RAND corporation

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pages: 558 words: 164,627

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

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

“Quarterly Report on Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, October–December 1966.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, January 1967. ______. “Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study, January–June 1966: A Briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, August 1, 1966. ______. Some Preliminary Observations on NVA Behavior During Infiltration. D-16339-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, November 3, 1967. ______. “Southeast Asia Trip Report. Part 1. The Impact of Air Power in South Vietnam.” RM-4400/1-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, December 1964. Gouré, Leon, Douglas Scott, and Anthony J.

Field Manual no. 3-24.2. Washington, DC, April 2009. Hickey, Gerald C. The Highland People of South Vietnam: Social and Economic Development. RM-5281/1-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, September 1967. ______. The Major Ethnic Groups of the South Vietnamese Highlands. RM-4041-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, April 1964. ______. “The Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case in Vietnam.” RM-4882-ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 1965. Historical Division Joint Secretariat, Joint Chiefs of Staff. The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1960–1968.

Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA, May 1996. Zasloff, Joseph J. Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam: The Role of the Southern Vietminh Cadres. RM-5163/2-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 1967. ______. Political Motivation of the Viet Cong: The Vietminh Regroupees. RM-4703/2-ISA/ARPA. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, August 1966. ______. The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency. RM-4140-PR. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, July 1964. Statements to Congress Abizaid, General John P. Commander, U.S. Central Command, “Testimony Before Congress, Senate Armed Services Committee,” September 25, 2003.


pages: 323 words: 100,772

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

In the years after the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, game theory and its terms became popular buzzwords with economists, social scientists, and military strategists. One of the places where game theory found immediate acceptance was the RAND Corporation. RAND, the prototypic “think tank” was founded at the Air Force’s behest shortly after World War II. The RAND Corporation’s original purpose was to perform strategic studies on intercontinental nuclear war. RAND hired many of the scientists leaving wartime defense work, and took on as consultants an even larger orbit of stellar thinkers. RAND thought highly enough of game theory to hire von Neumann as a consultant and to devote a great deal of effort not only to military applications of game theory but also to basic research in the field.

Richards) John von Neumann, confined to wheelchair, receives the Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower. This was von Neumann’s last public appearance. (Photo © UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos) Robert Axelrod. Bertrand Russell. (Photo © UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos) 5 THE RAND CORPORATION The RAND Corporation is housed in a unspectacular low-and mid-rise complex a block from the beach at 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica. Blocky, in colors of pinkish terra-cotta and putty white, RAND’s buildings resemble those that might occupy a California state college campus. Discrete signs identify the complex and warn that it is private property.

Herman Kahn, one of RAND’s best-known analysts, interrupted his thinking about the unthinkable to take a midday swim in the Pacific. When John von Neumann visited, he usually stayed in the nearby Georgian Hotel, still in business, now as an oceanfront home for senior citizens. To many, the RAND Corporation epitomizes modern Machiavellianism. Both hawks and doves are apt to perceive it as a secret lair where amoral geniuses conspire darkly. RAND was well known enough to rate as a target for a Pete Seeger satirical folk song in the 1960s (“The RAND Corporation’s the boon of the world/They think all day long for a fee./They sit and play games about going up in flames/For counters they use you and me …”1. Business Week reported, “The military professionals dub these civilian interlopers into the national security arena ‘defense intellectuals,’ ‘RANDsters,’ ‘technocrats,’ and worse.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

., Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (Urbana: Universsity of Illinois Press, 1966), 75. 36.John von Neumann, “Defense in Atomic War,” Journal of the American Ordnance Association (1955): 22; reprinted in John von Neumann, Theory of Games, Astrophysics, Hydrodynamics and Meteorology, vol. 6 of Collected Works (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963), 524. 37.von Neumann, “Defense in Atomic War” (1955), 23; (1963), 525. 38.RAND Articles of Incorporation, 1948, in The RAND Corporation: The First Fifteen Years (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1963). 39.Contract of 2 March 1946 establishing project RAND; in Bruce Smith, The RAND Corporation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 30. 40.A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1955; reprint. New York: Free Press, 1966), xii (page citation is to the reprint edition). 41.Louis Ridenour and Francis Clauser, Preliminary Design of an Experimental Earth-Circling Spaceship, U.S.

New York: Free Press, 1966), xii (page citation is to the reprint edition). 41.Louis Ridenour and Francis Clauser, Preliminary Design of an Experimental Earth-Circling Spaceship, U.S. Air Force Project RAND Report SM-11827, 2 May 1946, 2, 16. 42.RAND, The RAND Corporation, 23. 43.Paul Baran, interview by Judy O’Neill, 5 March 1990, OH 182, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 44.J. M. Chester, Cost of a Hardened, Nationwide Buried Cable Network, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-2627-PR, 1 October 1960. 45.Baran, interview. 46.Ibid. 47.Paul Baran, Summary Overview, vol. 11 of On Distributed Communications, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3767-PR, August 1964, 1. 48.Paul Baran, “Packet Switching,” in John C. McDonald, ed., Fundamentals of Digital Switching, 2d ed.

., Fundamentals of Digital Switching, 2d ed. (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1990), 204. 49.Baran, interview. 50.Paul Baran, Reliable Digital Communications Systems Utilizing Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes, RAND Corporation Memorandum P-1995, 27 May 1960, 1–2. 51.Baran, Digital Communications Systems, 7. 52.Paul Baran, History, Alternative Approaches, and Comparisons, vol. 5 of On Distributed Communications, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3097-PR, August 1964, 8. 53.Warren S. McCulloch, in Claude Shannon, “Presentation of a Maze-Solving Machine,” in Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, and H. L. Teuber, eds., Cybernetics: Circular, Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems, Transactions of the Eighth Cybernetics Conference, March 15–16, 1951 (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, 1952); reprinted in N.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Despite moving to more modern headquarters in 2003, RAND remains synonymous with the Cold War and the icy logic of nuclear deterrence.1 At the peak of RAND’s notoriety in the 1960s, a folk song recorded by Pete Seeger summed up the organization’s reputation for cold-blooded strategizing: Oh, the Rand Corporation’s the boon of the world, They think all day long for a fee. They sit and play games about going up in flames; For counters they use you and me, honey bee, For counters they use you and me … 2 If any one man can be regarded as the founding father of the RAND Corporation, then that man would be Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the commanding general of the US Air Force during the Second World War. Arnold was an early believer in the importance of a powerful and independent air force and never stinted from hitting his enemy with everything at his disposal during the war.

Elinor Ostrom, 2012, ‘Coevolving Relationships between Political Science and Economics’, Rationality, Markets and Morals, 3 (2012), pp. 51–65. CHAPTER 7: THE THINK TANK BY THE SEA 1. Details of the history of the RAND Corporation are mainly from Fred Kaplan, 1983, The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford University Press, Stanford, and David Jardini, 2013, Thinking Through the Cold War: RAND, National Security and Domestic Policy, 1945–1975, Smashwords, as well as Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma and Alex Abella, 2008, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, Harcourt, San Diego, Calif. Daniel Bessner, 2018, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, offers another perspective on RAND.

Interview with Robert Leonard, 27 February 1990, quoted in Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory. 24. Willis H. Ware, 2008, RAND and the Information Evolution: A History in Essays and Vignettes, RAND Corporation. 25. Clay Blair Jr, ‘Passing of a Great Mind’, Fortune, 25 February 1957, p. 89. 26. Quoted in Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory. 27. Much of this work is collected and summarized in Melvin Dresher, 1961, Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications, available as RAND Corporation document number CB-149-1 (2007). 28. This episode is related in Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory. 29.


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

., “Public Reporting of Mortality Rates for Hospitalized Medicare Patients and Trends in Mortality for Reported Conditions,” Annals of Internal Medicine, published online May 31, 2016. 21. M. W. Friedberg et al., “A Methodological Critique of the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard” (Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif., 2015), http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE170.html, and David M. Shahian et al., “Rating the Raters: The Inconsistent Quality of Health Care Performance Measurement,” Annals of Surgery 264, no. 1 (July 2016), pp. 36–38. 22. Cheryl L. Damberg et al., Measuring Success in Health Care Value-Based Purchasing Programs: Summary and Recommendations (Rand Corporation, 2014), p. 18. Rachel M. Werner et al., “The Effect of Pay-for-Performance in Hospitals: Lessons for Quality Improvement,” Health Affairs 30, no. 4 (April 2011), pp. 690–98.

In fact, if you were going to be faithful to the data, you would conclude that public reporting slowed down the rate of improvement in patient outcomes.”20 As if that were not enough of a problem, many of these public rankings, such as ProPublica’s surgical report card, are based on what experts regard as dubious criteria, as likely to be misleading as genuinely illuminating.21 Another recent report, this time from the Rand Corporation, came to similar conclusions. Most studies of pay-for-performance, it noted, examined process and intermediate outcomes rather than final outcomes, that is, whether the patient recovered. “Overall,” it reports, “studies with stronger methodological designs were less likely to identify significant improvements associated with pay-for-performance programs.

Though a small part of the U.S. military’s use of metrics, COIN is a particularly instructive case, with larger ramifications for our topic. For not only has the military made extensive use of metrics in the interests of accountability and transparency, its efforts have also been scrutinized by academic researchers working at American military academies and at the Rand Corporation, which conducts research for the Department of Defense. Some of these researchers are both soldiers and scholars, while others have a more conventional academic background. What characterizes their work is close contact with actual experience, either in the form of direct participation in counterinsurgency or of access to recently deployed officers.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Air Force’s Project RAND (progenitor of the RAND Corporation), for whom von Neumann was consulting in Santa Monica, took it upon themselves, in April 1947, to build an electronic roulette wheel and compile a list of one million random numbers, available first as punched cards and later expanded and published as a book. “Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors,” the editors explained.72 Between June 29 and July 1, 1949, a conference on the Monte Carlo method—sponsored by the RAND Corporation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Bureau of Standards’ Institute for Numerical Analysis—was held at UCLA.

Householder, ed., Monte Carlo Method, Proceedings of a Symposium held June 29, 30 and July 1, 1949, in Los Angeles, California, under the sponsorship of the RAND Corporation, and the National Bureau of Standards, with the cooperation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Bureau of Standards Applied Mathematics Series 12, issued June 11, 1951, p. 36. 72. A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1955), p. xii. 73. Klára von Neumann to Stan Ulam, May 15, 1949, SUAPS. 74. Klára von Neumann to Carson Mark, June 28, 1949, KVN. 75. Herman Kahn, “Use of Different Monte Carlo Sampling Techniques,” in Meyer, ed., Symposium on Monte Carlo Methods, p. 147.

Edward Teller, Testimony, United States District Court, District of Minnesota, Fourth Division, 4-67 Civil 138: Honeywell, Inc., Plaintiff, v. Sperry Rand Corporation and Illinois Scientific Developments, Inc., Defendants, Transcript of Proceedings, vol. 47, Minneapolis, Minn., Monday, August 30, 1971, p. 6702. 34. Hans A. Bethe, “Comments on the History of the H-Bomb,” written in 1954, declassified in 1980, with a new introduction by Hans Bethe, in Los Alamos Science (Fall 1982): 47. 35. Teller, Testimony, Honeywell, Inc., Plaintiff, v. Sperry Rand Corporation and Illinois Scientific Developments, Inc., Defendants, p. 6771. 36. E. Bretscher, S. P. Frankel, D.


pages: 1,117 words: 270,127

On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn

British Empire, business cycle, defense in depth, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, John von Neumann, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Suez crisis 1956, two and twenty, zero-sum game

The Army's contracts are with the Operations Research Office (Johns Hopkins), Stanford Research Institute, and others. The Air Force contracts are with The RAND Corporation, Anser, Institute of Air Weapons Research, Mitre Corporation, and others. The RAND Corporation, with which I have been for some years, is the largest and possibly the most prestigious of these organizations. It has over 900 employees, approximately two-thirds of whom have technical backgrounds. Its Air Force budget runs to some $13,000,000 annually. In spite of its size and expense the RAND Corporation has no formal staff responsibilities. Only a small percentage of the studies undertaken at the organization are created "to order" and must meet deadlines imposed from outside.

It is with the hope of decreasing the probability of catastrophe and alleviating the consequences of thermonuclear war if it comes that I offer these pages to all with the interest—and the courage—to read them. Herman Kahn Princeton, New Jersey June 10, 1960 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Concepts on which these three lectures are based originated in work done under the auspices of The RAND Corporation and continued at The Center of International Studies at Princeton University while I was on leave of absence from RAND. While many of the things that I discuss grew out of studies done by The RAND Corporation, the presentation and synthesis are my own. I accept full responsibility for them. However, I owe a tremendous debt to many friends and colleagues—so many that it would be impossible for me to identify them all.

Rowen on survival of strategic forces. Much of Lecture I, parts of Lecture II, and the Appendix derive from joint effort devoted to a RAND Corporation civil defense study which I led. This study is reported in RAND Report R-322-RC, A Report on a Study of Non-Military Defense, July 1,1958. Because so much of the book is based on the findings of this study, I would like to repeat here some remarks that prefaced the report on that study: The study . . . [was] supported by The RAND Corporation as part of its program of RAND-sponsored research. In addition to its work for the United States Air Force and other government agencies, the Corporation regularly sponsors, with its own funds, research projects in areas of importance to national security and public welfare.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

To make that much cocaine, one needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 kilograms of dried coca leaves. Based on price data from Colombia obtained by Gallego and Rico, that would cost about $385. Once this is converted into a kilo of cocaine, it can sell in Colombia for $800. According to figures pulled together by Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, that same kilo is worth $2,200 by the time it is exported from Colombia, and it has climbed to $14,500 by the time it is imported to the United States. After being transferred to a midlevel dealer, its price climbs to $19,500. Finally, it is sold by street-level dealers for $78,000.10 Even these soaring figures do not quite get across the scale of the markups involved in the cocaine business.

The evidence is that they charge quite reasonable prices for doing so: witnesses say that the New York mafia’s fee for fixing prices in the concrete industry was only 2 percent of the contract price; in Sicily, the construction industry reportedly paid 5 percent to the mafia (of which it kept 3 percent and used the remaining 2 percent to pay bribes to politicians). If the price-fixing agreement means that a firm can jack up its rates substantially, these fees are well worth it. (And it seems they can: a study in the 1980s by the RAND Corporation found that residential customers on Long Island were paying 15 percent more for their garbage collection than they would in a competitive market, and commercial customers were paying 50 percent more.)12 The agreements were so robust that garbage-collection firms were even able to buy and sell “contracts” to serve particular customers or neighborhoods, with the exclusive rights guaranteed by the mafia.

Occupying the very middle of the network, these middlemen are the best-connected people in the business. Furthermore, acting as the link between the wholesalers and the retailers, they have a high degree of “betweenness centrality.” The findings of the Home Office report seem to agree with other studies on pricing in the drugs business. The RAND Corporation found that the single-biggest leap in the price of cocaine in the United States occurs during the transfer from middle dealers to retailers, when the price of a kilo shoots up from $19,500 to $78,000.10 If the police are to focus their energies in one place, it may be that they cause the most disruption not by targeting the small fry on the streets, or even the big fish doing the importation, but instead by aiming squarely at the middle, where the dealers are the best connected and, it seems, making the most money.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Both Groeteschele and Strangelove were modelled on Herman Kahn, who had written the bestselling account of nuclear strategy, On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960, and had become something of a celebrity as a result of his provocative analyses and an apparent tendency to playfulness when talking about mass death. Kahn was a favourite target of critics, and his humanity had been questioned—‘no one could write like this; no one could think like this.’22 He had written his book at the RAND Corporation, the most famous of the ‘think-tanks’ where the mysteries of nuclear strategy were explored, although he left soon after its publication to set up his own Hudson Institute, in part because his colleagues at RAND objected to his showmanship and because he felt they were becoming too bureaucratic.23 In both movies the Kahn character allows nuclear war to be discussed in terms of a cold rationality, detached from any human emotion.

This should encourage both sides to be more cautious and concentrate on diplomacy in a crisis. This was the aspect of the nuclear relationship that Schelling had identified as the key to avoiding war through miscalculation. Whether or not a first strike option could be developed was the pressing issue of the moment. In 1954 a team at the RAND Corporation, led by Albert Wohlstetter, was asked to consider the optimum basing configurations for the US strategic bomber force. They introduced as a key criterion vulnerability to a surprise attack and in so doing demonstrated how the United States might be caught out by a calculating Soviet Union with a pre-emptive strike.12 This was the modern-day version of war fiction, except that there was no character development or narrative tension.

If others followed the same path there was a possibility of a transcendent community of shared values that would produce peace if only because there would be nothing to fight about. But the spread of democracy was bound to be contentious and would be resisted by autocrats. As European communism imploded Francis Fukuyama of the RAND Corporation announced that this was not just ‘the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history’, but ‘the end of history as such’. By this he meant ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’2 Talking of the ‘end of history’ invited misinterpretation.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

Black himself must have written the jacket copy: "Whatever the merits or demerits of the book, it can safely be said that there is no other which has at+ tempted to deal with this subject." Black was not entirely out of the loop. In December 1948 the RAND Corporation's Joseph Goldsen wrote Black that "a group of 52 The Big Bang American mathematicians and political scientists" were interested in his work and would appreciate receiving offprints. Black had never heard of the RAND Corporation. He checked it out with the British Consul in San Francisco, An official informed him that "the activities of the Rand Corporation are highly classified" and the "United States Air Force would much prefer that, if you decided to respond to Mr.

Constitution· Joseph Goebbels • God· Kaiser Wilhelm II • John von Neumann" Kenneth Arrow" J\'larxism • Alfred Tarski • intransitivity· Harold Hotelling· ice cream· John Hicks· "Scissors, Paper. Stone" • Duncan Black· the "forty-seven-year-old wife of a machinist liVing in Dayton. Ohio" • the RAND Corporation· Condoleezzrl Rice· Olaf Helmer· Harry Truman· Joseph Stalin· Abram Bergson 2. The Big Bang Michelle Kwan • the Great Flip.Flop • 45 Repuhlicans • Democrats • Communists· Sidney Morgenbesser • irrelevant alternatives" /\.'tichelangelo • Joe McCarthy • Winston Churchill • Wooclrow Wilson· Boss Tweed· Amartya Sen Contents 3.

The median voter, like everyone else, favors the candidate whose views are closest to her own. This means that the candidate who captures the center will win a two-way race. Six years Into his peripatetic career as grad student, Arrow accepted an unusual job. He agreed to go to California to think about nuclear doomsday. The RAND Corporation was the greatest monument to von Neumann's-and Morgenstern's-game theory. RAND began as the air force's Project RAND (for Research ANd Development), a scientific consultancy initially contracted to Douglas Aircraft. Conceived as a peacetime Manhattan Project, RAND was recruiting many of the nation's best minds to ponder the challenges of the nuclear age. 41 GAMING THE VOTE Arrow heard about RAND from his wife's former employer, Abe Girschick.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

They unleashed unprecedented power that became even scarier after the Soviet Union got the bomb, too. As the two nations faced off, the newly invented Doomsday Clock—created to reflect mankind’s proximity to self-annihilation—read just two minutes from the apocalypse. The Defense Department asked a group of scientists and mathematicians at an elite think tank called the RAND Corporation to come up with a strategy for what the United States should do in this new nuclear age. To study the situation, the researchers turned to a then-new field called game theory. Game theory uses mathematical models to determine the optimal, rational strategies in games and other strategic conflicts.

Their relationships were what mattered to them. The secretaries achieved the ideal outcome of the game. According to the model of rationality set by game theory, the secretaries weren’t playing correctly. Pursuing your immediate self-interest was the rational thing to do. * * * ■ ■ ■ ■ The RAND Corporation published The Compleat Strategyst with the goal of expanding the application of game theory in day-to-day life. “We believe it possible that Game Theory, as it develops—or something like it—may become an important concept and force in many phases of life,” author J. D. Williams wrote. They were right.

Why don’t we do a test? And we’d do a test, and it would show that maybe people would unsubscribe at a slightly higher rate, but the increase in purchasing would more than make up for it. You’d get in a situation where it doesn’t feel right, but it does seem like a rational decision. The RAND Corporation’s book on game theory defined what’s rational as “to gain as much from the game as a player can, safely, in the face of a skillful opponent who is pursuing an antithetical goal.” In the real world, getting as much as you can right now often comes at a long-term cost. And once growth expectations are set, that mitigating word “safely” becomes increasingly optional when it comes to gaining “as much from the game as a player can.”


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Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

a man named Donald Latham: Warner, “Cybersecurity: A Pre-history”; and interviews. In April 1967: Willis H. Ware, Security and Privacy in Computer Systems (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, P-3544, 1967). This led to a 1970 report by a Defense Science Board task force, known as “the Ware Panel,” Security Controls for Computer Systems (declassified by RAND Corporation as R-609-1, 1979); and interviews. He well understood: Willis H. Ware, RAND and the Information Evolution: A History in Essays and Vignettes (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2008). Ware was particularly concerned: Ibid., 152ff. In 1980, Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes: Extra features, WarGames: The 25th Anniversary Edition, Blu-ray disc; and interviews.

“It took decades”: Department of Defense, Defense Science Board, Task Force Report, Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat, 51. Actually, in the mid-1990s, the RAND Corporation did conduct a series of war games that simulated threats and responses in cyber warfare; several included upper-midlevel Pentagon officials and White House aides as players, but no insiders took them seriously; the games came just a little bit too early to have impact. The games were summarized in Roger C. Molander, Andrew S. Riddile, Peter A. Wilson, Strategic Information Warfare: A New Face of War (Washington, D.C.: RAND Corporation, 1996). The dearth of impact comes from interviews.The presented a ninety-page paper, explaining how they did the hack (and spelling out disturbing implications), at the August 2015 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas (Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle,” illmatics.com//remote7.20Car7.20Hacking.pdf).

Ware was a pioneer in the field of computers, dating back to the late 1940s, when there barely was such a field. At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, he’d been a protégé of John von Neumann, helping design one of the first electrical computers. For years now, he headed the computer science department at the RAND Corporation, an Air Force–funded think tank in Santa Monica, California. He well understood the point of ARPANET, lauded its goals, admired its ambition; but he was worried about some implications that its managers had overlooked. In his paper, Ware laid out the risks of what he called “resource-sharing” and “on-line” computer networks.


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In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook

Bletchley Park, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, financial engineering, four colour theorem, index card, John von Neumann, linear programming, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, traveling salesman, Turing machine

In the words of Alan Hoffman and Philip Wolfe, Whitney served “possibly as a messenger from Menger” in bringing the salesman to the mathematics community.23 And on to the RAND Corporation There is not a record of the study of the salesman problem, under the TSP name, in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, but by the end of the 1940s it had become a known challenge. At this point the center of TSP action had moved from Princeton to RAND, coinciding with Flood’s relocation to California. Princeton University’s Harold Kuhn writes the following in a December 2008 e-mail letter. The traveling salesman problem was known by name around Fine Hall by 1949. For instance, it was one of a number of problems for which the RAND corporation offered a money prize.

—Geoff Mack, Lyrics to “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Contents Preface xi 1 Challenges 1 Tour of the United States 2 An Impossible Task? 6 One Problem at a Time 10 Road Map of the Book 16 2 Origins of the Problem 19 Before the Mathematicians 19 Euler and Hamilton 27 Vienna to Harvard to Princeton 35 And on to the RAND Corporation 38 A Statistical View 39 3 The Salesman in Action 44 Road Trips 44 Mapping Genomes 49 Aiming Telescopes, X-rays, and Lasers Guiding Industrial Machines 53 Organizing Data 56 Tests for Microprocessors 59 Scheduling Jobs 60 And More 60 4 Searching for a Tour 62 The 48-States Problem 62 Growing Trees and Tours 65 Alterations While You Wait 75 Borrowing from Physics and Biology The DIMACS Challenge 91 Tour Champions 92 51 84 viii Contents 5 Linear Programming 94 General-Purpose Model 94 The Simplex Algorithm 99 Two for the Price of One: LP Duality 105 The Degree LP Relaxation of the TSP 108 Eliminating Subtours 113 A Perfect Relaxation 118 Integer Programming 122 Operations Research 125 6 Cutting Planes 127 The Cutting-Plane Method 127 A Catalog of TSP Inequalities 131 The Separation Problem 137 Edmonds’s Glimpse of Heaven 142 Cutting Planes for Integer Programming 144 7 Branching 146 Breaking Up 146 The Search Party 148 Branch-and-bound for Integer Programming 8 Big Computing 153 World Records 153 The TSP on a Grand Scale 163 9 Complexity 168 A Model of Computation 169 The Campaign of Jack Edmonds 171 Cook’s Theorem and Karp’s List 174 State of the TSP 178 Do We Need Computers?

By an ingenious application of linear programming—a mathematical tool recently used to solve production-scheduling problems—it took only a few weeks for the California experts to calculate “by hand” the shortest route to cover the 49 cities: 12,345 miles. The California experts were George Dantzig, Ray Fulkerson, and Selmer Johnson, part of an exceptionally strong and influential center for the new field of mathematical programming, housed at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. The RAND team’s guarantee involves some pretty mathematics that we take up later in the book. For now it is best to think of the guarantee as a proof, like those we learned in geometry class. The Dantzig et al. proof establishes that no tour through the 49 cities can have length less than 12,345 miles.


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Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Swarms of ARPA contractors—anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, and sociologists—passed through poor villages, putting people under a microscope, measuring, gathering data, interviewing, studying, assessing, and reporting.58 The idea was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power.59 The RAND Corporation, under an ARPA contract, did most of this work. Based out of a building overlooking the wide, tan beaches of Santa Monica, RAND was a powerful military and intelligence contractor that had been created by the US Air Force several decades earlier as a private-public research agency.60 In the 1950s, RAND was central to formulating America’s belligerent nuclear policy.

Anthony Russo, a RAND contractor who worked on ARPA projects and who would later help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers, discovered that when results of ARPA studies contradicted military wishes, his bosses simply suppressed and discarded them.77 “The more I grew to admire Asian culture—especially Vietnamese,” Russo wrote in 1972, “the more I was outraged at the Orwellian horror of the U.S. military machine grinding through Vietnam and destroying everything in its path. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls were turned into prostitutes; streets that had been lined with beautiful trees were denuded to make room for the big military trucks. I was fed up with the horror and disgusted by the petulance and pettiness with which the RAND Corporation conducted its business.”78 He believed that ARPA’s entire Project Agile apparatus was a giant racket used by military planners to give scientific cover to whichever existing war policies they were intent on pursuing. This wasn’t cutting-edge military science, but a boondoggle and a fraud. The only people benefiting from Project Agile were the private military contracting firms hired to do the work.

Lick spread that cash through his personal and professional networks in the military-academic-contractor world. He bankrolled projects on interactive computing and time sharing, graphical interface design, networking, and artificial intelligence at MIT, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, and the RAND Corporation. At MIT, Lick set up one of his biggest and most important initiatives: Project MAC, short for Machine-Aided Cognition, which evolved into a sophisticated interactive computer environment complete with email, bulletin boards, and multiplayer video games. MIT’s Project MAC spawned the first crop of “hackers,” ARPA contractors who tinkered with these giant computers in their free time.


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Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002. Oliker, Olga, and David A. Shlapak. U.S. Interests in Central Asia: Policy Priorities and Military Roles. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005. Oliker, Olga, and Tanya Charlick-Paley. Assessing Russia’s Decline: Trends and Implications for the United States and the U.S. Air Force. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2002. Organski, A.F.K. World Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Pape, Robert A. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005. Pastor, Robert A. A Century’s Journey: How the Great Powers Shape the World.

.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Bergsten, C. Fred, Bates Gill, Nicholas Lardy, and Derek Mitchell. China: The Balance Sheet—What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Bernard, Cheryl. Civil, Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2003. Birdsall, Nancy, and Augusto de la Torre. Washington Contentious: Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Inter-American Dialogue, 2001. Blank, Stephen. After Two Wars: Reflections on the American Strategic Revolution in Central Asia.

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2004. Dobbins, James. The UN’s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005. Dominguez, Jorge I., and Byung Cook Kim, eds. Between Compliance and Conflict: Between East Asia, Latin America, and the “New” Pax Americana. New York: Routlege, 2005. Doyle, Michael. Empires. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Drakuli, Slavenka. Café Europa: Life After Communism.


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Thus, the very strengths that The Software Industry 5 enabled a firm to succeed in one market segment became institutional rigidities in another. This is the main reason why few firms have successfully escaped the confines of their particular sector.12 Software Contractors The defining event for the software contracting industry came in 1956, when the US-government-owned RAND Corporation created the Systems Development Corporation (SDC) to develop the computer programs for the huge SAGE air defense project. This was the first of several multi-billion-dollar defense projects in the 1950s and the 1960s, known as the L-Systems, that provided an important market for early software contractors.

A set of binary-to-decimal and decimalto-binary conversion programs were needed at every installation, and most people wrote their own.”9 According to a joke of the day, “there were 17 customers with 701s and 18 different assembly programs.”10 This duplication of effort, unavoidable during the early learning period, clearly was untenable in the long run. Some form of cooperative association, it was felt, might alleviate the problem. The idea of a cooperative association was first proposed by R. Blair Smith, a 701 sales manager in IBM’s Santa Monica sales office.11 Smith had sold 701s to the RAND Corporation and to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and their early experiences had left him “afraid that the cost of programming would rise to the point where users would have difficulty in justifying the total cost of computing.”12 Before joining IBM, Smith had been an accounting machine manager and a founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Machine Accountants Association, which seemed to him an appropriate model for a computer user group.

The Digital Computer Origins of the Software Contractor 33 Association was now replaced by a more formal structure, ownership of a 704 being “the single qualification for membership.”14 The new group’s name, SHARE, though usually capitalized, was not an acronym; rather, it represented the objective of sharing information and programs. Another objective was to serve as a conduit between users and IBM’s future developments in hardware and programming. In August 1955, SHARE’s “secretary pro tem,” Fletcher Jones of the RAND Corporation, sent out invitations to all seventeen organizations that owned 704s to the inaugural meeting of SHARE. At a time when the cost of programming ran as high as $10 an instruction, dramatic savings could be achieved through cooperation. It was estimated that each of the 704’s early users spent the equivalent of the first year’s rental (at least $150,000) establishing a basic programming regime.


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The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

The goal was to discuss what Elbert Little, of the Wayne State Computational Laboratory, suggested was a “universal feeling” among industry leaders that there was “a definite shortage” of technically trained people in the computer field.12 This shortage, variously described by an all-star cast of scientists and executives from General Motors, IBM, the RAND Corporation, Bell Telephone, Harvard University, MIT, the Census Bureau, and the Office of Naval Research, as “acute,” “unprecedented,” “multiplying dramatically,” and “astounding compared to the [available] facilities,” represented a grave threat to the future of electronic computing. Already it was serious enough to demand a “cooperative effort” on the part of industry, government, and educational institutions to resolve.13 The proceedings of the Conference on Training Personnel for the Computing Machine Field provide the best data available on the state of the labor market in the electronic computer industry during its first decade.

How did they reconcile contemporary beliefs about the idiosyncratic nature of individual programming ability with the rigid demands of corporate management and control? Aptitude Tests and Psychological Profiles So how did companies deal with the need to train and recruit programmers on a large scale? Here the case of the System Development Corporation (SDC) is particularly instructive. SDC was the RAND Corporation spin-off responsible for developing the software for the U.S. Air Force’s Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) air-defense system. SAGE was perhaps the most ambitious and expensive of early cold war technological boondoggles. Comprised of a series of computerized tracking and communications centers, SAGE cost approximately $8 billion to develop and operate, and required the services of over two hundred thousand private contractors and military operators.

Comprised of a series of computerized tracking and communications centers, SAGE cost approximately $8 billion to develop and operate, and required the services of over two hundred thousand private contractors and military operators. A major component of the SAGE project was the real-time computers required to coordinate its vast, geographically dispersed network of observation and response centers. IBM was hired to develop the computers themselves but considered programming them to be too difficult. In 1955 the RAND Corporation took over software development. It was estimated that the software for the SAGE system would require more than one million lines of code to be written. At a time when the largest programming projects had involved at most fifty thousand lines of code, this was a singularly ambitious undertaking.27 Within a year, there were more programmers at RAND than all other employees combined.


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The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

(spring 2006) Cracking Bert’s shell and loving the bomb. Chemical Heritage (24:1) 22. Smith, Bruce LR. (1966) The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation. Harvard University Press. U.S. Department of Defense. (April 1981) Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving U.S. Nuclear Weapons 1950–1980. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/reading_room/635.pdf.Acc.Jan.29, 2007. I am indebted to the Center for Defense Information for this reference. Wohlstetter SJ et al. (April 1954) Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases. RAND Corporation Publication R266. Wohlstetter, Albert. (1958) The delicate balance of terror.

Yet at the same time, it solved practical questions that were unanswerable by any other means: the defenders of Captain Dreyfus used it to demonstrate his innocence; insurance actuaries used it to set rates; Alan Turing used it to decode the German Enigma cipher and arguably save the Allies from losing the Second World War; the U.S. Navy used it to search for a missing H-bomb and to locate Soviet subs; RAND Corporation used it to assess the likelihood of a nuclear accident; and Harvard and Chicago researchers used it to verify the authorship of the Federalist Papers. In discovering its value for science, many supporters underwent a near-religious conversion yet had to conceal their use of Bayes’ rule and pretend they employed something else.

Smiling, Cornfield replied, “That’s nothing compared to how happy I am to be able to see you.”13 As he was dying he said to his two daughters, “You spend your whole life practicing your humor for the times when you really need it.”14 9. there’s always a first time Bayes’ military successes were still Cold War secrets when Jimmie Savage visited the glamorous new RAND Corporation in the summer of 1957 and encouraged two young men to calculate a life-and-death problem: the probability that a thermonuclear bomb might explode by mistake. RAND was the quintessential Cold War think tank. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), had helped start it in Santa Monica, California, 10 years earlier as “a gimmick” to cajole top scientists into applying operations research to long-range air warfare.1 But RAND, an acronym for Research ANd Development, considered itself a “university without students” and its 1,000-odd employees “defense intellectuals.”


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The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks

affirmative action, airport security, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, hiring and firing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Yom Kippur War

“basic grand strategy”: Franks, American Soldier, 340–41. “The October 2002 Centcom war plan”: “Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations,” August 24, 2004, 11. “post conflict stabilization”: RAND Corporation, “Iraq: Translating Lessons into Future DoD Policies,” attachment to letter from James Thompson, president and chief executive officer, RAND Corporation, to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, February 7, 2005, 6. “There’s never been a combat operation”: Franks, American Soldier, 524. “I just think it’s interesting”: Franks teleconference, August 2, 2004, 16. “The guys who did well”: Telephone interview with American civilian official in Kabul who requested anonymity, December 2007.

In 2004, an official Pentagon review led by two former defense secretaries, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, unambiguously concluded, “The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a handover to Iraq’s authorities.” The following year, the head of the RAND Corporation, hardly a hostile observer, would send a memorandum to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld stating that after extensive review of internal documents, his researchers had found that “post conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult.”

Imagine a U.S. military at the other extreme—tactically mediocre and manned with draftees. In such a circumstance, it is hard to imagine the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being allowed to meander for years without serious strategic direction. A few reliefs might have broken the strategic logjam, but the vocabulary of accountability had been lost. In 2005, a RAND Corporation study of Army generalship referred not to “firings” or “relief for cause” but, vaguely, to “performance departures”—which could mean leaving voluntarily or not. Similarly, a fine essay by Col. George Reed on “toxic leadership” in the military analyzed the problem bravely but tiptoed around the obvious solution, saying only, rather tentatively, “If the behavior does not change, there are many administrative remedies available.”


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Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Jung, Patrick K. Ryan, and Jonathan Wallace, Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq (Arlington, VA: RAND Corporation, 2016). 35. Craig Davis, “Reinserting Labor into the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs,” Monthly Labor Review 128, no. 6 (2005): 53–61. 36. Benjamin W. Bahney, Howard J. Shatz, Carroll Ganier, Renny McPherson, and Barbara Sude, An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). 37. Johnston et al., Foundations of the Islamic State. 38. Ibid., 93. 39. Ibid., 85. 40. Philip Verwimp, “An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators of Genocide: Micro-level Evidence from Rwanda,” Journal of Development Economics 77, no. 2 (2005): 297–323; Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M.

EVIDENCE FROM THE PHILIPPINES Proposition 2 (modest, secure aid programs reduce violence) seems to be borne out for the conflict it was designed to explain, the insurgency in Iraq. Does our model work in other asymmetric conflicts? For evidence let’s return to the Philippines, and a study by Joe and two of his coauthors, Ben Crost (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and ESOC alumnus Patrick Johnston (RAND Corporation), on the effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) using the remarkable data on individual conflict incidents introduced in chapter 2 and village-level measures of insurgent influence.64 CCT programs distribute cash payments directly to poor households that meet a number of prerequisites (hence “conditional”), such as vaccinating their children or keeping them in school.

Though, as we’ll discuss in the conclusion, it did not remain so and was once again the scene of intense fighting by mid-2015. 16. The broad need to exercise caution when using administrative data from conflict zones is amply demonstrated by the many examples in Ben Connable’s excellent Embracing the Fog of War: Assessment and Metrics in Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012). 17. Pakistan data from the BFRS Dataset of Political Violence in Pakistan. For details, see Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Christine Fair, Jenna Jordan, and Rasul Bakhsh Rais, “Measuring Political Violence in Pakistan: Insights from the BFRS Dataset,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 32, no. 5 (2015): 536–58.


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In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In contrast, American Economic Review, the main publication of the American Economic Association, had begun its publication in 1911.40 Almost seventy years later, Markowitz’s article is visibly different from recent Journal of Finance publications. The title of the article, “Portfolio Selection,” is short and simple. The article had a single author, compared to today’s much more common practice of multiple authorship. Markowitz’s affiliation was with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, a nonprofit policy think tank, unlike the typical author of today with a university affiliation. The article was succinct, at eleven pages of text plus four pages of graphs, and referred to only three previous studies, all books, compared with today’s standard of referencing upwards of fifty articles and books.

Markowitz surmised that his model of E-V efficiency would be most appropriate for investors who were not gamblers. Harry Had Another Problem After writing his article, Markowitz continued at the University of Chicago to finish his PhD, a process that wasn’t without some white-knuckle moments.48 Having already started working at the RAND Corporation in California, he stopped off in Chicago to defend his dissertation after a business trip to Washington, D.C. “I remember landing at Midway Airport and thinking to myself, I know this field cold, not even Milton Friedman will give me a hard time.” In retrospect, this was probably not a wise thought.

And yes in the sense that Marschak paved the way to a theory of markets whereby its participants act in a world of uncertainty and risk. Portfolio Selection: The Book In 1951 after the coursework for his doctorate was complete but while he was still working on his dissertation, Markowitz left the University of Chicago to work at the RAND Corporation, where his work had nothing to do with portfolio theory.74 During the 1955–1956 academic year Markowitz took a leave of absence from RAND to be at the Cowles Foundation, which had moved to Yale, at the invitation of the economist and future Nobel laureate James Tobin. Markowitz’s 1959 book Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments was primarily written at this time.


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Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

It was called QUICK COUNT: For information about the computer model, see N. D. Cohen, “The Quick Count System: A User’s Manual,” RAND Corporation, RM-4006-PR, April 1964. I learned about Quick Count from another report, one that was “designed to be of use to those who have only a rudimentary knowledge of targeting and the effects of nuclear weapons but who need a quick means of computing civil damage to Western Europe.” See “Aggregate Nuclear Damage Assessment Techniques Applied to Western Europe,” H. Avrech and D. C. McGarvey, RAND Corporation, Memorandum RM-4466-ISA, Prepared for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense/International Security Affairs, June 1965 (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY/declassified).

“Assessing the Capabilities of Strategic Nuclear Forces: The Limits of Current Methods,” Bruce W. Bennett, N-1441-NA, RAND Corporation, June 1980. “Assessment Report: Titan II LGM 25 C, Weapon Condition and Safety,” Prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee, May 1980. “Attack Warning: Better Management Required to Resolve NORAD Integration Deficiencies,” Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Defense, Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, United States General Accounting Office, July 1989. “The Ballistic Missile Decisions,” Robert L. Perry, RAND Corporation, October 1967. “Ballistic Missile Staff Course Study Guide,” 4315th Combat Crew Training Squadron, Strategic Air Command, Vandenberg Air Force Base, July 1, 1980.

If P1 = the population of a city before destruction, P2 = the population of a city after destruction, H1 = the number of housing units before destruction, H2 = the number of housing units after destruction, and F = the number of fatalities, then “the fully compensating increase in housing density,” could be expressed as a mathematical equation: Iklé was impressed by the amount of urban hardship and overcrowding that people could endure. But there were limits. The tipping point seemed to be reached when about 70 percent of a city’s homes were destroyed. That’s when people began to leave en masse and seek shelter in the countryside. Iklé’s dissertation attracted the attention of the RAND Corporation, and he was soon invited to join its social sciences division. Created in 1946 as a joint venture of the Army Air Forces and the Douglas Aircraft Company, Project RAND became one of America’s first think tanks, a university without students where scholars and Nobel laureates from a wide variety of disciplines could spend their days contemplating the future of airpower.


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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

John von Neumann, ‘Various Techniques Used in Connection with Random Digits’ in Proceedings of a Symposium held 29, 30 June and 1 July 1949, in Los Angeles, California, under the sponsorship of the RAND Corporation and the National Bureau of Standards, with the cooperation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; also published in A. S. Householder, G. E. Forsythe and H. H. Germond (eds), Monte Carlo Method (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), National Bureau of Standards Applied Mathematics Series 12. 9. RAND Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955; revised pbk edn Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001); https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html.

Image: James Bridle. 34. ERNIE 1, 1957. Reproduced with permission of National Savings and Investments (NS&I). 35. ERNIE 3, 1988. Reproduced with permission of National Savings and Investments (NS&I). 36. The first page of the RAND Corporation’s book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, 1955. A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001). 37. Hexagram 52 of the I Ching: 艮 (gèn): ‘keeping still, mountain’. Wikimedia Commons / Ben Finney. 38. John Cage’s score for A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-Two Waltzes, and Fifty-Six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, 1978.

In order to fully implement the Monte Carlo method, there was one further, crucial requirement: a source of random numbers, which could not be generated by the computer itself. John von Neumann was all too aware of the failure of machines in this regard. In a paper written on the subject in 1949, he warned that ‘anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin’.8 In response to this need, the RAND Corporation – an offshoot of the US armed forces, which employed von Neumann as a consultant – built an ‘electronic roulette wheel’, which consisted of a pulse generator and a noise source, most likely a small gas-filled transistor valve similar to the kind used in ERNIE. The result was published in 1955 as A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates – an extraordinary book of numbers which consists of exactly what its title describes: 400 closely set pages, each containing 50 lines of 50 digits, with the lines numbered 00000 through 19999.


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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

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and later at the State Department; he was also responsible for recruiting me to come to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies while he was dean there. I worked with his mentor Albert Wohlstetter at the latter's consulting firm, Pan Heuristics, and like him was an analyst for several years at the Rand Corporation. I was a student of Allan Bloom, himself a stu- Preface dent of Leo Strauss and the author of The Closing of the American Mind. I was a classmate of William Kristol in graduate school and wrote frequently for the two magazines founded by his father, Irving Kristol, The National Interest and The Public Interest, as well as for Commentary magazine.

ALBERT WOHLSTETTER Leo Strauss said virtually nothing about foreign policy, however much students or students of students may have sought to translate his philosophical ideas into policies. The same cannot be said for Albert Wohlstetter, on the other hand, who was the teacher of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, and other people in or close to the Bush administration. Wohlstetter was a mathematical logician who worked at the Rand Corporation in its glory days in the 1950s and later taught The Neoconservative Legacy at the University of Chicago. His career was marked by a longstanding concern with two central issues. The first was the problem of extended deterrence. Wohlstetter argued against the belief, promoted in early Cold War days by strategists like the French general Pierre Galois, that a minimum nuclear deterrent would be a cheap and effective form of national defense.

It is perhaps not an accident that MacArthur lived in East Asia almost continuously from the time he helped establish the Philippine Army in the 1930s until his recall by President Truman during the Korean War. 16. See Francis Fukuyama, "The March of Equality," Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 11-17. 17. Albert Wohlstetter, Henry S. Rowen, et al., Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, R-266, 1954). A shorter version was published as "The Delicate Balance of Terror" in Foreign Affairs 2 7, no. 2 (Jan. 1959). 18. Henry A. Kissinger,/4 World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973); Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 19.


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A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Shapley, interview, 10.94. 12: The War of Wits 1. John McDonald, “The War of Wits,” Fortune (March 1951). 2. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, op. cit.; Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, op. cit.; The RAND Corporation: The First Fifteen Years (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, November 1963) and 40th Year Anniversary (Santa Monica: RAND, 1963); John D. Williams, An Address, 6.21.50; Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Bruno W. Augenstein, A Brief History of RANDs Mathematics Department and Some of Its Accomplishments (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, March 1993); Alexander M.

The descriptions of Arrow’s contributions are taken from Mark Blaug, Great Economists Since Keynes (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1985), pp. 6–9. 18. Kenneth Arrow, professor of economics, Stanford University, interview, 6.26.95. 19. McDonald, interview. 20. Richard Best, former manager of security, RAND Corporation, interview, 5.22.96. 21. Interviews with Alexander M. Mood, professor of mathematics, Universih of California at Irvine, former deputy director, mathematics department, RAND Corporation, 5.23.96, and Mario L. Juncosa, mathematician, RAND, 5.21.96 and 5.24.96. 22. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 51. 23. Bernice Brown, retired statistician, RAND, interview, 5.22.96. 24. Augenstein, interview. 25.

Milnor also dazzled the department — and Nash — by winning the Putnam competition in his second semester at Princeton (in fact, he went on to win it two more times and was offered a Harvard scholarship).51 Nash was choosy about whom he would talk mathematics with. Melvin Peisakoff, another student who would later overlap with Nash at the RAND Corporation, recalled: “You couldn’t engage him in a long conversation. He’d just walk off in the middle. Or he wouldn’t respond at all. I don’t remember Nash having a conversation that came to a nice soft landing. I also don’t remember him ever having a conversation about mathematics. Even the full professors would discuss problems they were working on with other people.”52 On one occasion in the common room, however, Nash was sketching an idea when another graduate student got very interested in what he was saying and started to elaborate on the idea.53 Nash said, “Well, maybe I ought to write a Note for the Proceedings of the National Academy on this.”


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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

Baran soon married, and he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar data processing systems. He took night classes at UCLA on computers and transistors, and in 1959 he received a master’s degree in engineering. Baran left Hughes in late 1959 to join the computer science department in the mathematics division at the RAND Corporation while continuing to take classes at UCLA. Baran was ambivalent, but his advisor at UCLA, Jerry Estrin, urged him to continue his studies toward a doctorate. Soon a heavy travel schedule was forcing him to miss classes. But it was finally divine intervention, he said, that sparked his decision to abandon the doctoral work.

NSF, which had raised the academic network issue five years earlier, sent Kent Curtis, the head of its computer research division. After the meeting, Landweber spent the summer working with Peter Denning from Purdue, Dave Farber from the University of Delaware, and Tony Hearn who had recently left the University of Utah for the RAND Corporation, to flesh out a detailed proposal for the new network. Their proposal called for a network open to computer science researchers in academia, government, and industry. The underlying medium would be a commercial service provider like TELENET. Because CSNET would be using slower links than those used by the ARPANET, and did not insist on redundant linkages, the system would be far less expensive.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, January 1985. Anderson, Christopher. “The Accidental Superhighway.” The Economist, 1 July 1995. Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communications Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems, 1 March 1964. ———.“Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes.” RAND Corporation Mathematics Division Report No. P-1995, 27 May 1960. Boggs, David R., John F. Shoch, Edward A. Taft, and Robert M. Metcalfe. “PUP: An Internetwork Architecture.” IEEE Transactions on Communications, April 1980. “Bolt Beranek Accused by Government of Contract Overcharges.” Dow Jones News Service–Wall Street Journal combined stories, 27 October 1980.


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The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Available at http://www.riksbank.se/Documents/Tal/Jochnick/2015/tal_af_jochnick_150123_eng.pdf. Johnson, Boris. 2013. 2020 Vision: The Greatest City on Earth: Ambitions for London (June). City Hall, London: London Greater Authority. Johnson, Patrick B. 2014. “Countering ISIL’s Financing.” The RAND Corporation Testimony Series. Testimony presented before the House Financial Services Committee on November 13. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Jost, Patrick M., and Harjit Singh Sandbu. 2000. “Hawala: The Hawala Alternative Remittance System and Its Role in Money Laundering.” Prepared by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the United States Department of Treasury in cooperation with INTERPOL/FOPAC.

The basic takeaway from these studies is that the cash consumers admit to holding can account for perhaps 5–10% of the total currency supply.5 We begin with the United States and then look at Europe and Canada. The United States The two important sources of data on US consumer cash holdings are the “Survey of Consumer Payment Choice” and the “Diary of Consumer Payment Choice.”6 The first is an annual survey conducted by the Federal Reserve that makes use of the RAND Corporation’s “American Life Panel” survey respondents. The second is a consumer diary project (where consumers are asked to keep diaries, something akin to the Nielsen diaries for rating TV shows). It gives a more detailed snapshot of consumer holdings of cash, but so far only for the month of October 2012.7 Nevertheless, the diary snapshot is especially valuable, because, in addition to answering questions on total currency held on person (e.g., wallet, pocket, and purse) and on property (e.g., home and car), respondents were also asked the denominations of the notes they held.

Although there do not seem to be any aggregate statistics on cash seizures for the United States, I invite the reader to try online searching on the words “bust,” “cash,” “drugs,” or the like, to get an idea of the extent of the activity. Admittedly, the oft-quoted fact that some 90% of all US currency has traces of cocaine overstates the connection between drugs and cash. The contamination occurs in modern high-speed counting machines, including ATMs, where one bill can pollute a batch.32 The RAND Corporation has estimated the combined size of the market for four major illegal drugs in the United States to be more than $100 billion in 2010, with cocaine (including crack) $28 billion, heroin $27 billion, marijuana $41 billion, and methamphetamine (meth) $13 billion. This is only the footprint in the United States.33 The last attempt to do a comprehensive measure of the global drug market, by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for the year 2003, came up with an estimate of $322 billion.


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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Bel Geddes intended it to be built and flown between Chicago and London, but sadly, was unable to raise the necessary funding. Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner No. 4, 1929. Image courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. In the shadowlands of big thinking is the RAND Corporation and Herman Kahn. The RAND Corporation developed many of the techniques used today for scenario building." Kahn, who coined the phrase "thinking the unthinkable," more than many, really did think the unthinkable. At one point he reconceptualized the practicalities of nuclear war by thinking through the aftermath in a rational way: what the costs would be and how America could rebuild itself after a nuclear war.

THE UNITED MICRO-KINGDOMS: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT20 Inspired by all this big thinking we decided to try a design experiment to take the literary imagination behind the Sternberg Solution series, or The World, Who Wants It, and combine it with more concrete design speculations. After finding the wonderfully titled The Beginner's Guide to NationBuilding published by the RAND Corporation in 2007,21 we began to wonder how nations were built and if states could be designed. Architects have long developed master plans for cities and regions. Could we talk about big ideas through small things? The Design Museum in London invited us to try. It is common in the design of technology products and services to start with personas, then develop scenarios, all within existing reality.

Available at http://www.walkerart.org/ magazine/2011/metahavens-facestate. Accessed December 23, 2012. 20. The project was commissioned by the Design Museum in London and exhibited there as "The United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction" between May 1 and August 25, 2012. 21. James Dobbins et al., The Beginner's Guide to Nation - Building (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2007). Available at http://www.rand.org/pubs/ monographs/MG557.html. Accessed December 24, 2012. 22. Torie Bosch, "Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling Explains the Intriguing New Concept of Design Fiction," Slate blog, March 2, 2012. Available at http:// www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_ fictions_.html.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

“First Day on the Somme,” updated September 12, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_day_on_the_Somme. 277military tactics had finally adapted: Biddle, Military Power, 33–35. 277swarming: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (RAND Corporation, 2000), https://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311.html; Sean J. A. Edwards, Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future (RAND Corporation, 2000), https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1100.html; Sean J. A. Edwards, Swarming and the Future of Warfare (RAND Corporation, 2005), https://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD189.html; Paul Scharre, Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm (Center for a New American Security, October 15, 2014), https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/robotics-on-the-battlefield-part-ii-the-coming-swarm. 277maneuver warfare: The term “maneuver warfare” sometimes is used differently to describe a philosophy of combat, rather than the more narrow meaning in which it is used here pertaining to the physical movements of units in spatial relation to each other.

Morgan et al., Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Concerns in an Uncertain World (RAND Corporation, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3139-1.html; Michael C. Horowitz, Paul Scharre, and Alexander Velez-Green, A Stable Nuclear Future? The Impact of Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence (arXiv.org, 2019), https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.05291; Edward Geist and Andrew J. Lohn, How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War? (RAND Corporation, 2018), https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE296.html. 286Lethal autonomous weapons: Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: W.W.

Similar to the approach that the MAVLab team used for their drone, it relied on “redundancy, . . . self-checking, self-testing components, and isolation,” Howell said. But to do that “takes intention from the start,” he said. “It takes top cover to say this is worth spending money on.” Multiple independent reports have said DoD needs to improve its processes for AI assurance. A 2019 congressionally mandated independent assessment by the RAND Corporation found that DoD’s processes were “nowhere close to ensuring the performance and safety of AI applications, particularly where safety-critical systems are concerned.” The National Security Commission on AI also concluded that “TEVV of traditional legacy systems is not sufficient” at providing adequate assurance for AI systems, and that “an entirely new type of TEVV will be needed.”


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Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

In 1946 he joined a group of prominent American aeronautical engineers who went to Brazil, teaching aeronautics and advising Brazil’s Air Ministry on how to build its aviation business. It was the first of several moves that revealed a contrarian streak in Jones. After a few years in Brazil he returned to California to take a job at the RAND Corporation, the Air Force think tank. At RAND he did cost-benefit analyses of transport aircraft, showing the trade-offs between various designs in terms of cost, range, speed, and payload—and in the process showing that an airlift could be used not just in emergencies (the recent Berlin Airlift being the prime example) but as a primary strategy, by allowing the US to keep a smaller garrison army in Western Europe and reinforce it quickly with stateside troops in case of war.

In the 1980s, noting the alarm raised by Soviet theorists, some American strategists pushed for a fundamental reappraisal of America’s Cold War strategy. The push was led by Albert Wohlstetter, whom one scholar has called “the alpha male of strategic studies” in the Cold War. An influential architect of nuclear strategy at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter had then taught at the University of Chicago, from where his intellectual progeny propagated the neoconservative movement, and he now ran his own consulting firm, called Pan Heuristics.29 Wohlstetter had chaired the LRRD seminars of the early 1970s, and now, a decade later, he developed the ideas they had introduced.

., “A Brief History of the ElectroScience Laboratory” (available at https://electroscience.osu.edu/sites/electroscience.osu.edu/files/uploads/about/history.pdf). 22 Kuehl, “The Radar Eye Blinded,” 252. On the Quail, see Glenn A. Kent, Thinking about America’s Defense: An Analytical Memoir (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2008), 149–53. 23 Bernard C. Nalty, Tactics and Techniques of Electronic Warfare: Electronic Countermeasures in the Air War against North Vietnam, 1965–1973 (Newtown, CT: Defense Lion Publications, 2013); Richard P. Hallion, Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1992), 57–61.


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A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Cox: chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association Steve Coz: former editor of National Enquirer Donald Cram: professor of chemistry at UCLA, Nobel laureate in chemistry Jim Cramer: investor, author, TV personality, host of CNBC’s Mad Money Clyde Cronkhite: criminal justice expert, former police chief of Santa Ana, former deputy police chief of Los Angeles Mark Cuban: investor, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks Heidi Siegmund Cuda: journalist, former music critic for the Los Angeles Times Thomas Cummings: leading expert in designing high-performing organizations and strategic change at USC Marshall School of Business Fred Cuny: disaster relief specialist Mario Cuomo: governor of New York, 1983–1994 Alan Dershowitz: attorney, constitutional scholar, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School Donny Deutsch: advertising executive, TV personality Jared Diamond: evolutionary biologist, author, professor at UCLA, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Alfred “Fred” DiSipio: record promoter investigated during payola scandal DMX: musician, actor Thomas R. Donovan: former CEO of the Chicago Board of Trade Jack Dorsey: cofounder of Twitter, founder and CEO of Square Inc. Steve Drezner: specialist in systems analysis and military projects for RAND Corporation Ann Druyan: author and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science Marian Wright Edelman: founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund Betty Edwards: author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Peter Eisenhardt: astronomer, physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Paul Ekman: psychologist, pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions Anita Elberse: professor of business administration at Harvard Business School Eminem: musician, music producer, actor Selwyn Enzer: futurist, former director of USC Center for Futures Research Susan Estrich: lawyer, author, first female campaign manager of a major presidential campaign (for Michael Dukakis) Harold Evans: journalist, author, former editor of the Sunday Times, founded Condé Nast Traveler Ron W.

Beyoncé Knowles: musician, actress Christof Koch: neuroscientist and professor at California Institute of Technology, specializing in human consciousness Clea Koff: forensic anthropologist who worked with United Nations to reveal genocide in Rwanda Stephen Kolodny: attorney; practices family law Rem Koolhaas: architect, architectural theorist, professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design Jeff Koons: artist Jesse Kornbluth: journalist, editor of a cultural concierge service Richard Koshalek: former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Mark Kostabi: artist, composer Anna Kournikova: former professional tennis player Lawrence Krauss: theoretical physicist, cosmologist, professor at Arizona State University Steve Kroft: journalist, correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes William LaFleur: author, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Japanese culture Steven Lamy: professor of international relations at the University of Southern California Lawrence Lawler: former special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office of the FBI Nigella Lawson: journalist, author, food writer, TV host Sugar Ray Leonard: professional boxer who won world titles in five weight divisions Maria Lepowsky: anthropologist, professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison, lived with the indigenous people of a Papua New Guinea island Lawrence Lessig: activist for Internet freedom and Net neutrality, professor at Harvard Law School Cliff Lett: professional race car driver, designer of radio-controlled cars Robert A. Levine: former economist at RAND Corporation Ariel Levy: journalist, staff writer at New York magazine Dany Levy: founder of DailyCandy email newsletter Roy Lichtenstein: Pop artist John Liebeskind: former professor at UCLA, leading researcher in the study of pain and its relation to health Alan Lipkin: former special agent for the criminal investigation division of the IRS Margaret Livingstone: neurobiologist specializing in vision, professor at Harvard Medical School Tone Loc: musician, actor Elizabeth Loftus: cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory, professor at the University of California, Irvine Lisa Love: West Coast director for Vogue and Teen Vogue Jim Lovell: Apollo-era astronaut, commander of the crippled Apollo 13 mission Thomas Lovejoy: ecologist, professor at George Mason University, former assistant secretary for environmental and external affairs at the Smithsonian Institution, expert in tropical deforestation Malcolm Lucas: chief justice of the California Supreme Court, 1987–1996 Oliver Luckett: founder and CEO of social media content company the Audience Frank Luntz: political consultant and pollster Peter Maass: author and journalist who covers international affairs, war, and conflict Norman Mailer: author, playwright, filmmaker, journalist, cofounder of the Village Voice Sir John Major: prime minister of the United Kingdom, 1990–1997 Michael Malin: astronomer, designer, developer of cameras used to explore Mars P.

Army general Ned Preble: former executive, Synectics creative problem-solving methodology Ilya Prigogine: chemist, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Nobel laureate in chemistry, author of The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature Prince: musician, music producer, actor Wolfgang Puck: chef, restaurateur, entrepreneur Pussy Riot: Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the two members of the Russian feminist punk rock group who served time in prison Steven Quartz: philosopher, professor at California Institute of Technology, specializing in the brain’s value systems and how they interact with culture James Quinlivan: analyst at the RAND Corporation, specializing in introducing change and technology into large organizations William C. Rader: psychiatrist, administers stem cell injections for a variety of illnesses Jason Randal: magician, mentalist Ronald Reagan: president of the United States, 1981–1989 Sumner Redstone: media magnate, businessman, chairman of CBS, chairman of Viacom Judith Regan: editor, book publisher Eddie Rehfeldt: executive creative director for the communications firm Waggener Edstrom David Remnick: journalist, author, editor of the New Yorker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize David Rhodes: president of CBS News, former vice president of news for Fox News Matthieu Ricard: Buddhist monk, photographer, author of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill Condoleezza Rice: U.S. secretary of state, 2005–2009, former U.S. national security advisor, former provost at Stanford University, professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Frank Rich: journalist, author, former columnist for the New York Times, editor at large for New York magazine Michael Rinder: activist and former senior executive for the Church of Scientology International Richard Riordan: mayor of Los Angeles, 1993–2001, businessman Tony Robbins: life coach, author, motivational speaker Robert Wilson and Richard Hutton: criminal defense attorneys Brian L.


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Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet: Lily Dayton, “BMI May Not Be the Last Word on Health Risks, Some Experts Say,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2014, www.​latimes.​com/​health/​la-​he-​bmi-​20141220-​story.​html. Keith Devlin, the mathematician: Keith Devlin, “Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus,” NPR, July 4, 2009, www.​npr.​org/​templates/​story/​story.​php?​storyId=​106268439. the $6 billion wellness industry: Rand Corporation, “Do Workplace Wellness Programs Save Employers Money?,” Rand Corporation Research Brief, 2013, www.​rand.​org/​content/​dam/​rand/​pubs/​research_​briefs/​RB9700/​RB9744/​RAND_​RB9744.​pdf. “Here are the facts”: Joshua Love, “4 Steps to Implement a Successful Employee Wellness Program,” Forbes, November 28, 2012, www.​forbes.​com/​sites/​theyec/​2012/​11/​28/​4-​steps-​to-​implement-​a-​successful-​employee-​wellness-​program/.

In fact, it is encouraged by the government. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, invites companies to engage workers in wellness programs, and even to “incentivize” health. By law, employers can now offer rewards and assess penalties reaching as high as 50 percent of the cost of coverage. Now, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, more than half of all organizations employing fifty people or more have wellness programs up and running, and more are joining the trend every week. There’s plenty of justification for wellness programs. If they work—and, as we’ll see, that’s a big “if”—the biggest beneficiary is the worker and his or her family.

+com/+2015/+06/+09/+education/+us-+to-+forgive-+federal-+loans-+of-+corinthian-+college-+students.+html. investigators at CALDER/American Institutes: Rajeev Darolia, Cory Koedel, Paco Martorell, Katie Wilson, and Francisco Perez-Arce, “Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For-Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment,” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2014, accessed January 9, 2016, www.​rand.+org/+pubs/+working_+papers/+WR1054.+html. The top 20 percent of the population: William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” Who Rules America?, first posted September 2005, updated February 2013, accessed January 9, 2016, http://​whorulesamerica.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The field’s early systems demonstrate this slippage between AI as tool for solving military, managerial, and scientific problems and as an attempt to understand the human self. Perhaps the most celebrated early AI systems were developed by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon in the 1950s, who began working together at the RAND Corporation, a military think tank. The frameworks the pair would become famous for had the imprint of Newell’s earlier work at RAND, which was in fact about people, not machines. Newell and colleagues worked on “simulations” of an air defense control center responding to aerial attack. These were experiments with people who had to manage the control center under different scenarios staged by the experimenters.

Much of our research effort has gone into the design of programming languages (information-processing languages) that make the writing of such programs practicable.” Allen Newell, John C. Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon, Report on a General Problem-Solving Program, Memo P-1584 (Santa Monica, Calif: RAND Corporation, 1958).   27.   The pair wrote that their work should be seen as “nonstatistical” and “makes very little use of the standard statistical apparatus.” For Newell and Simon, mental “content,” made of “diverse meaningful symbolic structures,” nearly defied reduction to numbers. Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving, 13.

The long reign of alchemy has shown that any research which has had an early success can always be justified and continued by those who prefer adventure to patience.” Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do, 304.   14.   Hubert L. Dreyfus, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, Report No. P-3244 (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1965).   15.   Stuart E. Dreyfus and Hubert L. Dreyfus, The Scope, Limits, and Training Implications of Three Models of Aircraft Pilot Emergency Response Behavior, Report No. ORC-79-2 (Berkeley: Operations Research Center, University of California, February 1979), 32.   16.   For acrimonious exchanges between prominent AI practitioners and Dreyfus, especially after Dreyfus was beaten in chess by a computer program, see Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, University of Pittsburgh Publication (New York: Freeman, 1979), chap. 9.   17.   


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

There is a new study just done by a couple of major terrorism specialists, Peter Bergen and others, and their estimate is that what they call “the Iraq effect”—the effect of the Iraq war on terrorism—has been a “sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks,” focused particularly on regions and populations that have been involved in the invasion, “amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost.”12 That’s quite an increase. It’s a long, careful, important study, using the Rand Corporation database.13 I haven’t seen anything about the report in the mainstream press. You can also see this short-term thinking right now in the case of Iran. I don’t know if the Bush administration is planning to invade, but in order to achieve a short-term gain in domestic political power and shifting attention away from their catastrophe in Iraq, war planners may trap themselves into invading, with consequences that are unimaginable.

In a demonstration of their military capacity, the Chinese recently shot down one of their own anti-satellite systems.19 Afterward, there was a big hubbub: China is starting the Cold War, they’re a major threat, and so on. All this is totally predictable. I wrote about the possibility of this happening years ago—not because I have any insight, I was just quoting the major strategic analysts. You can read about it in Hegemony or Survival.20 I quoted the Rand Corporation, leading military figures, and so on, all of whom pointed out the obvious, that other countries regard what we call “missile defense” as a first-strike weapon. A missile shield could never impede a first strike, but it could conceivably impede a retaliatory strike. So if you have a functioning missile defense system, and the adversary has no way around it, they’re going to understand it as a first-strike weapon.

Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Aid Distributions,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 2 (January 1981), pp. 155, 157. 10 For discussion, see Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, pp. 52–53. 11 Alfredo Molano, Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia, trans. Daniel Bland (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), see foreword by Aviva Chomsky. 12 See C. Peter Rydell and Susan S. Everingham, Controlling Cocaine: Supply Versus Demand Programs, Rand Corporation (2004), online at http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR331/index2.html. 13 Hugh O’Shaughnessy and Sue Branford, Chemical Warfare in Colombia: The Costs of Coca Fumigation (London: Latin America Bureau, 2005), p. 120, citing Martin Jelsma and Pien Metaal, “Cracks in the Vienna Consensus: The UN Drug Control Debate,” Drug War Monitor, Washington, D.C., Washington Office on Latin America, January 2004. 14 Ewen MacAskill and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Bush’s Last Stand,” Guardian (London), 11 January 2007; Michael Gordon, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made in Iran, U.S.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

Lambeth, “Uncertainties for the Soviet War Planner,” International Security 7, No. 3 (Winter 1982–83), pp. 139–66. 174. Benjamin S. Lambeth, Selective Nuclear Options in American and Soviet Strategic Policy, R-2034-DDRE (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1976); and Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Options, R-2154-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, September 1977). 175. Robert Jervis, for example, has written a book titled The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 176. See note 159 in this chapter. 177. One author estimates that the ratio of conventional to nuclear spending in the U.S. defense budget was roughly 1.45:1 in 1961, 4:1 in 1971, and 6.7:1 in 1981.

Russia and the Outside World, CSIA Studies in International Security (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1994), pp. 77–106; and Sergey Rogov, Security Concerns of the New Russia, vol. 1, The Challenges of Defending Russia, Occasional Paper (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, July 1995). 90. See Zalmay Khalilzad et al., The United States and a Rising China: Strategic and Military Implications (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999); and Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2000). 91. For a generally optimistic assessment of the future of China’s economy, see World Bank, China 2020: Development Challenges in the New Century (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997). For more pessimistic assessments, see the articles in “The FPRI Conference on China’s Economy,” Orbis 43, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 173–294; and Nicholas R.

See Posen, “War for Kosovo,” p. 81. 66. Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 68. For a discussion of why punishment from the air usually fails, see ibid., pp. 21–27; Stephen T. Hosmer, Psychological Effects of U.S. Air Operations in Four Wars, 1941–1991: Lessons for U.S. Commanders, RAND Report MR-576-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996); and Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress: Psychological Studies of Bombing and Civilian Defense (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951). 67. There is also some evidence in the public domain that a decapitation strategy was employed against Yugoslavia in 1999. Specifically, it appears from some of the targets that NATO struck (TV stations, Milosevic’s house, important government buildings, party headquarters, high-level military headquarters, and the businesses of Milosevic’s close friends) that it aimed either to kill him or to precipitate a coup.


pages: 109 words: 33,946

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

banking crisis, Credit Default Swap, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, traumatic brain injury, Yom Kippur War

, and V. de Silva. “Mental Health of Special Forces Personnel Deployed in Battle.” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 47 (2012): 1343–51. Helmus, Todd C., and Russell W. Glenn. Steeling the Mind: Combat Stress Reactions and Their Implications for Urban Warfare. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005. Hirshon, J. M., et al. “Psychological and Readjustment Problems Associated with Emergency Evacuations of Peace Corps Volunteers.” Journal of Travel Medicine 4, no. 3 (September 1997): 128–31. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations: Initial Assessment.

Cohesion, Anticipated Breakdown, and Endurance in Battle: Considerations for Severe and High Intensity Combat. Unpublished manuscript, Washington, DC: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1979. ———. The Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deployment with Special Emphasis on the Gulf War. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001. Medical Surveillance Monthly Report 20, no. 3 (March 2013). https://www.afhsc.mil/documents/pubs/msmrs/2013/v20_n03.pdf. Morley, Christopher A., and Brandon A. Kohrt. “Impact of Peer Support on PTSD, Hope, and Functional Impairment.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 22 (2013): 714–34.

Global Research News, February 12, 2014. http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-wars-in-afghanistan-iraq-to-cost-6-trillion/5350789. Tanielian, Terri, and Lisa H. Jaycox, eds. Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG720.sum.pdf. Thompson, Mark. “They Don’t Seem to Get Better…” Time, February 23, 2012. http://nation.time.com/2012/02/23/they-dont-seem-to-get-better/. Toll, W. A., et al. “Promoting Mental Health and Psychosocial Well-Being in Children Affected by Political Violence.”


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Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

“The launching of the sputniks told us,” wrote John Dunning for The New York Times Introduction 4 ration decided to create a computer network that was independent of centralized command and control, and would thus be able to withstand a nuclear attack that targets such centralized hubs. In August 1964, he published an eleven-volume memorandum for the Rand Corporation outlining his research.6 Baran’s network was based on a technology called packet-switching7 that allows messages to break themselves apart into small fragments. Each fragment, or packet, is able to find its own way to its destination. Once there, the packets reassemble to create the original message.

The highway system was first approved by Congress immediately following World War II, but was not officially begun until June 29, 1956, when President Eisenhower signed it into law. (This is exactly the same period during which Internet pioneer Paul Baran began experimenting with distributed, packet-switching computer technologies at the Rand Corporation.11) The highway system is a distributed network because it lacks any centralized hubs and offers direct linkages from city to city through a variety of highway combinations. For example, someone traveling from Los Angeles to Denver may begin by traveling on Interstate 5 north toward San Francisco turning northwest on Interstate 80, or head out on Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas, or even Interstate 40 toward Albuquerque.

These include standards for Ethernet18 (the most common local area networking protocol in use today), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and others. “The IEEE,” Paul Baran observed, “has been a major factor in the development of communications technology.”19 Indeed Baran’s own theories, which eventually would spawn the Internet, were published within the IEEE community even as they were published by his own employer, the Rand Corporation. Active within the United States are the National Institute for Standardization and Technology (NIST) and ANSI. The century-old NIST, formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards, is a federal agency that develops and promotes technological standards. Because it is a federal agency and not a professional society, it has no membership per se.


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Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

This inherent problem was apparently lost on Cebrowski: Vice-Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John A. Garstka, “Net-Centric Warfare, Its Origin and Future,” Proceedings Magazine, U.S. Naval Institute, January 1998. Two Rand Corporation researchers: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1997). Their report, “Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century”: Report of the National Defense Panel, “Power Projection,” December 1997. http://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/administration_and_Management/other/902.pdf.

The Soviets even coined a helpful catchphrase to describe this claimed ability to see everything, strike anything—the “military technical revolution”—and proclaimed their intention of producing their own versions. In no time, talk of this revolution was gathering momentum in U.S. military commentaries, largely thanks to assiduous promotion by an already legendary Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall. Trained as an economist, Marshall had spent his early career at the Rand Corporation, the famed Santa Monica–based think tank staffed with brilliant minds devising nuclear war strategies for the U.S. Air Force, which financed the undertaking. In retrospect it is clear that Rand’s core mission was to devise strategies justifying and whenever possible enhancing the air force budget.

This inherent problem was apparently lost on Cebrowski, who suggested that if every soldier and warplane was connected up like the Wal-Mart cash registers, an entire force could operate as a coordinated mechanism, identifying and destroying targets with maximum efficiency and discrimination. Jasons pondering how to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail back in the summer of 1966 would have caught on to the idea immediately. Unsurprisingly, the defense intelligentsia was quick to fall into line. Two Rand Corporation researchers, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, academic foot soldiers in the revolution in military affairs, popularized the notions of “cyberwar” and “netwar” as well as the catchy slogan “It takes a network to defeat a network.” Meanwhile, politicians were getting in on the act. In 1996 Senators Joseph Lieberman and Dan Coats sponsored a National Defense Panel as a forum to advance “the revolution in military affairs.”


pages: 518 words: 128,324

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

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

New technologies allow for asymmetric responses, like missiles that can be launched from the Chinese mainland to destroy aircraft carriers, or antisatellite weapons that for a million dollars can destroy a multibillion-dollar US satellite.62 Although it has devoted on average just 2 percent of its GDP to defense since the late 1980s (the US has spent closer to 4 percent),63 three decades of double-digit economic growth have allowed Chinese military capabilities to expand eightfold.64 Today its defense budget of $146 billion in market exchange rates (or $314 billion in PPP) ranks second only to that of the US, and is twice Russia’s.65 China’s growing military might will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6. For now, suffice it to say that China has already secured a number of advantages on the battlefield. The most authoritative assessment of the changing balance of military power in the region is a 2015 RAND Corporation study called “The U.S.-China Military Scorecard.” The report finds that, by 2017, China will have an “advantage” or “approximate parity” in six of the nine areas of conventional capability: for instance, in launching attacks on air bases or surface targets, achieving air superiority, and preventing an opponent from using space-based weapons.

But in the 1970s, China also claimed sovereignty over the islands. Chinese ships regularly pass through these waters, raising tensions between Beijing and Tokyo and risking a collision that could set off a chain reaction. Consider a scenario that provided the story line for a recent war game designed by the RAND Corporation.30 A group of Japanese ultranationalists sets sail for the Senkakus in small civilian watercraft. On social media, they explain they are headed for Kuba Jima, one of the smaller islands, which they intend to claim and occupy on behalf of Japan. They land and begin building unidentified structures.

Recall the Rule of 72: divide 72 by the annual growth rate to determine how long it will take to double. [back] 65. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2016 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 19. [back] 66. Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996–2017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015), xxxi, xxix. [back] 67. In remarks to reporters at the May 2012 Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing, Clinton said of the US and China: “We look at the future with great optimism. And we believe that neither of us can afford to keep looking at the world through old lenses, whether it’s the legacy of imperialism, the Cold War, or balance-of-power politics.


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I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

That’s what drove previous technical changes, like the adoption of steam engines and steel hulls in the Royal Navy, despite centuries of tradition and vested interest in wood and sail. It drove the creation of independent air forces, when conceptual thinking called for ‘strategic bombing’ of key targets far behind enemy lines. Those air forces stimulated new intellectual thinking about war, as happened in the RAND Corporation of the 1950s and 60s, where much thought went into theorising nuclear war and designing forces accordingly. And now, there is nascent change in western armed forces in response to advances in AI. The US Defense Department has worked to deepen its existing ties with Silicon Valley, to accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies.

Pioneered by the brilliant John von Neumann, co-inventor of the modern computer, game theory looked like a good way of modelling the sorts of adversarial behaviours that took place in international relations. It was enthusiastically embraced by a group of quantitative theorists then growing in prominence, some of whom worked for the US Air Force’s inhouse thinktank, the RAND Corporation.22 Schelling himself was a mathematically trained economist, and so was well placed to take advantage of the new technique. But what makes Schelling’s work of enduring importance is his use of metaphor, not maths. His strategists were emphatically men, not machines. To pare away the complexity of the real world, game theoreticians make some bold simplifications about human minds.

In International Conference on Intelligent Human Systems Integration, pp. 999–1006. 11. Wong, Yuna Huh, John Yurchak, Robert W. Button, Aaron Frank, Burgess Laird, Osonde A. Osoba, Randall Steeb, Benjamin N. Harris, and Sebastian Joon Bae, Deterrence in the Age of Thinking Machines. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2797.html. 12. Russon, Mary-Ann. ‘The robot that watches as you cross the road’, BBC News, 28 August 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45330451. 13. Schelling, Thomas. Arms and Influence New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 116. 14.


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Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

And in policy circles, the systems theorist Herman Kahn would pioneer the application of game theory and computer simulation to the geopolitics of thermonuclear war. Against the backdrop of late 1950s Cold War tensions, Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation developed computerized war games to “simulate the unthinkable.” The use of computer games to model complex social phenomena, having soon transcended the walls of the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon, was eventually applied to political analysis, policy formation, and city planning. THE COMPUTER BECOMES A COMMODITY Today, with the hindsight of historical perspective, IBM’s early domination of the computer market can be seen as largely a fortuitous inheritance.

The first major firm in the large-systems sector of software contracting was the RAND Corporation, a government-owned defense contractor. It developed the software for the SAGE air-defense project. When the SAGE project was begun in the early 1950s, although IBM was awarded the contract to develop and manufacture the mainframe computers, writing the programs for the system—estimated at a million lines of code—was way beyond IBM’s or anyone else’s experience. The contract for the SAGE software was therefore given to the RAND Corporation in 1955. Although lacking any actual large-scale software writing capability, the corporation was judged to have the best potential for developing it.

Martin Greenberger, a professor at the MIT Management School who was probably the first to describe the utility concept in print, argued in an Atlantic Monthly article that the drive for computer utilities was unstoppable and that “[b]arring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by A.D. 2000 as the telephone service is today.” The computer utility vision was widely shared by computer pundits at the end of the 1960s. Paul Baran, a computer-communications specialist at the RAND Corporation, waxed eloquent about the computer utility in the home: And while it may seem odd to think of piping computing power into homes, it may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. We will speak to the computers of the future in a language simple to learn and easy to use. Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams.


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If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

   — antiwar movement and, 234–35    — arrest in Atlanta, 120    — assassination, 102, 268–69, 270, 276, 322    — Montgomery bus boycott, 73–74    — speech at Lincoln Memorial, 199    — Wofford and, 14, 112 Kissinger, Henry, 290 Kochen, Manfred, 76–77, 347n Komer, Robert, 228, 241, 247, 248, 250, 267 Kristol, Irving, 192, 308, 367n Kubrick, Stanley, 148, 173–75, 276–77, 364n Lang, Kurt, 265 Lanier, Jaron, 322 Lansdale, Edward, 61, 219 Lasky, Victor, 132–33 Lasswell, Harold    — Burdick and, 31–33    — Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 34, 37, 44    — content analysis, 55, 262    — education and early career, 33    — Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications, 53–54    — Greenfield and, 13, 31, 33–34, 61    — on Morgan’s article in Harper’s, 126    — Pool and, 52, 53–55, 343nn    — RAND Corporation and, 50    — Simulmatics Corporation founder, 32, 142    — at Stanford, 54–55    — Stevenson and 1960 election, 103 Lazarsfeld, Paul    — Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, 34, 81–82, 84, 87    — Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 34, 37, 44    — McPhee and, 81–82, 83–84, 87, 348n    — RAND Corporation and, 50    — Stevenson and 1960 election, 103 Le, Kim, 238–39, 303 Lederer, William, 157–58, 182, 247–48, 361n Lehrer, Tom, 171 Leibovitz, Annie, 312 Lerner, Daniel, 54–55, 58, 344n Levandowski, Anthony, 328 Lewis, Anthony, 309 Leyland, George, 293–94, 384n “Liberty in Shackles” (Wicker), 309 Libraries of the Future (Licklider), 284 Library of Congress, 33, 53, 280 Licklider, J.C.R

He recommended turning the study of human behavior into a science, like physics, to be based on “experiment, the accumulation of data, the framing of general theories, attempts to verify the theories, and prediction.”25 After all, if a body of knowledge couldn’t be used to make predictions, what use was it? Before working for Ford, Gaither had helped found the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica. RAND—short for “Research and Development”—had begun as an arm of the U.S. Air Force, part of the Douglas Aircraft Company, but in 1948, newly independent, and with funding from both the Department of Defense and the Ford Foundation, RAND had hired a pioneer in psychological warfare to head its new Social Science Division.26 Its projects included charting, mathematically, “a general theory of the future.”27 Prophecy is ancient, a species of mysticism.

Describing the social sciences as “the new humanities of the Twentieth Century,” Pool argued that while statesmen in times past had consulted philosophy, literature, and history, statesmen of the Cold War era were instead obligated to consult the behavioral sciences. The “McNamara revolution,” he argued, had “remade American defense policy in accordance with a series of ideas that germinated in the late 1950’s in the RAND corporation.” Given a choice “between policy based on moralisms and policy based on social science,” he was glad to report that the secretary of defense had rejected the humanities and morality in favor of behavioral science and rationality.30 The more unpopular the war in Vietnam, the deeper Pool’s commitment, and the closer he grew not only to the Pentagon but to the White House.


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San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

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

., “Changes in US Lifetime Heroin Use and Heroin Use Disorder: Prevalence from the 2001–2002 to 2012–2013 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions,” JAMA Psychiatry 74, no. 5 (2017): 445–55, doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.0113. 77. Gregory Midgette et al., What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs, 2006–2016 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), www.rand.org. 78. Beau Kilmer, interview by the author, February 19, 2021. 79. Gregory Midgette et al., What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs, 2006–2016 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), www.rand.org. 80. Silvia S. Martins et al., “Prescription Opioid Use Disorder and Heroin Use Among 12–34 year-olds in the United States from 2002 to 2014,” Addictive Behaviors 65 (2017): 236–41, doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2016.08.033. 81.

Goodman and Barbara Baker, eds., “State of Washington: Members of the Legislature, 1889–2014,” Legislative Information Center, State of Washington, June 2014, www.leg.wa.gov. 40. Michael Dardia et al., Military Base Closures: The Impact on California Communities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996), available at RAND Corporation, www.rand.org; Dan Walters, “The Decline and Fall of California’s Republican Party,” Orange County Register, December 2, 2019, www.ocregister.com. 41. E. J. Dionne, “Washington Talk; Greening of Democrats: An 80’s Mix of Idealism and Shrewd Politics,” New York Times, June 14, 1989, www.nytimes.com. 42.

The number of adults who had ever used heroin rose fivefold from 2001–02 to 2012–13, to 3.8 million, found a study of nearly 80,000 people published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The share suffering addiction rose threefold to 1.1 million.76 Other studies find the same results. RAND Corporation found the number of heroin users nationally rose from 1.6 to 2.3 million, their spending on heroin rose from $31 to $43 billion, and heroin consumption rose from 27 to 47 million metric tons, between 2006 and 2016.77 “Heavy users drive this market,” a senior RAND analyst told me. “Eighty percent of consumption comes from twenty percent of the users, which is similar to alcohol.”78 RAND calculates the total US illegal drug market at around $146 billion per year, which is about the same size as the total US market for alcohol.79 Experts are unsure how many heroin users there are in the United States and estimates vary significantly, but studies find that there has been a significant increase in usage of heroin and other opiates over the last two decades.


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The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

For a discussion of Internet’s prospects, see a study by the Rand Corporation available only on-line at the time of writing: Rand Corporation (1995). 72 Cerf (1999). 73 Kahn (1999). 74 Zook (2000c). 75 UNDP (1999); UNESCO (1999); US Department of Commerce (1999b); Castells and Kiselyova (2000); Zook (2000a). 76 See, for instance, Comision de nuevas tecnologias (1999). 77 Dutton (1999); UNESCO (1999). 78 Zook (2000b). 79 Markoff (1995). 80 De Kerckhove (1997). 81 Harmon (1999); Linus Torvalds (personal communication, 1999). 82 Himannen (2001). 83 Gitlin (1987); Rand Corporation (1995). 84 To follow Rheingold’s (1993) biological image. 85 Rheingold (1993). 86 Rheingold (1993); Turkle (1995); Jones (1995, 1997, 1998); Kiesler (1997). 87 Barlow (1995: 40). 88 Mitchell (1995, 1999). 89 Turkle (1995: 267). 90 Slouka (1995). 91 Wolton (1998). 92 Kraut et al. (1998). 93 Wellman et al. (1996); Wellman (1997); Wellman and Gulia (1999). 94 Castells (1972); Wellman (1979); Fischer (1982). 95 Wellman and Gulia (1999: 355). 96 Putnam (1995). 97 Wellman and Gulia (1999: 350). 98 Sproull and Kiesler (1991); Rand Corporation (1995). 99 Hiltz and Turoff (1993); Sato et al. (1995), US Department of Commerce (1999). 100 Gurstein (1990). 101 Montgomery (1999: 15). 102 Baym (1998: 55). 103 Dyson (1998). 104 US Library of Congress (1999). 105 Lanham (1993); Rand Corporation (1995). 106 Specter (1994). 107 Armstrong (1994). 108 Abramson et al. (1988); Epstein (1995). 109 Castells et al. (1996). 110 Ganley (1991); Varley (1991). 111 Patrice Riemens (personal communication – face to face, handwritten mail, electronic mail – 1997/99). 112 Schuler (1996). 113 Keck and Sikkink (1998). 114 December (1993), cited and summarized by Benson (1994). 115 De Kerckhove (1997: 51). 116 Dutton (1999). 117 Fischer (1992). 118 Rheingold (1993). 119 Castells and Kiselyova (2000). 120 Sullivan-Trainor (1994). 121 Telecommunications Council (1994). 122 Thery (1994). 123 Banegas (1993). 124 See, among a myriad of business sources on the matter, Bird (1994); Bunker (1994); Dalloz and Portnoff (1994); Herther (1994). 125 The Economist (1994a). 126 Schiller (1999). 127 Business Week (1994h). 128 Elmer-Dewwit (1993); Poirier (1993); Business Week (1994d). 129 New Media Markets (1993). 130 Owen (1999: ch.17). 131 Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (1994); New Media Markets (1994). 132 Kaplan (1992); Sellers (1993); Booker (1994); Business Week (1994e); Lizzio (1994); Wexler (1994). 133 Owen (1999: 313). 134 Business Week (1994f). 135 Dentsu Institute for Human Studies (1994: 117). 136 Martin (1994). 137 Owen (1999: 4). 138 Bunker (1994); Business Week (1994f); Cuneo (1994); The Economist (1994a). 139 Piller (1994). 140 Tobenkin (1993); Martin (1994). 141 Van der Haak (1999). 142 Moran (1993). 143 Dentsu Institute for Human Studies (1994: 140–3). 144 Negroponte (1995). 145 Baudrillard (1972); Barthes (1978). 146 Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1992). 6 The Space of Flows Space and time are the fundamental, material dimensions of human life.

For a discussion of Internet’s prospects, see a study by the Rand Corporation available only on-line at the time of writing: Rand Corporation (1995). 72 Cerf (1999). 73 Kahn (1999). 74 Zook (2000c). 75 UNDP (1999); UNESCO (1999); US Department of Commerce (1999b); Castells and Kiselyova (2000); Zook (2000a). 76 See, for instance, Comision de nuevas tecnologias (1999). 77 Dutton (1999); UNESCO (1999). 78 Zook (2000b). 79 Markoff (1995). 80 De Kerckhove (1997). 81 Harmon (1999); Linus Torvalds (personal communication, 1999). 82 Himannen (2001). 83 Gitlin (1987); Rand Corporation (1995). 84 To follow Rheingold’s (1993) biological image. 85 Rheingold (1993). 86 Rheingold (1993); Turkle (1995); Jones (1995, 1997, 1998); Kiesler (1997). 87 Barlow (1995: 40). 88 Mitchell (1995, 1999). 89 Turkle (1995: 267). 90 Slouka (1995). 91 Wolton (1998). 92 Kraut et al. (1998). 93 Wellman et al. (1996); Wellman (1997); Wellman and Gulia (1999). 94 Castells (1972); Wellman (1979); Fischer (1982). 95 Wellman and Gulia (1999: 355). 96 Putnam (1995). 97 Wellman and Gulia (1999: 350). 98 Sproull and Kiesler (1991); Rand Corporation (1995). 99 Hiltz and Turoff (1993); Sato et al. (1995), US Department of Commerce (1999). 100 Gurstein (1990). 101 Montgomery (1999: 15). 102 Baym (1998: 55). 103 Dyson (1998). 104 US Library of Congress (1999). 105 Lanham (1993); Rand Corporation (1995). 106 Specter (1994). 107 Armstrong (1994). 108 Abramson et al. (1988); Epstein (1995). 109 Castells et al. (1996). 110 Ganley (1991); Varley (1991). 111 Patrice Riemens (personal communication – face to face, handwritten mail, electronic mail – 1997/99). 112 Schuler (1996). 113 Keck and Sikkink (1998). 114 December (1993), cited and summarized by Benson (1994). 115 De Kerckhove (1997: 51). 116 Dutton (1999). 117 Fischer (1992). 118 Rheingold (1993). 119 Castells and Kiselyova (2000). 120 Sullivan-Trainor (1994). 121 Telecommunications Council (1994). 122 Thery (1994). 123 Banegas (1993). 124 See, among a myriad of business sources on the matter, Bird (1994); Bunker (1994); Dalloz and Portnoff (1994); Herther (1994). 125 The Economist (1994a). 126 Schiller (1999). 127 Business Week (1994h). 128 Elmer-Dewwit (1993); Poirier (1993); Business Week (1994d). 129 New Media Markets (1993). 130 Owen (1999: ch.17). 131 Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (1994); New Media Markets (1994). 132 Kaplan (1992); Sellers (1993); Booker (1994); Business Week (1994e); Lizzio (1994); Wexler (1994). 133 Owen (1999: 313). 134 Business Week (1994f). 135 Dentsu Institute for Human Studies (1994: 117). 136 Martin (1994). 137 Owen (1999: 4). 138 Bunker (1994); Business Week (1994f); Cuneo (1994); The Economist (1994a). 139 Piller (1994). 140 Tobenkin (1993); Martin (1994). 141 Van der Haak (1999). 142 Moran (1993). 143 Dentsu Institute for Human Studies (1994: 140–3). 144 Negroponte (1995). 145 Baudrillard (1972); Barthes (1978). 146 Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1992). 6 The Space of Flows Space and time are the fundamental, material dimensions of human life.

When in the late 1950s the launching of the first Sputnik alarmed the American high-tech military establishment, ARPA undertook a number of bold initiatives, some of which changed the history of technology and ushered in the Information Age on a grand scale. One of these strategies, developing an idea conceived by Paul Baran at Rand Corporation in 1960–4, was to design a communications system invulnerable to nuclear attack. Based on packet-switching communication technology, the system made the network independent of command and control centers, so that message units would find their own routes along the network, being reassembled in coherent meaning at any point in the network.


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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Nineteen sixty-seven was one year before Intel was founded and two years before ARPANET was launched, the famous predecessor to the internet initially funded by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, later called DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Yet Kahn saw the writing on the wall: the computer revolution—as this man, the Rand Corporation’s foremost nuclear thinker saw it—was the most important, most salient, and most exciting aspect of modern technology.80 Remarkably, Kahn even suspected that “each user” might have a private file space in a central computer, for such uses as consulting the Library of Congress. Computer access would be used to reduce crime, as police can check immediately the record “of any person stopped for questioning.”

Then Licklider articulated in more detail what this computer network was supposed to be all about: the advancement of the art of information processing, and “the advancement of intellectual capability (man, man-machine, or machine),” Licklider wrote. The memo went out to ARPA-contracted researchers at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, the Rand Corporation, and several contractors in industry. To make progress in these endeavors, he reckoned, each researcher needed hardware facilities, as well as a software base more complex and more extensive than one person alone could build. The only solution was a network of computers, a network of individual “thinking centers,” as he called it.

An example was the navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile. Cyberwar meant crewless tanks, cruise missiles that behave like kamikaze robots, head-to-toe battle gear with microclimate control and hazard protection for the infantry, as well as “anti-missile satellites.”20 Some thought this characterization was too simple. The following year, two Rand Corporation analysts—John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt—published an influential paper, “Cyberwar Is Coming!” Autonomous weapons weren’t enough, they argued. The respected think-tank veterans injected a fresh and controversial idea into the Washington defense establishment. Arquilla and Ronfeldt also disagreed with the prevailing view within the Joint Staff, then still headed by Colin Powell: that overwhelming force was necessary to win the next war.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

To cite only one of innumerable examples, the Wall Street Journal published a forecast by former CIA analyst, Samuel Adams, that 100,000 people would be murdered in the event of a Communist victory in Vietnam, which relied heavily on a hysterical propaganda tract by Craig Hosmer put out by the Rand Corporation.110 The Journal refused at the time to publish any criticism of the Adams piece and has subsequently never gotten around to discussing where the Adams forecast went wrong. For readers of the Journal, the Vietnamese Communists might be said to have killed 100,000 people in a postwar bloodbath, an “Asian Auschwitz”(see note 109, chapter 2). It is one of the public functions of both right-wing and official think tanks like the Rand Corporation, the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute, and academic social science scholarship more broadly, to show that they are evil and we are good—though we occasionally err.

“I Have Heard the Cry of my People,” a statement signed by 18 Catholic religious leaders of Northeast Brazil, 6 May 1973, IDOC translation and reprint, p. 43. 40. E. Bradford Burns, “Brazil: The Imitative Society,” The Nation, 10 July 1972, quoted in Black, op. cit., p. 261. 41. Konrad Kellen, “1971 and Beyond: The View From Hanoi,” Rand Corporation (June 1971), pp. 14-15. 42. The flavor of “our” South Vietnam may be captured, however, in the finding by one former AID employee: “I have personally witnessed poor urban people literally quaking with fear when I questioned them about the activity of the secret police in a post election campaign.

., p. 22), as was constantly trumpeted by Dean Acheson and a host of sycophants. 15. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An, University of California, 1971, p. 197; to date, the best account of the origins of the insurgency under the U.S.-Diem regime. There is also important material on this subject in the massive “Vietcong Motivation and Morale Study” undertaken by the Rand Corporation. For an interesting study based on this generally ignored material, see David Hunt, “Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam,” Radical America, vol. 8, nos. 1-2, 1974. See also Georges Chaffard, Les deux guerres du Vietnam, La Table Ronde, Paris, 1969. U.S. government sources, in addition to the Pentagon Papers, also contain much useful information: see Robert L.


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Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In all this messy diversity we see the interplay of politics, culture and chance in shaping the spread of ideas. And the paradoxical quality of appealing, seductive ideas which turn out to do great damage. The stories of these high priests are varied, but together they show how economics has come to dominate our lives. 2 Trust No One Oh, the RAND Corporation is the boon of the world; They think all day for a fee. They sit and play games about going up in flames, For counters they use you and me, Honey Bee, For counters they use you and me.1 In the fall of 1948 most of the newly arrived postgraduate maths students at Princeton University in New Jersey were cocky, but one was even cockier.

The time and place was early 1950s Santa Monica, at the end of the Malibu Beach Crescent, just west of Los Angeles. The seaside promenade was lined with hotels and retirement homes, shades of cream and pink punctuated by bursts of vivid bougainvillea. The scent of oleander hung in the air. Santa Monica was an improbable setting for the offices of the RAND Corporation, a secretive think tank employing mathematicians and scientists to develop military strategy for potential nuclear war with the USSR. The Korean War had just begun and the Cold War was getting hot. The atmosphere at RAND combined paranoia, megalomania and a worship of abstract logic. Nuclear military technology was still in its infancy, and during the Second World War US generals had realized that they needed advice on the best way to deploy the latest weapons, from radar to long-range missiles, as well as the atom bomb.

It is the world of modern economic theory, one which I was hoping to persuade economists to leave.’23 The usual spelling is ‘Coasean’, not Coase’s choice of ‘Coasian’. Poor Ronald Coase – he didn’t even get to control the spelling of ‘Coasean world’, let alone what it means. 4 The Government Enemy In the early 1950s John von Neumann and John Nash were not the only geniuses associated with the RAND Corporation. RAND was the incubator for another intellectual revolution, as significant as game theory but completely independent of it. And this time the genius behind it was a lowly intern. The earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of game theory had been the military analysts at RAND, who wanted to use its powerful mathematical tools to outwit the Soviets in Cold War nuclear strategizing.


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The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Grand Strategy The problem is that the United States has tied its end state to maintaining global peace and prosperity but has failed to conjure a meaningful grand strategy to achieve this. There is also another problem. “Grand strategy is the biggest crock of shit.” “Say again?” I ask, nearly dropping my sandwich. “Grand strategy is a myth. It doesn’t exist,” says Dan, a colleague at the RAND Corporation, a Department of Defense–sponsored think tank. “Those are fighting words,” I say, half-seriously. “Bring it on,” he replies, slurping his sweet tea with a smirk. We are sitting on a park bench in the middle of the Pentagon courtyard eating lunch. It’s the only park in America that has no squirrels.

Wars no longer end but smolder in perpetuity: Matthew Hoddie and Caroline Hartzell, “Civil War Settlements and the Implementation of Military Power-Sharing Arrangements,” Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 3 (2003): 303–20; Monica Duffy Toft, Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End, vol. 965 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2010); Roger Mac Ginty, “No War, No Peace: Why So Many Peace Processes Fail to Deliver Peace,” International Politics 47 no. 2 (2010): 145–62; Jasmine-Kim Westendorf, Why Peace Processes Fail: Negotiating Insecurity after Civil War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2015). Why Do We Get War Wrong?

Schooner and Collin Swan, “Contractors and the Ultimate Sacrifice,” The George Washington University Law School, working paper no. 512 (September 2010); Christian Miller, “Civilian Contractor Toll in Iraq and Afghanistan Ignored By Defense Dept,” ProPublica, 9 October 2009. 11. Contractor PTSD and casualties: Molly Dunigan et al., Out of the Shadows: The Health and Well-Being of Private Contractors Working in Conflict Environments (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013); Contingency Contracting: DOD, State, and U.S.AID Continue to Face Challenges in Tracking Contractor Personnel and Contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, GAO-10-1 (Washington: US Government Accountability Office, 2009), www.gao.gov/new.items/d101.pdf; Justin Elliott, “Hundreds of Afghanistan Contractor Deaths Go Unreported,” Salon, 15 July 2010.


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Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

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

This was not because it was uniquely fitted for this intellectual purpose but because of deliberate decisions to adopt it as the foundation of a new science of decision-making and the active promotion of this new science by bodies such as the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation, both of which encouraged its embrace by business schools. As with Plato’s philosophy, a new discipline that offered eternal truths was created in part by disparaging and caricaturing what had gone before for its lack of rigor. The best place to start this story is with the RAND Corporation, which we identified in the last section as the home of game theory and the belief that a formal science of decision could be developed.

See also crowd psychology Cornford on, 618 of the deed (Bakunin), 275–276 First World War and, 337, 339 Lippmann on, 339 Nazis and, 336, 342–343, 414 Propaganda (Bernays), 341 Protagoras, 36 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 302 Proudhon, Joseph, 251, 270, 274, 668n27 Prussia Austro-Prussian War and, 105 Franco-Prussian War and, 105–107, 112, 274–275 Napoleonic Wars and, 78–79, 82 Public Opinion (Lippman), 337, 340 Pullman strike, 313–315 Quakerism, 346 quantitative analysis. See also game theory limitations of, 150, 203 McNamara and, 149–150, 199, 202, 501–502, 546 RAND Corporation and, 147–148, 152–153, 513–514 Quayle, Dan, 452–453, 690n51 Quiet American, The (Greene), 187 “Quiz Kids.” See “Whiz Kids” radical Islamists, 222, 235–236. See also al-Qaeda Raff, Daniel, 616 Raiffa, Howard, 161–162, 514 Ramsey, Douglas, 506 RAND Corporation game theory and, 161–162, 513 nuclear strategy and, 161–162, 168 quantitative emphasis of, 147–148, 150, 152–153, 513–514 rational choice theory and, 575–577 Randolph, A.

As one of the key figures in the British program noted, the methodology used was closer to classical economics than physics, although economists were not directly engaged.8 During the course of the war, operations research—as the new field came to be known—made major strides in support of actual operations, including working out the safest arrangement for convoys in the face of submarine attack or choosing targets for air raids.9 Mathematicians and physicists made more of an impact in the United States, notably those who became involved in the Manhattan Project, the organization which had led to the production of the first atomic bomb. The center for the postwar application of such methods to practical, and particularly military, problems was the RAND Corporation, which became the prototypical “think tank.” The organization was set up under an air force grant to develop operational research. It soon became an independent nonprofit corporation addressing defense issues and other aspects of public policy using advanced analytical techniques. RAND began by recruiting natural scientists and engineers who expected to deal with hardware.


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Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

., Princeton University, 1987. 9 See Robert Komer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1972). 10 Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America and the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), p. 2. 11 Sir Robert Thompson, “Squaring the Error,” Foreign Policy, April 1968. 12 Robert Thompson, Peace Is Not at Hand (New York: David McKay, 1974), p. 71. 13 Colby and McCargar, Lost Victory, p. 263. 14 Robert Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S-GVN Performance in Vietnam (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1972), pp. v–ix. 15 Thompson, Peace Is Not at Hand, p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 35. 17 Colby and McCargar, Lost Victory, p. 91. 18 Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, p. 113. 19 Ibid., p. 115. 20 Ibid., p. xi. 21 Nguyen Van Thieu, letter to President Richard Nixon, March 20, 1973, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Komer, Robert. Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S-GVN Performance in Vietnam. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1972. Komer, Robert. The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1972. Krepinevich, Andrew. The Army and Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. LeMoine, Ray, and Jeff Neumann, with Donovan Webster. Babylon by Bus. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Loeffler, Jane.

.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy), January 27, 2005. 10 Sergeant First Class Doug Sample, “Task Force Commander Says Insurgents ‘Desperate, Isolated,’ ” American Forces Press Service, March 9, 2004. 11 Daniel Gonzales, John Hollywood, et al., Networked Forces in Stability Operations: 101st Airborne Division, 3/2 and 1/25 Stryker Brigades in Northern Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2007). 12 Colonel Lloyd Sammons, interview by Plotkin. 13 Gonzales, Hollywood, et al., Networked Forces in Stability Operations. 14 U.S. General Accounting Office, “Defense Transformation: Army’s Evaluation of Stryker and M113A3 Infantry Carrier Vehicles Provided Sufficient Data for Statutorily Mandated Comparison,” publication GAO-03-671, May 2003, www.gao.gov/new.items/d03671.pdf. 15 “Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 45: Non-Governmental Organizations.” 16 Integrated Regional Information Network, Iraq: “NGO registration causes controversy,” January 13, 2004, www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?


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The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Law enforcement officials said the purpose may have been to build up a giant database of federal employees who could be targeted at a later time for blackmail or identity theft, potentially compromising dozens of government agencies.16 China, just like in previous cases, strenuously denied the allegations, but in mid-2017 the FBI arrested a Chinese national in connection with the case as he entered the US for a security conference.17 In the wake of the Unit 61398 indictments and the OPM hack, President Barack Obama hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House, where the two men signed a major bilateral agreement promising “that neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential information”.18 The deal was a big diplomatic win for Obama as he neared the end of his second term, one of the few concessions he scored from an increasingly assertive China despite his much vaunted ‘pivot to Asia’ and attempts to contain Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. The Rand Corporation, a US think tank closely linked to the government and defence industry, described the agreement as a “good first step”, but many were sceptical about how closely China would stick to the letter of the deal.19 Initial signs were good. Security agency FireEye said in a 2016 report that there had been a “notable decline” in the number of Chinese intrusions against companies in the US and twenty-five other countries.

Epstein, ‘Cat and mouse’, The Economist, 6 April 2013, https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21574629-how-china-makes-sure-its-internet-abides-rules-cat-and-mouse 9M. Chase and J. Mulvenon, You’ve Got Dissent! Chinese dissident use of the internet and Beijing’s counter-strategies, Santa Monica CA: Rand Corporation, 2002, p. 54, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1543.html 10K. Platt, ‘China hits at e-mail to curb dissent’, The Christian Science Monitor, 31 December 1998, https://www.csmonitor.com/1998/1231/123198.intl.intl.1.html 11C. Smith, ‘China sentences internet entrepreneur for trading e-mail list with dissidents’, The Wall Street Journal, 21 January 1999, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB916818019827637500 12Smith, ‘China sentences internet entrepreneur’. 13Barme and Ye, ‘The Great Firewall of China’. 14S.

Perez, ‘FBI arrests Chinese national connected to malware used in OPM data breach’, CNN, 24 August 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/24/politics/fbi-arrests-chinese-national-in-opm-data-breach/index.html 18‘President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the United States’, Office of the Press Secretary, White House, 25 September 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/25/fact-sheet-president-xi-jinpings-state-visit-united-states 19S. Harold, ‘The US–China cyber agreement: a good first step’, Rand Corporation, 1 August 2016, https://www.rand.org/blog/2016/08/the-us-china-cyber-agreement-a-good-first-step.html 20FireEye, Red Line Drawn: Chinese recalculates its use of cyberespionage, Milpitas CA: FireEye, 2016, https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/current-threats/pdfs/rpt-china-espionage.pdf 21S.


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Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

The experience of these two states is instructive, or should be, for anyone interested in facts about public benefits and immigrants, rather than emotion or populist rhetoric. In what its authors describe as “the most detailed analysis to date of immigrants and their use of health services,” a 2006 Rand Corporation study estimates that each year the United States spends “about $1.1 billion in federal, state, and local government funds on heath care for illegal immigrants aged 18-64.” That works out to $11 per household. Lou Dobbs informs his viewers that thousands of illegal alien lepers are scurrying across the Mexican border, infecting Americans and spiking health-care costs.

In a definitive longitudinal study in the 1990s, sociologists Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut found substantial second-generation progress among Latinos in Miami and Fort Lauderdale as well. Nationwide cross-generational studies show the same results. In 2006, economist James Smith of the RAND Corporation found that successive generations of Latinos have experienced significant improvements in wages relative both to their fathers and grandfathers and to the native whites with whom they compete for jobs. And Roger Waldinger and Renee Reichl, two UCLA social scientists, found that while first-generation Mexican men earned just half as much as white natives in 2000, the second generation had upped their earnings to three-quarters of their Anglo counterparts.

See overpopulation argument Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich) population growth Portes, Alejandro Poverty Powell, Benjamin Prager, Dennis Prescott, Edward productivity professionals, immigrant ProjectUSA Proposition protectionism public school system Puerto Rican immigrants Race Betterment Foundation Racism RAND Corporation Randolph, A. Philip Reagan, Ronald, ix Rector, Robert Reichl, Renee Republican restrictionist argument alienation of Hispanic voters and Bracero Program and Bush, George W. vs. - concession of Hispanic vote and gamble on immigration issue in congressional elections of and House immigration “field hearings” and Immigration Control and Reform Act of (ICRA) and Kennedy-McCain bill of and losses in congressional elections of and Proposition in California and talk radio and welfare and Resource reduction-population increase argument restaurant industry Ricardo, David Richardson, Bill Ridge, Tom Rios, Xavier Rockefeller Foundation Rodgers, T.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The converse, however, is not true." Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Despite setbacks and difficulties, the roboteers are moving forward. Recently they enjoyed a collective laugh at the expense of one of the leading critics of the robot-builders, a former RAND Corporation computer specialist named Hubert L. Dreyfus. Arguing that computers would never be able to match human intelligence, Dreyfus wrote a lengthy paper heaping vitriolic scorn on those who disagreed with him. Among other things, he declared, "No chess program can play even amateur chess." In context, he appeared to be saying that none ever would.

The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decisionmaking. Participants in a RAND Corporation study conducted several years ago were asked when this development might occur. Answers ranged from as soon as 1990 to "never." But the median date given was 2020—well within the lifetime of today's teen-agers. In the meantime, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis.

For generations, we have simply assumed that the proper place for education to occur is in a school. Yet if the new education is to simulate the society of tomorrow, should it take place in school at all? As levels of education rise, more and more parents are intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now delegated to the schools. Near Santa Monica, California, where the RAND Corporation has its headquarters, in the research belt around Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in such science cities as Oak Ridge, Los Alamos or Huntsville, many parents are clearly more capable of teaching certain subjects to their children than are the teachers in the local schools. With the move toward knowledge-based industry and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education system, offering them home instruction instead.


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

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

“the prisoner’s dilemma”: The prisoner’s dilemma was first conceived by Merrill Flood (of secretary problem and traveling salesman problem fame) and Melvin Drescher at RAND Corporation. In January 1950, they staged a game between UCLA’s Armen Alchian and RAND’s John D. Williams that had prisoner’s dilemma–like payoffs (Flood, “Some Experimental Games”). Princeton’s Albert Tucker was intrigued by this experiment, and in preparing to discuss it that May in a lecture at Stanford, he gave the problem its now famous prison formulation and its name. A detailed history of the origins of game theory and its development in the work of the RAND Corporation can be found in Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma. a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3: Roughgarden and Tardos, “How Bad Is Selfish Routing?”

If your favorite restaurant disappointed you the last time you ate there, that algorithm always says you should go to another place—even if it’s your last night in town. Still, Robbins’s initial work on the multi-armed bandit problem kicked off a substantial literature, and researchers made significant progress over the next few years. Richard Bellman, a mathematician at the RAND Corporation, found an exact solution to the problem for cases where we know in advance exactly how many options and opportunities we’ll have in total. As with the full-information secretary problem, Bellman’s trick was essentially to work backward, starting by imagining the final pull and considering which slot machine to choose given all the possible outcomes of the previous decisions.

Taylor and Gantt made scheduling an object of study, and they gave it visual and conceptual form. But they didn’t solve the fundamental problem of determining which schedules were best. The first hint that this problem even could be solved wouldn’t appear until several decades later, in a 1954 paper published by RAND Corporation mathematician Selmer Johnson. The scenario Johnson examined was bookbinding, where each book needs to be printed on one machine and then bound on another. But the most common instance of this two-machine setup is much closer to home: the laundry. When you wash your clothes, they have to pass through the washer and the dryer in sequence, and different loads will take different amounts of time in each.


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In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

Wohlstetter influenced the design and deployment of U.S. strategic forces through his research, developed the “second-strike” theory for deterring nuclear war, and originated “fail safe” and other methods for reducing the probability of accidental nuclear war.2 Wohlstetter served as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and, beginning in 1964, as a professor at the University of Chicago. He had a significant influence on Khalilzad and helped him make contacts in Washington. After leaving Chicago in 1979, Khalilzad moved to New York to become a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.3 The Brutal-Hearted Mountain Tribes During his studies with Wohlstetter, Khalilzad continued to monitor events in Afghanistan and, with his academic training completed, he began writing articles on the invasion using a pseudonym to protect members of his family who were still there.

The charms of the climate and scenery of Caubul have been celebrated by many Persian and Indian writers. The beauty and abundance of its flowers are proverbial, and its fruits are transported to the remotest parts of India.32 As Kabul crumbled during the fighting, Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, became perturbed at the waning U.S. interest in the region. “America has not helped Afghans and our friends in the region make the right decisions,” Khalilzad wrote in a scathing 1996 opinion piece in the Washington Post. “After the fall of the Soviet Union we stopped paying attention. This was a bad decision.

Tribal elders, known as maliks, were given special favors by the British in return for maintaining peace, keeping open important roads such as the Khyber Pass, and apprehending criminals. After partition in 1947, Pakistan continued this system of local autonomy and special favors. FIGURE 6.2 Pakistan’s Tribal Agencies Courtesy of RAND Corporation Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, laid the foundation for this independence in remarks to a tribal jirga in Peshawar in 1948: “Keeping in view your loyalty, help, assurance and declarations we ordered, as you know, the withdrawal of troops from Waziristan as a concrete and definite gesture on our part….


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Paul Edwards has pointed out that in addition to researchers at MIT and government officials, SAGE involved heavy contributions from IBM (which built some fifty-six SAGE computers for approximately $30 million each) and the RAND Corporation (which wrote much of the computers’ software). Edwards, Closed World, 101–2. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 16, 4. 54. Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, “Air Defense System: ADSEC Final Report,” October 24, 1950, MITRE Corporation Archives, Bedford, MA, 2 –3, quoted in Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 21. 55. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, 66. 56. As Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has noted, there were important exceptions to this trend. On May 11, 1959, for instance, Life magazine published a photo essay on the RAND Corporation. Although most of the images depicted “people doing something iconically scientific,” the final image showed a group of analysts in suits, reclining together on the floor, surrounded by “the mise en scene for the modern intellectual,” including “futuristic chairs and a Japanese paper kite dangling from the ceiling.”

GBN’s particular blending of countercultural and techno-cultural organizational styles depended on its roots in two organizations, the Stanford Research Institute and Royal Dutch/Shell. In the 1950s and 1960s, SRI and Shell represented the apogee of the military and the industrial worlds. SRI had been founded in 1947 to offer business consulting for the oil industry, but, along with the RAND Corporation, it very quickly became one of the two leading American think tanks for the U.S. military. Royal Dutch/Shell was a multinational behemoth devoted to extracting and refining oil. Yet, elements of both organizations had embraced countercultural practices. GBN cofounders Jay Ogilvy and Peter Schwartz, for instance, both worked at SRI just as the military-industrial consulting firm found itself coming to grips Networking the New Economy [ 185 ] with the counterculture around it.

They swallowed up the personal wisdom of senior officers rooted in combat experience in favor of intuitions arising from repeated trials of laboratory-staged simulations of future war.”18 Under conditions of nuclear uncertainty, analysts had to imagine the data to which they might apply the mathematical formulas, game theories, and computer technologies they had developed for earlier forms of combat. In short, they had to simulate the future. At the RAND Corporation and later, at his own Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn, perhaps the most well-known analyst of this period, began to present his simulations in the form of scenarios—narrative scripts of possible futures. These included his infamous scenarios for nuclear Armageddon, in which he tried to convince policymakers that nuclear warfare was a real possibility and one for which they should prepare, and his equally wellknown visions for America in the year 2000.19 On the one hand, Kahn’s work on nuclear war seemed to many to be the epitome of American technocratic hubris.


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Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In the case of irrational investor behavior, the errors can compound across individuals, replacing the wisdom of crowds with the madness of mobs. One manifestation of this madness is the violation of the Random Walk Hypothesis that Craig and I discovered. But there are many others. One of the first cracks in the orthodox view of market rationality comes from the high-stakes world of the Cold War. The RAND Corporation is a legendary—some would say notorious—think tank based in Santa Monica, California. RAND was founded in 1948 to maintain the close relationship between scientific research and military planning that had developed during the Second World War.7 As the nation’s leading technological research institute, RAND attracted “the best and the brightest” academics across a wide assortment of scientific fields (although the nearby California beaches didn’t hurt), and put them to work on the most pressing problems of the Cold War.

RAND was founded in 1948 to maintain the close relationship between scientific research and military planning that had developed during the Second World War.7 As the nation’s leading technological research institute, RAND attracted “the best and the brightest” academics across a wide assortment of scientific fields (although the nearby California beaches didn’t hurt), and put them to work on the most pressing problems of the Cold War. RAND went out of its way to include economists in its scientific mix: in fact, twenty-two Nobel Prize winners in economics have worked at the RAND Corporation over the years. One of the bright young economists at RAND was an unusual man named Daniel Ellsberg. A former company commander in the U.S. Marine Corps, Ellsberg volunteered for the Marines after graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, returning there for graduate work after his tour of duty.

As a Harvard fellow, Ellsberg gave a series of popular lectures at the Boston Public Library on political decision making in the uncertain conditions of the Cold War. Dramatically titled “The Art of Coercion,” and broadcast by WGBH radio, Ellsberg’s lectures cemented his reputation as a theorist and public intellectual in the making.8 Ellsberg’s mixture of the scholar and the soldier proved irresistible to the RAND Corporation, even though his publication history was thin and his doctorate unfinished. Ellsberg was hired by RAND in 1959, where he was soon immersed in the fine details of strategic nuclear war planning. In that hothouse environment, Ellsberg was a deft conversationalist who loved to kibitz in a seminar or over someone’s shoulder, but Ellsberg’s frustrated colleagues urged him to write up his results in academic style.


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You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

“The achievement of a satellite craft by the United States would inflame the imagination of mankind and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb.”25 Although the study focused on the scientific and technological challenges of creating such a satellite rather than its military applications, it briefly mentioned the use of satellites as surveillance platforms for measuring the accuracy of bombing raids and tracking weather conditions over enemy targets. In 1951 the now-independent think tank RAND Corporation went further, in a report arguing that it should be possible to build a satellite with a television camera that could soar over the Soviet Union, broadcasting images back to the United States. The quality of the images would not be terribly impressive. At best the TV technology of the time would be able to detect only objects two hundred feet or larger in size.

The Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in October 1957 cured Eisenhower of his complacency. It also eased his concerns about international law. The Soviets had gone first; the way was clear. Within days of Sputnik’s launch, Eisenhower and Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles were talking about how to get some spy satellites aloft.28 By this time the RAND Corporation had soured on its plan to broadcast the images via television. They had concluded that the best equipment that could be squeezed onto a satellite would produce images too poor to be of any use. Yet there was another way—complex and technically demanding, but possible. The satellite could use a specialized type of film, capable of handling the temperature extremes and radiation found in space.

For example, in 1967 a Corona satellite caught images of Soviet troops massing on the border of Czechoslovakia. By the time the film had been returned to earth, developed, analyzed, and provided to the Johnson administration, the Russians had already invaded.31 What the United States needed was something like the RAND Corporation’s original vision—a satellite that captured images electronically and broadcast them directly to earth. It was not until 1976 that such a satellite could be created, thanks to a technical breakthrough that was destined to capture a Nobel Prize and to restructure an entire global industry. In 1969 a pair of scientists at Bell Labs, William Boyle and George Smith, were working on electronic memory devices for computers.


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

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

Wolfowitz's alleged "fantasy" Perhaps the low point for the Wolfowitz view was a biting article in Foreign Affairs magazine that appeared during winter 1998-99. Siding with Zinni, it mocked 24 FIASCO the idea of having Iraqi exiles seize territory, supported by U.S. airpower. Essentially, the three authors, each from a mainstream national security institution— the Rand Corporation, the National Defense University, and the Council on Foreign Relations—argued that only people who know nothing about military affairs could think that a small force of Iraqi rebels could topple Saddam easily. The article cited a few proponents of what it disparaged as the "Rollback Fantasy," but singled out Wolfowitz, quoting him disapprovingly, and then stated that he was wrong, and that, in fact, "for the United States to try moving from containment to rollback in Iraq would be a terrible mistake that could easily lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths."

"We said, 'Oh, shit,' did a mission analysis, and focused on humanitarian issues," such as minimizing the displacement of people, stockpiling food to stave off famine, and protecting the infrastructure of the oilfields,he said. The decision to place the Defense Department—whether at the Pentagon or at the Central Command headquarters—in charge of postwar Iraq may have doomed the American effort from the start. As a subsequent Rand Corporation study put it, "Overall, this approach worked poorly, because the Defense Depart- THE RUN-UP 79 ment lacked the experience, expertise, funding authority, local knowledge, and established contacts with other potential organizations needed to establish, staff, support and oversee a large multiagency civilian mission."

THE SURPRISE 335 Popaditch also was on his way to a new life: He would receive the Silver Star for his actions, be medically retired from the Corps, and then enroll in college with the ambition of becoming a high school teacher. A two-front war As Fallujah ground on in early April 2004, and the fighting spread to nearby Ramadi, the broad middle of Iraq, from Mosul in the north to Baghdad to Najaf in the south-central area, began to spin out of control. On April 9, 2004, Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corporation terrorism expert who had been consulting at the CPA, was leaving the country at the end of a four-week visit. "We had three incidents on the way to Baghdad's airport, and then heard a huge explosion while we were there—it was the attack on the convoy that got Thomas Hammill." Hammill was a truck driver taken captive in one of the worst incidents involving contractors of the entire war.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th edn. (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). For Western calculations during the Cold War, see Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets, eds, Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, RAND Corporation report R-371-PR (Santa Monica CA, October 1963); Franklyn D. Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1962). As a useful retrospective, see Angus Maddison, ‘Measuring the Performance of a Communist Command Economy: An Assessment of the CIA Estimates for the USSR’, Review of Income and Wealth vol. 44 no. 3 (September 1998), pp. 307–23.

: see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’. 5 New cybernetics institutes and departments had sprung up: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. 6 But Nemchinov himself was no longer in charge: for a sharp-tongued account of his sudden loss of standing, and the appointment of Academician Fedorenko to TSEMI instead, see Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR. Trying to read the situation from California eight years later, Simon Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research: A Preliminary Study of Organisations and Personalities, RAND Corporation report R-909-ARPA (Santa Monica CA, December 1971), pp. 86–7, remarked that Fedorenko seemed to be ‘without observable experience in computer technology or automation’, and wondered whether this was why TSEMI ‘appears to have gradually changed from an economics laboratory, engaged in the realization of a preconceived theoretical system of ideas, into an operational support agency for the Gosplan’.

Stuart, Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th edn. (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). For Western calculations during the Cold War, see Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets, eds, Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, RAND Corporation report R-371-PR (Santa Monica CA, October 1963); Franklyn D. Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1962). As a useful retrospective, see Angus Maddison, ‘Measuring the Performance of a Communist Command Economy: An Assessment of the CIA Estimates for the USSR’, Review of Income and Wealth vol. 44 no. 3 (September 1998), pp. 307–23.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

China was particularly alarmed, Steinbruner and Lewis write, by a 1998 long-range planning document of the US Space Command outlining a new concept of “global engagement,” including “space-based strike capabilities” that would allow the US to attack any country and to “deny similar capability to any other countries,” another Clinton-era precursor to the National Security Strategy of September 2002. The UN Conference on Disarmament has been deadlocked since 1998 by China’s insistence on maintaining the use of space for peaceful means and Washington’s refusal to agree, alienating many allies and creating conditions for confrontation.8 A May 2003 Rand Corporation study concludes that “the potential for an accidental or unauthorized nuclear missile launch in Russia or the United States has grown over the past decade despite warmer U.S.-Russian relations.” Neglecting these risks “could produce possibly the greatest disaster in modern history, and possibly in world history,” said former senator Sam Nunn, cochairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the report.

EP-3 planes near China,” such as the one shot down in early 2001, engendering a mini-crisis, “are not just for passive surveillance; the aircraft also collect information used to develop nuclear war plans.”25 China’s interpretation of BMD is shared by US strategic analysts, in virtually the same words: BMD “is not simply a shield but an enabler of U.S. action,” a Rand Corporation study observed. Others agree. BMD “will facilitate the more effective application of U.S. military power abroad,” Andrew Bacevich writes in the conservative National Interest: “by insulating the homeland from reprisal—albeit in a limited way—missile defense will underwrite the capacity and willingness of the United States to ‘shape’ the environment elsewhere.”

David Sanger, New York Times, 2 September 2001. Sanger, New York Times, 5 September 2001. Jane Perlez, New York Times, 2 September 2001. Clinton, see William Broad, New York Times, 1 May 2000. 8. John Steinbruner and Jeffrey Lewis, Daedalus, fall 2002. 9. David Ruppe, Global Security Newswire, 22 May 2003. Rand Corporation, Beyond the Nuclear Shadow, May 2003. Paul Webster, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July–August 2003. 10. Judith Miller, New York Times, 20 January 2003. Nunn-Lugar initiative, see note 5. 11. Krepon, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January–February 2003. 12. Michael Gordon, Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 11 March 2002.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

India: An Investor’s Guide to the Next Economic Superpower. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia), 2006, 321 pp. China and India, 2025: A Comparative Assessment. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 22 August 2011. Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Estimates of Undiscovered Oil and Gas North of the Arctic Circle. Menlo Park, CA: U.S. Geological Service, 2008. Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences and Strategies for Deterrence. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, October 2011. Corruption Perceptions Index 2011. Berlin: Transparency International, 26 October 2011. Cunningham, Fiona, and Rory Medcalf. The Dangers of Denial: Nuclear Weapons in China-India Relations.

China has dismissed the Japanese position, in much the same way as it refuses to acknowledge various territorial claims further south in the oil-rich South China Sea by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Taiwan. These waters, it constantly reminds its neighbours, always have been and always will be Chinese. A recent study prepared for the U.S. Army by the RAND Corporation on possible regional conflicts involving China found that “an ongoing territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and overlapping claims to exclusive economic zones in the East China Sea are persistent irritants to the (China-Japan) relationship. Conflict could arise from an at-sea incident in the East China Sea, or from the escalation of a war of words amplified by some sort of maritime encounter.”3 Just such an incident happened in September 2010, when Japanese authorities arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing trawler after his vessel rammed a Japanese coastguard ship near the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

Japanese Ministry of Defense, 2011 White Paper, Tokyo, 2 August 2011. 2. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu, Beijing, 3 August 2011, reacting to Japan’s Defense White Paper. 3. James Dobbins, David Gompert, David Shlapak, Andrew Scobell, Occasional Paper, Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences, and Strategies for Deterrence, (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation), October 2011. 4. Ross Garnaut, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989), p. 36. 5. Ibid., p. 13. 6. Ibid., p. 36. 7. HSBC, “The World in 2050,” Hong Kong, January 2011. 8. Goldman Sachs, “BRICs and Beyond,” 23 November 2007. 9.


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The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

In a deliberate and also largely covert effort to resist the possibility of communist/Marxist encroachment on the U.S. conceptual establishment (which points at something far broader than institutional philosophy), individuals, government entities including the military and intelligence bodies (De Landa 1991), and private foundations like the RAND Corporation, promoted values like objectivity and rationalism over against subjectivity, collectivity, and shared social responsibility. Dovetailing precisely with the emerging availability of computing machinery in universities and with the waning productivity of the first wave of computing theorists (Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, et. al.), Chomsky offered the academy at least two attractive sets of theses that, while framed in terms of a profoundly new way of understanding the world, in fact harkened back to some of the most deeply entrenched views in the Western intellectual apparatus.

This doctrine, as Strauss’s approving invocation of Hobbes shows, has played a curious and in some ways determinative role in 20th-century political and intellectual practice. In several recent books (esp. Amadae 2003, Edwards 1996, and McCumber 2001) researchers have shown the deliberate creation of rationalist doctrines in the mid-20th century by U.S. think tanks, particularly the RAND corporation, such that this thought appears to be the spontaneous work of university academics but actually forms part of a coordinated plan to shape U.S. democratic practice. Of course, using rationalism as a basis for democracy makes a great deal of sense on the surface; but the deeper connections between the concept of natural right and the need for an absolute sovereign must be played down to make the theory palatable.

It is thus no accident that proponents of rationalism are often proponents of technological progressivism, perhaps most classically in computer history in the figure of Leibniz himself, who continually worked to build machines that would in some way or another perform the actions of thought for human beings. Amadae (2003) points to the concomitant emphasis on rationality and technology in the rational choice theorists, not least as expressed in the writings of the RAND corporation, historically a major proponent of both in contemporary U.S. thought. As Amadae puts it, “the mathematical formalism structuring rational choice theory is impelled by the same academy-wide momentum propelling an increased emphasis on formal models as an indication of scientific standing” (158), also pointing to the influence of one of the founders of modern computing, John von Neumann, on rational choice doctrine (via his writings on game theory, von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944).


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The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

., MIT Cambridge, MA Rothstein, Jerome 21 East Bergen Place Red Bank, NJ Sayre, David IBM Corporation 590 Madison Avenue New York, NY Schorr-Kon, J. J. C-380 Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Lexington, MA Shapley, L. Rand Corporation 1700 Main Street Santa Monica, CA Schutzenberger, M. P. R.L.E., MIT Cambridge, MA Selfridge, O. G. Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Lexington, MA Shannon, C. E. R.L.E., MIT Cambridge, MA Shapiro, Norman Rand Corporation 1700 Main Street Santa Monica, CA Simon, Herbert A. Department of Industrial Administration Carnegie Institute of Technology Pittsburgh, PA Solomonoff, Raymond J. Technical Research Group 17 Union Square West New York, NY Steele, J.

That second half, more formally, is called “scenario planning” and develops scenarios about the future using a wide variety of data across numerous sources: statistics, patent filings, academic and archival research, policy briefings, conference papers, structured interviews with lots of people, and even critical design and speculative fiction. Scenario planning originated at the start of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Herman Kahn, a futurist at the RAND Corporation, was given the job of researching nuclear warfare, and he knew that raw data alone wouldn’t provide enough context for military leaders. So instead, he created something new, which he called “scenarios.” They would fill in the descriptive detail and narration needed to help those in charge of creating military strategy understand the plausible outcomes—that is, what could happen if a certain set of actions were taken.

In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2016), 308–318. New York: ACM Press, 2016. Abstract, last revised October 24, 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00133. Ablon, L., and A. Bogart. Zero Days, Thousands of Nights: The Life and Times of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities and Their Exploits. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1751.html. Adams, S. S., et al. “Mapping the Landscape of Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence.” AI Magazine 33, no. 1 (2012). Agar, N. “Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!” Journal of Evolution and Technology 22 no. 1 (November 2011): 23–26. https://jetpress.org/v22/agar.htm.


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The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

Sharpe began to ponder the broader implications of Markowitz’s big idea regarding the optimal risk–reward trade-off in the new Modern Portfolio Theory. With a Master’s degree in economics in hand, Sharpe took a job with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, just a few minutes’ drive from UCLA. This job opportunity permitted him to become immersed in an intellectually stimulating environment while he also pursued a PhD at UCLA under the continued mentorship of Professor Alchian. It also allowed him to cross paths with Harry Markowitz himself. The RAND Corporation While at RAND, Sharpe had the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the greatest minds ever assembled to address the sciences, mathematics, and social sciences demanded in the Cold War-immersed USA.

Markowitz’s model is most profound if we accept the assumptions that a security can be priced based on its mean historic return and its Expected return Capital allocation line Efficient portfolio frontier Risk-free return Risk Figure 10.1 The capital allocation line 64 The Rise of the Quants Expected return High risk tolerance Capital allocation line Efficient portfolio frontier Low risk tolerance Risk-free return Risk Figure 10.2 Various choices of risk and return along the capital allocation line variance or standard deviation. However, it also acted as a springboard to an equally elegant interpretation from one of Markowitz’s associates, William Forsyth Sharpe. The Sharpe insight By the time William Forsyth Sharpe introduced himself to Markowitz in 1960 at the RAND Corporation, at the behest of a mentor, Fred Weston at UCLA, Modern Portfolio Theory was still a relatively theoretical insight. Computational challenges prevented a powerful theoretical tool from making the leap from academia into practice. Serendipity was repeated when, following a chance meeting in the waiting room of Jacob Marschak a decade earlier that gave rise to Modern Portfolio Theory, the speculative knock on the office door of Markowitz changed Sharpe’s academic fortunes and would establish a new theory as the foundational tool of securities pricing.


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What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The goal of the study was to discover which device would allow a user to get to a given point on the screen most quickly as well as repeatedly with the fewest errors. English was anxiously looking for a project to get into, and so Engelbart told him to begin organizing pointer experiments. Other kinds of pointing devices were already in use, including light pens, trackballs, and tablets with styli. The RAND Corporation had invented the latter, and though Engelbart hoped for a while that he could persuade them to lend him one for their research, the company told him it didn’t have any available. The actual idea of a rolling, handheld pointing device came to Engelbart one day when he was at a computer-graphics conference.

Since computers did things at lightning speed, and since in the days before graphical displays most user interaction with the machine consisted of merely entering text and data at a keyboard, the vast majority of the computer’s time was being wasted while it waited for user input. To be sure, there had been an earlier time-sharing machine invented at the RAND Corporation known as JOSS, but it consisted of lights on top of terminals—the computer’s time was allocated to the terminal whose light was switched on at the moment! In the late 1950s, however, McCarthy’s notion was prescient and similar to Doug Engelbart’s vision for the Augmentation machine. However, they remained fundamentally different concepts.

During his travels, Kay also visited the nation’s best computer-science research centers. He spent time in Menlo Park with the Augment Group, where Bill English took him under his wing and introduced him to many of Engelbart’s best young researchers. He traveled to MIT, where he visited with Papert. He traveled to the RAND Corporation and learned about a system called GRAIL that made it possible for a computer to respond directly to human gestures. He was already familiar with the ARPAnet ideas that would ultimately lead to today’s Internet. Moreover, in Hawaii, ARPA-funded experimenters were playing with the idea of creating wireless networks, and so it made sense that his notebook-sized Flex machine would have a wireless connection to the outside world as well.


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

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

Ten years later, there were 127 charter schools, nearly half in Philadelphia. The city adopted what is known as the “diverse provider model,” in which district schools compete with charter schools and privately managed schools (operating under contract to the district and not entirely free of districtwide mandates). Researchers from the RAND Corporation noted that achievement had improved in Philadelphia, but “with so many different interventions under way simultaneously in Philadelphia, there is no way to determine exactly which components of the reform plan are responsible for the improvement.” The RAND team concluded in 2008 that students in charter schools made gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the gains they experienced while attending traditional public schools.

Department of Education, 2007), 50, 58. 29 Sam Dillon, “Collapse of 60 Charter Schools Leaves Californians Scrambling,” New York Times, September 17, 2004. 30 Kristen A. Graham, “SRC Told Firms Need New Role,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 11, 2009; Brian Gill et al., State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2007), 39-41; Ron Zimmer et al., “Evaluating the Performance of Philadelphia’s Charter Schools,” Working Paper, RAND Education, Mathematica Policy Research, and Research for Action, 2008, iii. See also Kristen A. Graham, “Study: District-Run Phila. Schools Top Manager-Run Ones,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 9, 2009. 31 Martha Woodall, “Charter Schools’ Problems Surfacing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 29, 2008; Dan Hardy, “Charter School Appeals to Block Release of Records,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 11, 2009. 32 Buckley and Schneider, Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?

Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006), iii-v. 42 Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data (New York: National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2006), 2-5, 40. See also Ron Zimmer et al., Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009). 43 Erik W. Robelen, “NAEP Gap Continuing for Charters: Sector’s Scores Lag in Three Out of Four Main Categories,” Education Week, May 21, 2008, 1, 14. 44 Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Thomas Kane, et al., Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools (Boston: The Boston Foundation, 2009), 39; Boston Globe, “Top-Scoring Schools on the 10th Grade MCAS,” 2008, www.boston.com/news/special/education/mcas/scores08/10th_top_schools.htm; Jennifer Jennings, “The Boston Pilot/Charter School Study: Some Good News, and Some Cautions,” Eduwonkette blog, January 7, 2009, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/2009/01/the_boston_pilotcharter_school.html. 45 Vaznis, “Charter Schools Lag in Serving the Neediest.” 46 Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2009); Lesli A.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

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

These are the kind of rules that don’t fit real life with predictive precision, but that do attract economists, because they map onto the behavior of observable phenomena like markets, arms races, cartels, and traffic. After World War II, von Neumann joined other mathematicians and economists to brainstorm game theory at a mundane building that still houses the same institution near the Santa Monica beach. The RAND Corporation was the first think tank, where intellectuals with security clearances thought about the unthinkable, as RANDite Herman Kahn referred to the craft of thermonuclear war strategy.31 Because the arms race seemed to be closely related to the kind of bluff and counter-bluff described by game theory, the new field became popular among the first nuclear war strategists.

In addition to the organizers’ all-points network, protest communications were leavened with individual protesters using cell phones, direct transmissions from roving independent media feeding directly onto the Internet, personal computers with wireless modems broadcasting live video, and a variety of other networked communications. Floating above the tear gas was a pulsing infosphere of enormous bandwidth, reaching around the planet via the Internet.18 From Seattle to Manila, the first “netwars” have already broken out. The term “netwar” was coined by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two analysts for the RAND corporation (birthplace of game theory and experimental economics), who noticed that the same combination of social networks, sophisticated communication technologies, and decentralized organizational structure was surfacing as an effective force in very different kinds of political conflict: Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists—ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side—use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age.

Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973). 31. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 32. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ADiscourse on Inequality (London: Penguin, 1984). 33. Merrill M. Flood, “Some Experimental Games,” Research Memorandum RM789 (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1952). 34. A. W. Tucker, “On Jargon: The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” UMAP Journal 1 (1950): 101. 35. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 36. Ibid., 12. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Ibid., viiiix. 39. Ibid., 21. 40. R. L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 3537. 41.


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The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

A motive that would fundamentally affect all the networks that followed, and perhaps alter society forever. Ironically, this fantastic device for peaceful rambunctiousness arose out of bloody-minded contemplations, then called “thinking about the unthinkable.” Pondering what to do during and after a nuclear war. Back in 1964, Pentagon officials asked the Rand Corporation to imagine a transcontinental communication system that might stand a chance of surviving even an atomic cataclysm. Since every major telephone, telegraph, and radio junction would surely be targeted, generals were desperate for some way to coordinate with government, industry, and troops in the field, even after a first strike against U.S. territory.

In the 1960s and 1970s there was passionate interest in “Delphi polling,” which involved asking a large number of knowledgable people about the likelihood of certain future events. The average of their opinions was thought for a while to have some unbiased validity, when in fact it simply reflected the notions that were most fashionable at the time. In one infamous example, the renowned Rand Corporation released a set of predictions that included reliable long-range weather forecasting and mind control by 1975; manipulation of weather, controlled fusion, and electronic organs for humans by 1985; and sea floor mines, gene correction, and intelligent robots by 1990. Modern institutions of government and private capital are deeply concerned over the murkiness of their projections.

Recognize that doing all these things properly will involve letting go of hierarchical power, without necessarily giving up the advantages of a clearly defined modern state. This is hard to do, but the neo-West already has a myriad precedents, as well as an educated population that is more than willing to turn the devolution of skill and authority into a national resource. This final theme arises in a recent book about netwar and cyberwar, edited by Rand Corporation researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt: In Athenaʼs Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, a collection of papers that explores many of the new and perilous types of confrontation that we touched upon briefly here. Most of the contributing authors appear to agree on one conclusion: the information revolution favors and strengthens networked forms of organization, while making life difficult for hierarchical forms.


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Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

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

“About half (51 percent) of employed Americans say they get a sense of identity from their job, while the other half (47 percent) say their job is just what they do for a living.”12 Education mattered in this study: 77 percent of workers with a postgraduate degree and 60 percent of those with a college degree say their job gives them a sense of identity, while only 38 percent of those who have a high school diploma or less say the same.13 The type of employment also matters. Over 60 percent of those in government jobs, self-employment, or nonprofit work report deriving identity from work, compared with 42 percent in the private sector.14 The RAND Corporation found somewhat more positive outcomes than other studies. It asked Americans ages twenty-one to seventy-five if their work provides them with the “satisfaction of work well done,” a “feeling of doing useful work,” a “sense of personal accomplishment,” the ability to “make positive impact on community/society,” “opportunities to fully use talents,” and “goals to aspire to.”

The “summer slide” or summer “enrichment gap” or “Harry Potter divide”84 shows that much of the gap between poor and wealthier students gets even worse in the summer, when students of more means are much more likely to participate in enriching activities including camps, learning programs, and even reading Harry Potter books. Trials by the Wallace Foundation and RAND Corporation found that low-income students who consistently attended free, voluntary five- or six-week summer programs received significant reading and math gains compared with students who applied for the programs but were not accepted.85 PAVING THE ROAD TO COLLEGE Many, like me, realize only later in life the gift we inherited at birth of a high—almost assumed—expectation of going to college, and a tremendous support system that served as a magnet to keep us on track.

“How Americans View Their Jobs,” Pew Research Center, October 6, 2016, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/. 13. “How Americans View Their Jobs.” 14. “How Americans View Their Jobs.” 15. Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Till von Wachter, and Jeffrey B. Wenger, Working Conditions in the United States: Results of the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017), 46. 16. Michaelson et al., “Meaningful Work,” 80. 17. Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden, “What Makes Work Meaningful—or Meaningless,” MIT Sloane Management Review (2016), accessed November 8, 2019, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-makes-work-meaningful-or-meaningless/. 18.


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

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

One, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, founded in Colorado Springs in 1932 by businessman and economist Alfred Cowles, aimed to link economic theory more closely to math and statistics in an effort to model the economy. Cowles was inspired by the Great Depression and driven by the desire to bring scientific rigor to the study of the economy. The foundation’s founding motto was “Science is Measurement.”11 The second, the RAND Corporation, first established as a joint project by the Douglas Aircraft Company and the US Department of War in 1945, used game theory to analyze the United States’s geopolitical position relative to the Soviet Union. Game theory—a mathematical approach to analyzing strategic choices—emerged from the work of Princeton mathematician John von Neumann in the 1930s, who collaborated with his economist colleague Oskar Morgenstern to write Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (published in 1944), which launched the field.

To grasp the basic idea behind the way students in Boston, Paris, and Shanghai are matched to schools, doctors get their residencies, and graduates of the Air Force Academy are assigned to postings, it’s easiest to go back to the middle-school gym to figure out a better way of assigning girls and boys to their first dance.2 Lloyd Shapley, Matchmaker In 1962, the mathematician Lloyd Shapley was working at the RAND Corporation (which, you may recall from Chapter 2, along with the Cowles Foundation, helped spur the post–World War II mathematization of economics). Shapley preferred to spend his time thinking about problems like matching girls and boys at the dance rather than the strategic intricacies of the Cold War.

Woods store, 1–2 person’s life, value of, 166–167 philanthropic commitments, 72–75 Pillow Pets, 128–129 platforms babysitting, 121 Champagne fairs as, 126–128 competition, 124–126 credit card, 113–116 economics of, 107–112 greed in, 128–129 mobile market, 116 multisided, 14 rules for, 112–117 video game system, 116 See also economics Podolny, Joel, 39, 43 poker, bluffing in, 26 See also chess; Cold War Pontiff, Jeffrey, 11–12 posting system, 79–81, 100–101 POW camps, 7–13, 175–177 power law distributions, 22 practice, market, 14–15 Prendergast, Canice, 154–160 “Price and Advertising Signals of Product Quality” (Milgrom and Roberts), 70–71 price discovery, 83 priceless, when something is, 132–133 prisoners’ dilemma game, 178–179 property, expected value of, 56 Radford, R. A., 7–10, 22–23 Ranau Japanese POW camp, 10–11 RAND Corporation, 25, 27, 134–136 reality-based economic modeling, 35–37, 49–51, 141 See also lemon markets theory recessions, 36, 48, 75 Roberts, John, 66, 70–71 Ross, Lee, 177–179 Roth, Al, 140, 141, 163–165 rush, fraternity/sorority, 140 Rutland, VT, 1 Rysman, Marc, 109 Samuelson, Paul, 28–29, 44 Samuelson, William, 55–57 San Fernando Valley gangs, 61–62 San Fers gang, 61–62 Sandakan camp, Borneo, 10–11 Sauget, IL, 168–169 scams internet, 52–55 money-back, 69–70 Scarf, Herbert, 163–164 school choice, in Sweden, 151–152 school to student matching, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 Schultz, Theodore, 35 Schumpeter, Joseph, 24, 49–50 Scottish auctions, 82 Sears, 115–116 second-bid auction, 81–82 second-price sealed-bid auctions, 87–89 “Selection process starts with choices, ends with luck” (article), 146 self-destructive behaviors, signaling theory and, 67–68 selfish, markets making us, 177–179 seller misrepresentation, 52–55 sellers, knowing more than buyers, 41, 44–55 Seven Minute Abs, 172 Shakin’ Cat Midgets gang, 61 Shapley, Lloyd, 134–136, 137–138, 163–164 Shapley-Gale algorithm, 137–140 Shi, Peng, 148 Shleifer, Andrei, 180–181 shopping malls, as two-sided markets, 122–123 Shoup, Carl, 85 sick organizations, 142–143 signaling model applications of, 66–68 commitment signs, 62–66 competitive signaling, 69–71 integrity, 71–75 Silicon Valley, market friction and, 169–173 Skoll, Jeff, 39–40, 43, 51 Smith, Adam, 21 Snider, James, 42 social efficiency, auctions, 89 social well-being, assessing, 22 Solow, Robert, 35 Solow model, 35 Sönmez, Tayfun, 144 Sony’s Blu-ray format war, 125–126 sorority rush, 140 spectrum auction theory, 102–103 Spence, Michael, 62–66 Stack, Charles, 42–43 Stalag VII-A POW camp market, 5–6, 7–10, 13 stamp collecting, 82–84 Stiglitz, Joseph, 35–36, 76, 182 strategy proofness mechanism, 145 student to school matching, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 Summers, Larry, 166–167 Super Bowl advertising, 70–71 supply and demand, 96 survival rates, of Japanese vs.


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Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

As with the bandwagon effect, people who are focused on the “halo” don’t look at actual data—rather, they gravitate toward something that has a positive sheen to it. Again, this isn’t a failure of will; this is the nature of people. Fighting it head-on is silly—it’s like fighting gravity. But you can be clever about it. In the 1950s, the Rand Corporation was asked to answer some questions—the terrifying kind that got bandied about during the Cold War. Invoking in their terminology the Oracle of Delphi, the priestess who could predict the future, Norman Dalkey and Olaf Helmer published in 1963 a blandly titled paper, “An Experimental Application of the Delphi Method to the Use of Experts,” with the helpful reference “Memorandum RM-727/1-Abridged.”

And estimates on small pieces of the project. If people are more than three cards apart, then the high and the low cards talk about why they think what they do. Then everyone does another round of Planning Poker. Otherwise they just average the estimates, which will approximate the numbers that the statisticians at the Rand Corporation came up with. Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re painting the interior of a house, and you need to estimate how long it will take to paint the living room, the kitchen, and two bedrooms. And you’re doing this with a team that you’ve painted rooms with before. So first the two bedrooms: everyone estimates those at a three.

., 7.1 Omaha Beach OODA loop, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185, 8.2, 8.3 OpenView Venture Partners, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1, 8.1 Org Chart Orient, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 output, as measurable standard Overburden Palm paper airplanes, PDCA cycle in making Pashler, Harold passivity, elimination of PatientKeeper, 7.1, 7.2 patterns: negative in Scrum PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 7.1 peer review “Perils of Obedience, The” (Milgram) Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) personal growth Petraeus, David Pets.com, 8.1 planning, 1.1, 6.1 Waterfall, see Waterfall method weddings, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Planning Poker, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1 Porath, Christine Portal poverty, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 prioritization, 1.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1 process, happiness in product attributes, 172 Product Backlog, see Backlog product development: incremental value in productivity happiness and hours worked and, 5.1, 103, 8.1 Scrum and Product Marketing Product Owner, 2.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2 essential characteristics of feedback and, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 incremental value and as internal customer product vision, 8.1, 172, 8.2 Backlog and profit margins Progress Out of Poverty Index projects, prioritizing between, 93 ProPublica, purpose, 2.1, 7.1 Putnam, Lawrence Quattro Pro for Windows Rand Corporation, 6.1, 6.2 rat race Reasonableness, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 relative size, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 releases, incremental, see incremental development and delivery renovations, time frame for Rethink Robotics retrospective revenue, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 in venture capital review rituals re-work RF-4C Phantom reconnaisance jet rhythm, 5.1, 5.2 risk robots, 2.1, 4.1, 9.1 rockets Rodner, Don Rogers Commission Roomba Roosevelt, Theodore rugby as analogy New Zealand All Blacks team in Rustenburg, Eelco Said, Khaled Salesforce.com, 1.1, 3.1 Agile practices at sales teams Sanbonmatsu, David Schwaber, Ken Scrum Backlog as power of freedom and rules in and Heathcare.gov, 1.1 implementing in Japan, 2.1 managers’ difficulty with and Medco, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 at NPR at OpenView origins at Easel, 2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 origins in software development of positive behavior rewarded in productivity increases with reaching greatness with at Salesforce.com, 3.1 system examined and fixed in team size in time conceptualized in transparency in at Valve workweek and, 103 Scrum board, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, app.1 in education “SCRUM Development Process” (Sutherland and Schwaber) Scrum Master, 3.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, app.1, app.2, app.3 “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as Organizational Innovation” (Lamb and Munsing) self-control, decision making and Senate Judiciary Committee set-based concurrent engineering Shook, John short cycles short term memory, retention in Shu Ha Ri, 2.1, 9.1 single-tasking sizing, relative, 6.1, 6.2 skills small teams, superiority of, 3.1, 3.2 SMART government Smithsonian Institution soccer social motivation software, fixing bugs in software development, 2.1, 3.1 Sony Soviet Union space travel, private specialization, communication damaged by, 4.1, 4.2 Special Operations Forces (SOF), U.S.


pages: 241 words: 75,516

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, attribution theory, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, peak-end rule, positional goods, price anchoring, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, search costs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

If you want to experience this problem for yourself, pick some prescription drug that is now being marketed directly to you, then do a web search to find out what you can about the drug that goes beyond what the ads tell you. I just tried it for Prilosec, one of the largest-selling prescription medications in existence, which is heavily advertised by its manufacturer. I got more than 20,000 hits! And there is good evidence that the absence of filters on the Internet can lead people astray. The RAND Corporation recently conducted an assessment of the quality of web sites providing medical information and found that “with rare exceptions, they’re all doing an equally poor job.” Important information was omitted, and sometimes the information presented was misleading or inaccurate. Moreover, surveys indicate that these web sites actually influence the health-related decisions of 70 percent of the people who consult them.

Twitchell, Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). The quote is on p. 53. Yet several studies R.B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968, 9 (part 2), 1–27. The Internet can On rating the raters one finds on the Internet, see the Nadel article. The RAND Corporation On the accuracy of medical web sites, see T. Pugh, “Low Marks for Medical Web Sites,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 2001, p. A3. For a thorough discussion of strategies for information seeking and decision making in the modern, information-laden world, see J.W. Payne, J.R. Bettman, and E.J.

See surveys Porter, Roy positional competition positional goods positive liberty postdecision regret posters PPOs prescription drugs presumptions Prilosec Princeton University prison population product placement, in movies prospect theory comparisons and description of endowment effect and neutral point and sunk costs and psychological accounting public television, ads on Putnam, Robert Q Quarterlife Crisis R racial identification RAND Corporation Real Simple, reasoning, satisfaction and reference prices regret anticipated aversion of counterfactuals and effects of maximizing and mitigation of near misses and omission bias and postdecision Regret Scale responsibility and satisfaction and sunk costs and upside to see also trade-offs Regret (Landman) religion remembered utility responsibility, regret and restaurants retirement plans reversible decisions risk, risk assessment: loss and gain preferences and and most frequent causes of death prospect theory and see also decision-making risk aversion risk seeking romantic relationships, reasoning and routines rules, as means of eliminating choice “rules of the game,” S salience definition of omission bias and perception and satisfaction: misprediction of reasoning and regret and “three gap” assessment and see also happiness satisfaction treadmill Satisfaction with Life Scale satisficers definition of as maximizers maximizers compared with social comparison and trade-offs and scarcity Scitovsky, Tibor Seabrook, John second-order decisions security, primary importance of self-blame self-determination self-esteem, in comparison with others self-respect, freedom and Seligman, Martin Sen, Amartya shopping: comparison framing and reference prices and by maximizers by satisficers time vs. pleasure and Silent World of Doctor and Patient, The (Katz) Simon, Herbert simplicity Sipress, David sitcoms, decreasing length of Smaller, Barbara Smeloff, Edward A.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. National Defense Research Institute, RAND Corporation. www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG135.pdf. 1026. Ishmael W. 2003. A soft underbelly. Beef, July 1, p. 11. beef-mag.com/mag/beef_soft_underbelly/index.html. 1027. Chalk P. 2004. Hitting America’s soft underbelly: the potential threat of deliberate biological attacks against the U.S. agricultural and food industry. Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. National Defense Research Institute, RAND Corporation. www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG135.pdf. 1028. National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA. 2017.

Hitting America’s soft underbelly: the potential threat of deliberate biological attacks against the U.S. agricultural and food industry. Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. National Defense Research Institute, RAND Corporation. www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG135.pdf. 1031. Chalk P. 2004. Hitting America’s soft underbelly: the potential threat of deliberate biological attacks against the U.S. agricultural and food industry. Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. National Defense Research Institute, RAND Corporation. www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG135.pdf. 1032. Chalk P. 2004. Hitting America’s soft underbelly: the potential threat of deliberate biological attacks against the U.S. agricultural and food industry.

America’s Soft Underbelly According to the Government Accountability Office, long-distance live animal transport not only places countries at risk for catastrophic disease outbreaks,1023 but it makes them vulnerable to bioterrorism as well.1024 U.S. animal agriculture has been described as a particularly easy target,1025 not only as “one of the probable threats for an economic attack on this country,”1026 according to former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, but also as a direct attack on our citizenry. In 2004, the RAND Corporation prepared a report on agroterrorism for the Office of the Secretary of Defense titled Hitting America’s Soft Underbelly. They blamed America’s vulnerability in part on the “concentrated and intensive nature of contemporary U.S. farming practices.”1027 According to the last USDA census, the top 1 percent of the nation’s feedlots produced about half of the cattle1028 and 1 percent of U.S. egg farms confine more than 90 percent of the nation’s egg-laying hens.1029 Given that “highly crowded” animals are reared in “extreme proximity” in the United States, one infected animal could quickly expose thousands of others.1030 The RAND corporation points out that individual animals raised by U.S. agriculture have become progressively more prone to disease as a result of increasingly routine invasive procedures: Herds that have been subjected to such modifications—which have included everything from sterilization programs to dehorning, branding, and hormone injections—have typically suffered higher stress levels that have lowered the animals’ natural tolerance to disease from contagious organisms and increased the viral and bacterial “volumes” that they normally shed in the event of an infection.1031 Long-distance live transport could then ferry the spreading infection, according to USDA models, to as many as twenty-five states within five days.1032 Curtailing the long-distance live transport of animals, as well as the concentration and intensification of the food animal industry, could thus potentially be a matter of national security.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Hirschtick, “A Piece of My Mind: Copy-and-Paste,” Journal of the American Medical Association 295:2335–2336 (2006). 72 Ross Koppel, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist Interview of Koppel by the author, July 18, 2014. 73 In 2013, Steve Stack, board chair of the American Medical Association Quoted in F. Quinn, “Why Are Doctors Frustrated in Using EHR?,” MedCity News, November 7, 2013, available at http://medcitynews.com/2013/11/doctors-frustratedusing-ehr/. 73 investigators at the RAND Corporation M. W. Friedberg, P. G. Chen, K. R. Van Busum, et al., “Factors Affecting Physician Professional Satisfaction and Their Implications for Patient Care, Health Systems, and Health Policy” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013). 73 “We had one question in the interview guide” Interview of Mark Friedberg by the author, July 25, 2014. 74 “Our study does not suggest that physicians are Luddites” M. Friedberg, F.

In 2013, Steve Stack, board chair of the American Medical Association and a true believer in healthcare technology, explained the reasons: “EHRs have been and largely remain clunky, confusing, and complex. Though an 18-month-old child can operate an iPhone, physicians with seven to ten years of postcollegiate education are brought to their knees by their electronic health records.” That same year, investigators at the RAND Corporation reported the results of an indepth study of 30 physician practices designed to assess the effects of healthcare reform on doctors’ professional satisfaction. The researchers did not set out to examine physicians’ reactions to their EHRs; in fact, their initial plans called for a survey containing not a single question about computers.

See Problem-Oriented Medical Record privacy, 13–14 See also Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Problem-Oriented Medical Record, 46, 79 productivity, 244 productivity paradox, 244–253 Quantified Self movement, 117, 122 radiologists alienation of, 56–58 busyness of, 58–59 economic pressures, 59–60 nighthawks, 60–61 replacement by computers, 61–62 resisting isolation, 62 radiology, 50 impact of PACS on, 53–56 teleradiology, 60–61 transition from film to computerized radiology, 51 RAND Corporation study of healthcare reform’s effects on doctor’s professional satisfaction, 73, 74 study on healthcare costs, 81, 247 rationing, 15 Reason, James, 131 regional health information exchanges (RHIOs), 187 Reider, Jacob, 211–212, 229–230 Reiser, Stanley, 30, 33, 41 relational coordination, 57 relationships, 77–78 demise of, 268 See also doctor-patient relationships Relman, Arnold “Bud”, 23–25 RHIOs.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

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

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

The country’s collective ignoring of black New Orleanians’ lives also explains why there was no federal effort undertaken to figure out where exactly all the evacuees from Katrina had ended up. Ten years later, not one federal agency is studying the diaspora caused by Katrina. The biggest study of their whereabouts was performed by the nonprofit RAND Corporation, and that tracking program ended five years ago. A decade after the man-made failures that preceded and followed Katrina tore New Orleans apart, the “other America” narrative has been completely forgotten. The chasm has closed. And a new narrative—one of rebirth and growth—has overtaken the country’s popular media.

The psychiatric interpretation of fire-setting is complex, but it relates to the types of personalities which slums produce.… The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.” In 1976, the city cut thirty-four fire companies, relying on a study from the RAND Corporation that said the effects of shutting down those stations would be minimal, though letters from RAND employees from the time showed that at least some people knew the study was incorrect. Nearly all of the shut fire stations were in the Bronx and poor areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The effects were immediate and devastating.

“I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me”: Charles Babington, “Hastert Tries Damage Control After Remarks Hit a Nerve,” Washington Post, September 3, 2005. The biggest study of their whereabouts: Narayan Sastry and Christine Peterson, “The Displaced New Orleans Residents Survey Questionnaire,” RAND Corporation, 2010, www.rand.org/labor/projects/dnors.html. The city has been “resurrected”: Jason Berry, “Eight Years After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Has Been Resurrected,” Daily Beast, August 29, 2013. Its growth is an “economic miracle”: Adam Kushner, “How New Orleans Pulled Off an Economic Miracle,” National Journal, April 7, 2013.


Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

The whole affair started in October 1969, when Ellsberg began to copy in installments a multivolume work with the ungainly title “History of U.S. Decision-­Making Process on Vietnam Policy,” also known as the “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force.” He took sections of the history home from his office at the rand Corporation, returning each section after secretly photocopying it at night on a machine in the office of a sympathetic friend. The history was bound in cardboard covers with metal tapes, which could be removed for copying. There were forty-­seven volumes in all, and Ellsberg started in the middle. He was Xeroxing one of fifteen extant duplicates, produced in house at the Pentagon at the behest of Robert McNamara.

Map 2, a photocopy of a photocopy (notice the multiply reproduced loose-­leaf holes), reproduced as part of the Pentagon Papers Part IV-­B-­2 (1969) to document the beginning of the U.S.-­backed “Strategic Hamlet Program” in South Vietnam (1962), digitized by the National Archives and Records Administration in 2011. as an author for the history while he was an employee of the rand Corporation. He worked for several months during 1967 compiling material and drafting a section on the policy of President John F. Kennedy’s administration—although, according to Gelb, little of Ellsberg’s draft survived in the final version.20 Ellsberg was now effectively reediting the edit to which he and his subject had been subject.

See xerographics photography, 112–13, 149 Piper, Andrew, 19, 153n21 Planet pdf, 123 Poe, Edgar Alan, 28, 29, 50, 51; “The Purloined Letter,” 28–29 portable document format (pdf), 7, 18, 100, 114–19, 121–34 PostScript, 121, 123, 125, 132 Power, Eugene, 73–74, 79–80, 119, 130, 132 Preston, Cathy Lynn, 105 Price, Leah, 252n8 “print culture,” 7–9, 11, 20, 25 Printers’ Circular, 37, 42, 45 printers’ monopoly, 51–52, 82, 137, 146 Privacy Act of 1974, 97 ProQuest, 54, 79–80 Public Company Accountability Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, 97 Putnam, Herbert, 107 rand Corporation, 86, 91 Raney, M. Llewellyn, 73 receipts, 3, 21–22, 24, 30, 34, 36, 46 Reign of Terror, 16 Ritchie, Dennis, 97–100 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 59 Rostow, Walter, 94 Rotsler, Bill, 147 R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 66 Rumble, Walker, 162n60 Rumsfeld, Donald, 97 Russo, Anthony, 88–89, 91 samizdat, 95, 100, 174n41 Sánchez-­Eppler, Karen, 140, 141 Scalia, Antonin, 97 scholarly communication, 13–15, 52, 56, 60, 70–72, 133 Schwartz, Hillel, 172n3, 173n17 scientific management, 37, 56 Selden, Charles, 33–35; Selden’s Condensed Ledger, 33–34 Selden, Elizabeth, 34 Sellen, Abigail, 4, 111, 128, 130, 152n9 Sheehan, Neil, 92, 94–95 Shirky, Clay, 20, 136 Short Title Catalogue (Pollard and Redgrave), 73, 119 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 158n4 Sketchpad, 120–21 Smithsonian Institution, 52 Social Science Research Council, 14, 54, 57, 60, 63.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

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

What we’ve learned is that automation has a sometimes-tragic tendency to increase the complexity of a job at the worst possible moment—when workers already have too much to handle. The computer, introduced as an aid to reduce the chances of human error, ends up making it more likely that people, like shocked mice, will make the wrong move. CHAPTER FIVE WHITE-COLLAR COMPUTER LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, researchers at the venerable RAND Corporation in California made a stirring prediction about the future of American medicine. Having completed what they called “the most detailed analysis ever conducted of the potential benefits of electronic medical records,” they declared that the U.S. health-care system “could save more than $81 billion annually and improve the quality of care” if hospitals and physicians automated their record keeping.

Scerbo, “Adaptive Automation,” in Raja Parasuraman and Matthew Rizzo, eds., Neuroergonomics: The Brain at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 239–252. Chapter Five: WHITE-COLLAR COMPUTER 1.“RAND Study Says Computerizing Medical Records Could Save $81 Billion Annually and Improve the Quality of Medical Care,” RAND Corporation press release, September 14, 2005. 2.Richard Hillestad et al., “Can Electronic Medical Record Systems Transform Health Care? Potential Health Benefits, Savings, and Costs,” Health Affairs 24, no. 5 (2005): 1103–1117. 3.Reed Abelson and Julie Creswell, “In Second Look, Few Savings from Digital Health Records,” New York Times, January 10, 2013. 4.Jeanne Lambrew, “More than Half of Doctors Now Use Electronic Health Records Thanks to Administration Policies,” The White House Blog, May 24, 2013, whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/24/more-half-doctors-use-electronic-health-records-thanks-administration-policies. 5.Arthur L.

., 60–61, 154 death of, 53 erosion of expertise of, 54–58, 62–63 human- vs. technology-centered automation and, 168–70, 172–73 income of, 59–60 see also autopilot place, 131–34, 137, 251n place cells, 133–34, 136, 219 Plato, 148 Player Piano (Vonnegut), 39 poetry, 211–16, 218, 221–22 Poirier, Richard, 214, 215 Politics (Aristotle), 224 Popular Science, 48 Post, Wiley, 48, 50, 53, 57, 62, 82, 169 power, 21, 37, 65, 151, 175, 204, 217 practice, 82–83 Predator drone, 188 premature fixation, 145 presence, power of, 200 Priestley, Joseph, 160 Prius, 6, 13, 154–55 privacy, 206 probability, 113–24 procedural (tacit) knowledge, 9–11, 83, 105, 113, 144 productivity, 18, 22, 29, 30, 37, 106, 160, 173, 175, 181, 218 professional work, incursion of computers into, 115 profit motive, 17 profits, 18, 22, 28, 30, 33, 95, 159, 171, 172–73, 175 progress, 21, 26, 29, 37, 40, 65, 196, 214 acceleration of, 26 scientific, 31, 123 social, 159–60, 228 progress (continued) technological, 29, 31, 34, 35, 48–49, 108–9, 159, 160, 161, 173, 174, 222, 223–24, 226, 228, 230 utopian vision of, 25, 26 prosperity, 20, 21, 107 proximal cues, 219–20 psychologists, psychology, 9, 11, 15, 54, 103, 119, 149, 158–59 animal studies, 87–92 cognitive, 72–76, 81, 129–30 psychomotor skills, 56, 57–58, 81, 120 quality of experience, 14–15 Race against the Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 28–29 RAND Corporation, 93–98 “Rationalism in Politics” (Oakeshott), 124 Rattner, Justin, 203 reading, learning of, 82 Reaper drone, 188 reasoning, reason, 120, 121, 124, 151 recession, 27, 28, 30, 32 Red Dead Redemption, 177–78 “Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation, The” (Yerkes and Dodson), 89 Renslow, Marvin, 43–44 Revit, 146, 147 Rifkin, Jeremy, 28 Robert, David, 45, 169–70 Robert Frost (Poirier), 214 Roberts, J.


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Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Most campaigns involved the circulation of misinformation in the run-up to critical junctions such as elections, referendums and crises.36 The disappearance of trust in independent information sources is a slow poison that threatens to undermine the fundamental pillars of our democracies. The erosion of civil discourse, political paralysis, alienation and uncertainty are among the most severe consequences of the ‘Truth Decay’, as researchers of the RAND Corporation have called it.37 Trust doesn’t vanish overnight, but over the past few years we have watched its gradual erosion on different levels. First came the distrust in the political and financial establishment. The 2008 global financial crisis and its various connected scandals fuelled fears that national and international political and economic bodies were not acting in the public’s interest and had secret agendas that might at any point afflict the average man’s bank account.

Howard, ‘Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation’, Working Paper 2018.1, Oxford, UK, Project on Computational Propaganda. Available at comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk. 37Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, ‘Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life’, RAND Corporation. Available at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html. 38Public Policy Polling, April 2013. The press release and summary are available at https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf. 39Kavanagh and Rich, ‘Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life’. 40Fabian Klask, ‘Die Stille nach der lauten Nacht’, Die Zeit, 29 December 2017.

., Daniel here Habeck, Robert here HackerOne here hackers and hacking here ‘capture the flag’ operations here, here denial of service operations here ethical hacking here memory-corruption operations here political hacking here ‘qwning’ here SQL injections here techniques here Halle shooting here Hamas here, here Hanks, Tom here Happn here Harris, DeAndre here ‘hashtag stuffing’ here Hate Library here HateAid here, here Hatreon here, here, here Heidegger, Martin here Heise, Thorsten here, here Hensel, Gerald here, here Herzliya International Institute for Counter-Terrorism here Heyer, Heather here, here, here Himmler, Heinrich here Hintsteiner, Edwin here Histiaeus here Hitler, Adolf here, here, here, here, here Mein Kampf here, here Hitler salutes here, here, here, here Hitler Youth here HIV here Hizb ut-Tahrir here, here, here Höcker, Karl-Friedrich here Hofstadter, Richard here Hollywood here Holocaust here Holocaust denial here, here, here, here, here Holy War Hackers Team here Home Office here homophobia here, here, here Hooton Plan here Hoover Dam here Hope Not Hate here, here, here Horgan, John here Horowitz Foundation here Hot or Not here House of Saud here Huda, Noor here human trafficking here, here Hussein, Saddam here, here Hutchins, Marcus here Hyppönen, Mikko here Identity Evropa here, here iFrames here Illuminati here Incels (Involuntary Celibacy) here, here Independent here Inkster, Nigel here Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Intelius here International Business Times here International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) here International Federation of Journalists here International Holocaust Memorial Day here International Institute for Strategic Studies here Internet Research Agency (IRA) here iPads here iPhones here iProphet here Iranian revolution here Isabella I, Queen of Castile here ISIS here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here hackers and here, here, here, here, here Islamophobia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Tommy Robinson and here, here see also Finsbury Mosque attack Israel here, here, here, here, here Israel Defense Forces here, here Jackson, Michael here jahiliyya here Jakarta attacks here Jamaah Ansharud Daulah (JAD) here Japanese anime here Jemaah Islamiyah here Jesus Christ here Jewish numerology here Jews here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also anti-Semitism; ZOG JFG World here jihadi brides here, here JihadWatch here Jobs, Steve here Johnson, Boris here Jones, Alex here Jones, Ron here Junge Freiheit here Jurgenson, Nathan here JustPasteIt here Kafka, Franz here Kampf der Niebelungen here, here Kapustin, Denis ‘Nikitin’ here Kassam, Raheem here Kellogg’s here Kennedy, John F. here, here Kennedy family here Kessler, Jason here, here Khomeini, Ayataollah here Kim Jong-un here Kohl, Helmut here Köhler, Daniel here Kronen Zeitung here Kronos banking Trojan here Ku Klux Klan here, here Küssel, Gottfried here Lane, David here Le Loop here Le Pen, Marine here LeBretton, Matthew here Lebron, Michael here Lee, Robert E. here Li, Sean here Li family here Libyan Fighting Group here LifeOfWat here Lifton, Robert here Littman, Gisele here live action role play (LARP) here, here, here, here, here, here lobbying here Lokteff, Lana here loneliness here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lorraine, DeAnna here Lügenpresse here McDonald’s here McInnes, Gavin here McMahon, Ed here Macron, Emmanuel here, here, here, here MAGA (Make America Great Again) here ‘mainstream media’ here, here, here ‘Millennium Dawn’ here Manosphere here, here, here March for Life here Maria Theresa statue here, here Marighella, Carlos here Marina Bay Sands Hotel (Singapore) here Marx, Karl here Das Kapital here Masculine Development here Mason, James here MAtR (Men Among the Ruins) here, here Matrix, The here, here, here, here May, Theresa here, here, here Meechan, Mark here Meme Warfare here memes here, here, here, here and terrorist attacks here Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) here Menlo Park here Mercer Family Foundation here Merkel, Angela here, here, here, here MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) here, here, here MI6, 158, 164 migration here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also refugees millenarianism here Millennial Woes here millennials here Minassian, Alek here Mindanao here Minds here, here misogyny here, here, here, here, here see also Incels mixed martial arts (MMA) here, here, here, here Morgan, Nicky here Mounk, Yascha here Movement, The here Mueller, Robert here, here Muhammad, Prophet here, here, here mujahidat here Mulhall, Joe here MuslimCrypt here MuslimTec here, here Mussolini, Benito here Naim, Bahrun here, here Nance, Malcolm here Nasher App here National Action here National Bolshevism here National Democratic Party (NPD) here, here, here, here National Health Service (NHS) here National Policy Institute here, here National Socialism group here National Socialist Movement here National Socialist Underground here NATO DFR Lab here Naturalnews here Nawaz, Maajid here Nazi symbols here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Hitler salutes; swastikas Nazi women here N-count here Neiwert, David here Nero, Emperor here Netflix here Network Contagion Research Institute here NetzDG legislation here, here Neumann, Peter here New Balance shoes here New York Times here News Corp here Newsnight here Nietzsche, Friedrich here, here Nikolai Alexander, Supreme Commander here, here, here, here, here, here 9/11 attacks here, here ‘nipsters’ here, here No Agenda here Northwest Front (NWF) here, here Nouvelle Droite here, here NPC meme here NSDAP here, here, here Obama, Barack and Michelle here, here, here, here, here Omas gegen Rechts here online harassment, gender and here OpenAI here open-source intelligence (OSINT) here, here Operation Name and Shame here Orbán, Viktor here, here organised crime here Orwell, George here, here Osborne, Darren here, here Oxford Internet Institute here Page, Larry here Panofsky, Aaron here Panorama here Parkland high-school shooting here Patreon here, here, here, here Patriot Peer here, here PayPal here PeopleLookup here Periscope here Peterson, Jordan here Pettibone, Brittany here, here, here Pew Research Center here, here PewDiePie here PewTube here Phillips, Whitney here Photofeeler here Phrack High Council here Pink Floyd here Pipl here Pittsburgh synagogue shooting here Pizzagate here Podesta, John here, here political propaganda here Popper, Karl here populist politicians here pornography here, here Poway synagogue shooting here, here Pozner, Lenny here Presley, Elvis here Prideaux, Sue here Prince Albert Police here Pro Chemnitz here ‘pseudo-conservatives’ here Putin, Vladimir here Q Britannia here QAnon here, here, here, here Quebec mosque shooting here Quilliam Foundation here, here, here Quinn, Zoë here Quran here racist slurs (n-word) here Radio 3Fourteen here Radix Journal here Rafiq, Haras here Ramakrishna, Kumar here RAND Corporation here Rasmussen, Tore here, here, here, here Raymond, Jolynn here Rebel Media here, here, here Reconquista Germanica here, here, here, here, here, here, here Reconquista Internet here Red Pill Women here, here, here, here, here Reddit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here redpilling here, here, here, here refugees here, here, here, here, here Relotius, Claas here ‘Remove Kebab’ here Renault here Revolution Chemnitz here Rigby, Lee here Right Wing Terror Center here Right Wing United (RWU) here RMV (Relationship Market Value) here Robertson, Caolan here Robinson, Tommy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Rockefeller family here Rodger, Elliot here Roof, Dylann here, here Rosenberg, Alfred here Rothschilds here, here Rowley, Mark here Roy, Donald F. here Royal Family here Russia Today here, here S., Johannes here St Kilda Beach meeting here Salafi Media here Saltman, Erin here Salvini, Matteo here Sampson, Chris here, here Sandy Hook school shooting here Sargon of Akkad, see Benjamin, Carl Schild & Schwert rock festival (Ostritz) here, here, here Schilling, Curt here Schlessinger, Laura C. here Scholz & Friends here SchoolDesk here Schröder, Patrick here Sellner, Martin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Serrano, Francisco here ‘sexual economics’ here SGT Report here Shodan here, here Siege-posting here Sleeping Giants here SMV (Sexual Market Value) here, here, here Social Justice Warriors (SJW) here, here Solahütte here Soros, George here, here Sotloff, Steven here Southern, Lauren here Southfront here Spencer, Richard here, here, here, here, here, here Spiegel TV here spoofing technology here Sputnik here, here SS here, here Stadtwerke Borken here Star Wars here Steinmeier, Frank-Walter here Stewart, Ayla here STFU (Shut the Fuck Up) here Stormfront here, here, here Strache, H.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Ideas for networks between computers began to be conjured up in many places in the 1960s because universities and private companies had started developing various forms of information technology. In 1963, J.C.R. Licklider at the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman was able to propose an ‘intergalactic computer network’ that described many of the solutions that would become the internet’s infrastructure. At the same time, Paul Baran at the private think-tank RAND Corporation came up with a proposal for a distributed communication network. When Licklider started working at ARPA, he was involved in creating a network between its mainframe computers – the project that in 1969 would become ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. But that project had nothing to do with the military’s needs.

We didn’t do it by planning.’8 It was not that the military or politicians picked a winner, as Mazzucato claims; they did not have the faintest idea what Licklider, Taylor and the others were doing. In fact, the US Department of Defense had had a similar idea served to them on a silver platter a few years earlier. Paul Baran of RAND Corporation tried to sell his idea to the US Air Force in 1965, arguing that such a network could withstand a military attack. So it was not the government that dreamed up the idea – it was the state that neglected it. Baran’s contacts appreciated the concept, but as a result of a power struggle with the Ministry of Defense, the project went to the Defense Communication Agency, which had no technical expertise in the field and left it at that.

., 141 Obama, Barack, 147, 152, 165 Oculus, 177 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 147, 249–50 Open (Norberg), 297 Our World in Data, 18, 250, 268, 270 Oxfam, 4, 43, 133–4 ozone layer, 236 Pakistan, 219 Palm, 174 Paraguay, 239 Paris, France, 66–7 Paris Climate Agreement, 233 Parks, Rosa, 62–3 Paulsen, Roland, 98 PayPal, 178 Peru, 29–30 Pfizer, 177 Philippines, 248 Piketty, Thomas, 127–31 Pinochet, Augusto, 29, 46 ‘planned obsolescence’, 156–60 Poland, 26 populism, 47–8 pornography, 188–9 Portugal, 26–7, 254 poverty, 12, 17–25, 20, 29–33, 53–4, 110, 291–2 in China, 213, 214 climate change and, 235–6, 245 inequality and, 133–7 Prasad, Chandra Bhan, 64 prices, 67–9 price regulation, 68 profit, 74, 122–4 profit-hunger, 273–5 property rights, 70–72 protectionism, 3, 5, 11–12, 78–9, 115, 117–18 Putin, Vladimir, 5, 39 Quaero, 191–2 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 Quartz, Steven, 287 Questioning the Entrepreneurial State, 198 racial segregation, 62–3 racism, 62–3, 111 Radelet, Steven, 24 RAND Corporation, 184, 186 Rao, Madhusudan, 63 Reagan, Ronald, 8–10 Rehbinder, Caspian, 269–70 religion, 26–7 Republican Party (US), 8–9 Ridley, Matt, 188 Ritchie, Hannah, 250, 270 Romer, Paul, 241 Romney, Mitt, 165 Roser, Max, 18 Rosling, Hans, 18 Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban, 148–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 279, 284 Rubio, Marco, 181 Rü ck, Christian, 272 Russia, 39, 138 see also Soviet Union Rwanda, 35 Samuelson, Paul, 5 Sanders, Bernie, 43, 122 Sandström, Christian, 183, 240 Scandinavia, 22, 36, 281 Schröer, Gerhard, 191 Schumpeter, Joseph, 89 Segerfeldt, Fredrik, 137 Shah, Parth, 25 Shambaugh, David, 215 Shanghai, China, 209 Shelby, Richard, 202–3 Shopify, 178 Silicon Valley, 141 Singapore, 23, 84 Singh, Manmohan, 25 Sixdegrees, 170 slavery, 31, 73, 75 Smith, Adam, 213, 264 smoking, 137 Snapchat, 178 Soave, Robby, 171 social class, 137 middle class erosion, 93–5, 95 working class, 7 social media, 155, 163, 165–9 social mobility, 90–91 social networks, 169–71 socialism, 11, 44, 75, 120–21, 145 three steps of socialism, 44–5 Swiss bank socialism, 33 Socrates, 65 Son of a Servant, The (Strindberg), 120–21 Sony, 151 South Africa, 45–6, 72, 267 South Korea, 23–5, 84, 225 Soviet Union, 26, 215, 219, 241–2 see also Russia Sowell, Thomas, 62 space programme, 181–3, 191, 201–2 moon landing, 181–3, 191, 201–2 Space Launch System (SLS), 202 SpaceX, 202 Spain, 26, 27, 97 Spanish flu pandemic, 1918, 77 Starbucks, 75–6, 148 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, 155 Strain, Michael, 94 Strindberg, August, 120 subsidies, 139–40 suicide, 271 sulphur dioxide, 236 supply and demand, 67–9 supply chains see global supply chains Svensson, Mattias, 256 Sweden, 49–51, 54–5, 66, 75–8, 91, 240, 244–5, 251, 266, 268–9, 271, 285 Swedish Energy Agency, 194 Swiss bank socialism, 33 Switzerland, 285 Taiwan, 23–5, 205, 207, 225, 267 Taliban, 160–61 Tanzania, 239 Target, 178 taxation, 56, 259 tax deductions, 141, 148 Taylor, Robert, 184–6 tech companies, 162–79 competition, 178–80 data, 175–6 GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), 169–80 regulations, 164, 174–5 Tech Panic (Soave), 171 Technology Pork Barrel, The (Cohen and Noll), 190 technology, 40–41 Thanks a Thousand (Jacobs), 60 Thatcher, Margaret, 8–11, 116 Theranos, 153 Thoreau, Henry David, 82 Thunberg, Greta, 230, 232 TikTok, 178 Times, The, 116 traditions, 26–7 Trotsky, Leon, 73 Trump, Donald, 6, 8, 48, 83, 107, 140, 165, 217 Truss, Liz, 9, 11, 56, 117 trust, 153–6 Turkmenistan, 225 Twitter, 166–7 Uber, 102 Uganda, 35 Ukraine, 5, 215 United Kingdom, 10, 22–3, 38, 49, 97, 101, 268–9, 283 Brexit, 116–17 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 233, 239 United States, 22, 55, 62–3, 80, 85, 97, 110–11, 239, 267–8, 282 China and, 205, 211, 221 crony capitalism, 139–40 ‘deaths of despair’, 7, 108–10, 136, 271, 293 Defense Communication Agency, 187 Jim Crow laws, 63 labour market, 85, 87–93, 101, 104–11 political polarization, 167 productivity growth, 148–9, 152–3 welfare state, 111–14 US–China Business Council, 210 Vance, J.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Watson Jr. of IBM, and Edwin Land of Polaroid, to Robert Solow, the MIT economist, and Daniel Bell, the Columbia sociologist. When the 115-page report appeared at the end of 1966 it was accompanied by 1,787 pages of appendices including special reports by outside experts. The 232-page analysis of the impact of computing by Paul Armer of the RAND Corporation did a remarkable job of predicting the impact of information technology. Indeed, the headings in the report have proven true over the years: “Computers Are Becoming Faster, Smaller, and Less Expensive”; “Computing Power Will Become Available Much the Same as Electricity and Telephone Service Are Today”; “Information Itself Will Become Inexpensive and Readily Available”; “Computers Will Become Easier to Use”; “Computers Will Be Used to Process Pictorial Images and Graphic Information”; and “Computers Will Be Used to Process Language,” among others.

Seymour Papert, Winograd’s thesis advisor, had become engaged in a bitter debate with Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher and Heidegger acolyte, who, just one decade after McCarthy had coined the term, would ridicule the field in a scathing paper entitled “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence,” published in 1965 by the RAND Corporation.11 (Years later, in the 2014 movie remake of RoboCop, the fictional U.S. senator who sponsors legislation banning police robots is named Hubert Dreyfus in homage.) Dreyfus ran afoul of AI researchers in the early sixties when they showed up in his Heidegger course and belittled philosophers for failing to understand human intelligence after studying it for centuries.12 It was a slight he would not forget.

Dunlap, “Looking Back: 1978—‘Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu,’” Times Insider, New York Times, November 13, 2014. 10.Terry Winograd, “Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language,” MIT AI Technical Report 235, February 1971, 38–39, http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/AITR-235.pdf. 11.Hubert Dreyfus, “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence,” RAND Corporation, 1965, http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3244.html. 12.Hubert Dreyfus, “Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian,” http://leidl mair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf. 13.Dreyfus, “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence.” 14.Seymour Papert, “The Artificial Intelligence of Hubert L.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The precise calculations and the cool, comfortable vocabulary were coming all too commonly to be grasped not merely as tools of desperation but as genuine reflections of the nature of nuclear war.22 The central concept explored and developed in that living dreamworld was deterrence. The thinking process is nicely summarized in the recent recollections of Brian Jenkins, who, as an analyst at the RAND Corporation, has been at the center of this intellectual development for decades. The italics are mine: Each [side in the cold war] possessed an arsenal capable of ending modern civilization. Avoiding nuclear war became the major preoccupation of leaders of both sides. This required military planners to persuade their opponents that neither side could gain sufficient advantage to make starting a nuclear war even thinkable—neither could escape annihilation by launching a preemptive attack.

San Francisco, CA, 26–29 March. Jenkins, Brian Michael. 1975. “International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict.” In International Terrorism and World Security, ed. David Carlton and Carolo Schaerf. New York: Wiley, 13–49. ______. 2006. Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy and Strengthening Ourselves. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. ______. 2008. Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Jentleson, Bruce W., and Christopher A. Whytock. 2005/06. “Who ‘Won’ Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy.” International Security 30(3) Winter: 47–86. Jervis, Robert. 1979. “Deterrence Theory Revisited.”

The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McPhee, John. 1974. The Curve of Binding Energy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Meade, Charles, and Roger C. Molander. 2006. Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Mearsheimer, John J. 1983. Conventional Deterrence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ______. 1984/85. “Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence in Europe.” International Security 9(3) Winter: 19–47. ______. 1988. Liddell Hart and the Weight of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ______. 1990.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

That’s why the vehicles have to be tested in as many traffic situations as possible so that experience is gained on their reactions. A similar argument is presented by Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who demands accuracy of 99.999999 per cent in the development of autonomous cars, whereby the last percentage point can only be achieved at very great expense. Toyota and Rand Corporation have published calculations of the number of miles self-driving cars have to be tested before they can be assessed as roadworthy because the algorithms required for driverless cars undergo self-learning in multiple road traffic situations. The more traffic situations these algorithms are exposed to, the better prepared they are to master a new situation.

According to the latest research of the World Health Organisation, 90 per cent of the world’s population lives in places with poor air quality. One of the main causes is traffic, along with heating, garbage incineration and coal power plants [8]. In numerous places, there are ongoing discussions about banning cars from inner cities altogether so as to meet the air-quality standards. Research by the Rand Corporation also attempted to determine the social costs of a driven mile [3]. In conjunction with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, six important externalities were defined for the United States: oil-security costs, air pollution, climate change, traffic congestion, accidents and noise. All in all, they amount to some 13 cents per driven mile.

., Filippi, F., Persia, L., 2015: Automated Vehicles and the Rethinking of Mobility and Cities, in: Transportation Research Procedia, 145 160. [3] Anderson, J. M., Kalra, N., Stanley, K. D., Sorensen, P., Samaras, C., Oluwatola, O. A., 2014: Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica. [4] Arbib, J., Seba, T., 2017: Rethinking Transportation 2020 2030, Rethink Disruption Report. [5] Arup Foresight, 2014: Future of Rail 2050, London. [6] Bainbridge, L., 1983: Ironies of Automation, in: Automatica, 775 779. [7] Barclays, 2015: Disruptive Mobility. [8] Barth, M., Boriboonsomsin, K., Wu, G., 2014: Vehicle Automation and its Potential Impacts on Energy and Emissions, in: Meyer, G., Beiker, S., Road Vehicles Automation, Berlin, 103 112. [9] Bécsi, T., Aradi, S., Gáspár, P., 2015: Security Issues and Vulnerabilities in Connected Car Systems, in: IEEE Models and Technologies for Intelligent Transportation Systems, 477 482. [10] Beiker, S., 2012: Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving, in: Santa Clara Law Review, Article 1. 413 Bibliography 414 [11] Beiker, S., 2016: Deployment Scenarios for Vehicles with Higherorder Automation, in: Maurer, M., Gerdes, C.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

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

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

The spoils of this war are power over every meaningful aspect of our society: our economy, our infrastructure, our ability to compete and innovate, our personal privacy, our culture, and subtle daily decisions we make based on information we interact with online. And in recent years, unfortunately, the world’s democracies have been losing ground. It has become fashionable in academic circles to favor the term “competition” to describe this great geopolitical contest—this is a mistake. As Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, correctly observes, “competition conjures up images of sports matches or economic markets.17 Those competitions, however, are bound by rules, policed by referees and ultimately produce winners and losers,” he adds. The geopolitical contest between the U.S. and China is not confined to the realm of economic competition nor is it leveled by mutually observed rules.

Japan, India, and Australia have begun discussing a “supply chain partnership” to guard against China’s back-end dominance.37 In a conversation with his Japanese counterpart, Indian prime minister Modi called for a “free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region”38—echoing Quad language—while in New Delhi, then U.S. deputy secretary of state Steve Biegun invited “any country that seeks a free and open Indo-Pacific… to work with us.”39 This Quad could promote mutual defense and information sharing in the Indo-Pacific, with an emphasis on repelling front- and back-end threats. Strengthening the Quad “should enhance the deterrence value of the group toward China,” notes RAND Corporation senior defense analyst Derek Grossman.40 Similarly, the Western techno-bloc should reassert itself in international forums where technological standards are being hammered out. When China pushes its New IP or its China Standards 2035, the United States should vigorously advocate for rules of the road that keep the Internet free from authoritarian control.

Grynbaum, “Right-Wing Media Uses Parkland Shooting as Conspiracy Fodder,” New York Times, February 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/business/media/parkland-shooting-media-conspiracy.html. 22 Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life,” RAND Corporation, 2018, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html. 23 Indictment, U.S. Department of Justice, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2,371, 1349, 1028A, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1035562/download. 24 Chen, “The Agency.” 25 Renee DiResta, Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” Disinformation Report, https://disinformationreport.blob.core.windows.net/disinformation-report/NewKnowledge-Disinformation-Report-Whitepaper.pdf. 26 Sanger, The Perfect Weapon, 182. 27 Indictment, U.S.


Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions) by John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, business cycle, collective bargaining, full employment, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, Nash equilibrium, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, profit motive, RAND corporation, the market place, zero-sum game

Samuel Karlin (who received his Ph.D. at Princeton in mathematics in the spring of 1947 then took a faculty position at Cal Tech, and almost immediately started to consult at the RAND Corporation under the tutelage of Frederic Bohnenblust) has written that he never heard game theory mentioned during his graduate studies. Nevertheless, many observers agree that in the following decade Princeton was one of the two centers in which game theory flourished, the other being the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. The story of the RAND Corporation and its research sponsored by the Air Force has been told on several occasions (see [11], [12]). We shall concentrate on the activity in the mathematics department at Princeton, a story that illustrates the strong element of chance in human affairs.

Through the efforts at RAND and at Princeton University, many new directions of research had been opened and the way had been paved for the applications to come. The TGEB was published with unparalleled accolades from the cream of the mathematical economists of the era, then ignored by the economists while mathematicians at the RAND Corporation and at Princeton quietly pushed the boundaries of the subject into new territory. It took nearly a quarter century before reality overcame the stereotypical view that it was merely a theory of zero-sum two-person games and that its usefulness was restricted to military problems. Once these myths were countered, applications came tumbling out and, by the time the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded in 1994 to Nash, John Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten, the theory of games had assumed a central position in academic economic theory.

Wald, Statistical Decision Functions, New York (1950). (6) J. Williams, The Compleat Strategyst, Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy, New York (1953). Bibliographies on the subject are found in all of the above books except (6). Extensive work in this field has been done during the last years by the staff of the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California. A bibliography of this work can be found in the RAND publication RM-950. In the theory of n-person games, there have been some further developments in the direction of “non-cooperative” games. In this respect, particularly the work of J. F. Nash, “Non-cooperative Games,” Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, (1951), pp. 286–295, must be mentioned.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

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

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

For that, you’ll need an optical apparatus capable of high resolution, so that the target area can be clearly seen. Does that sound like a telescope? It should, because it is. Today, the largest optics (mirrors rather than lenses) are the ones developed for telescopes. Early in the twenty-first century, a comprehensive report from the RAND Corporation, a think tank devoted mainly to US military policy, proposed that the optics required for a space-based laser weapon designed to destroy terrestrial targets could become available and affordable once the optics required for the “next-generation space telescope” had been mastered. Today’s real-life next-generation space telescope, the seven-ton James Webb Space Telescope, has a 6.5-meter gold-coated mirror made up of eighteen separate hexagonal segments constructed from pure beryllium, a metal that’s both strong and light.

The scientists “might even welcome the laser if its large optics could also be used to increase observing time when not needed for weapon operations, maintenance, or training,” said RAND.25 Given that astro-folk tend to be a peaceable crew, “accept” might be a more suitable word than “welcome.” Since its founding in 1948, by the way, the RAND Corporation has supported a fair bit of “thinking about the unthinkable.”26 To this and other ends, it has consistently hired impressive individuals, ranging from Daniel Ellsberg, who made public the Pentagon Papers, to Donald Rumsfeld, who served as a RAND trustee for a quarter century before becoming George W.

The phrase, rather, has been interpreted to require that activities in space be non-aggressive . . . to refrain from the threat or use of force except in accordance with the law, such as in self-defense.158 At the heart of US military objectives is an expansive definition of self-defense—active, not passive. To embrace that definition means the potential use of weapons, and potential use opens the door to an actual program of weaponization. In 2002 the RAND Corporation’s Project Air Force division published Space Weapons Earth Wars. Intended as a tutorial for anyone concerned with national security, it focuses on facts, options, feasibilities, tactics, costs, positives, negatives, and possible scenarios.159 Everything you need to know about warmaking from space.


Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom

agricultural Revolution, clean water, Garrett Hardin, Gödel, Escher, Bach, land tenure, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, RAND corporation, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs

Vancouver: Uni­ versity of British Columbia Press. Carruthers, I., and R. Stoner. 1981. Economic Aspects and Policy Issues in Groundwater Development. World Bank staff working paper No. 496, Wash­ ington, D.C. Cave, J. A. K. 1984. The Cold Fish War: Long-Term Competition in a Dynamic . Game. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation. Central and West Basin Water Replenishment District. 1987. Annual Survey Re­ port on Ground Water Replenishment. Glendale, Calif.: Bookman, Edmmonston Engineering. Chamberlin, J. 1974. Provision of Collective Goods as a Function of Group Size. American Political Science Review 68:707-16. Chambers, J.

New York: Prentice-HalL Roberts, M. 1980. Traditional Customs and Irrigation Development in Sri Lanka. In Irrigation and Agricultural Development in Asia, ed. E. W. Coward, Jr., pp. 186-202. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Rolph, E. S. 1982. Government Allocation of Property Rights: Why and How. Technical report, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California. Rolph, E. S. 1983. Government Allocation of Property Rights: Who Gets What? Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 3:45-61. Rose-Ackerman, S. 1977. Market Models for Water Pollution Control: Their Strengths and Weaknesses. Public Policy 25:383--406. Rosenberg, N. 1982.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

They were more of a diversion than an avocation, but the accident of the brackets had more influence subsequently than I could have imagined at the time. Harry also enlisted me as the department’s representative on the Committee on Graduate Education, which gave me a reason to hang out in the dean’s office. He was on the board of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, and suggested it might be a nice place to work, right on the beach with no blizzards. I put it on my list. Grey Silver Shadow When the time came to find a real job, I was going out to UCLA to interview for a faculty position, and I added RAND to the schedule. UCLA JWPR007-Lindsey 14 May 7, 2007 16:12 h ow i b e cam e a quant told me to stay in the Holiday Inn on Wilshire Boulevard, rent a car, and come out in February of 1977.

Formerly he was first vice president of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, where he served as senior managing director of a quantitative equity management affiliate of the Prudential Asset Management Company and managing director of the discretionary asset allocation unit. Prior to that, he was on the finance faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and consulted to the Rand Corporation. Dr. Jacobs has a BA from Columbia College, an MS in Operations Research and Computer Science from Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, an MSIA from Carnegie Mellon University’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, and an MA in Applied Economics and a PhD in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Clients at his consulting and software development business include some of the world’s largest investment managers and hedge funds. These tasks involve trading systems and automated analysis of textual and Internet information sources. All build on his history of innovation in financial technology. At the RAND Corporation, he directed research on real-time applications of artificial intelligence that led to the founding of Integrated Analytics Corporation. IAC was acquired by the Investment Technology Group, (NYSE:ITG) and, with the addition of electronic order execution, its product became QuantEx, an electronic execution system still in use for millions of institutional equity transactions daily.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

By the 1950s, most of the best mathematicians and social scientists had been hired either directly or through grants to work out America’s nuclear-war-game scenarios against the Soviet Union. In a situation where the enemy might be signing a nonproliferation treaty while actually stockpiling an arsenal, paranoia made good sense. The think-tank logicians at the Rand Corporation called it “the prisoner’s dilemma.” The scenario went something like this: Two suspects are arrested by the police, who have insufficient evidence to convict either one. If one betrays the other, who remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives a ten-year sentence.

In Reagan’s persona as well as his politics, the independent, shoot-from-the-hip individualism of the Marlboro Man became compatible—even synergistic—with the economics and culture of self-interest. No-blink brinksmanship with the “evil” Soviet empire, the dismantling of domestic government institutions, the decertification of labor unions, and the promotion of unfettered corporate capitalism all came out of the same combination of Rand Corporation game theory and the 1960s antipsychiatry movement. Regulations designed to protect the environment, worker safety, and consumer rights were summarily decried as unnecessary government meddling in the marketplace. As if channeling Friedrich Hayek by way of R. D. Laing, Reagan shrank the social-welfare system by closing the public-psychiatric-hospital system.

If anything, it’s the other way around: a landscape defined by the competitive market will promote self-interested behavior. It’s the surest path to a corporatist society. Maybe that was the objective all along. Central Currency The economy in which we all participate is no more natural than the game scenarios John Nash set up to test the Rand Corporation’s secretaries. It is a model for human interaction, based on a set of false assumptions about human behavior. Even if we buy the proposition that people act as self-interestedly as they possibly can, we must accept the reality that people’s actual choices don’t correspond with their own financial well-being.


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The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

While it was common for observers to note the numerical replacement of high-wage industrial jobs with low-wage service jobs, few perceived any connection between these processes. “The decline of manufacturing employment was accompanied by a steady increase of employment in service industries,” observed a RAND Corporation study. “For many, the loss of manufacturing jobs meant unemployment or lower-paying jobs in new occupations.” In this typical analysis, the relationship between the two processes appeared to be coincidental.3 The rapid growth in the late 1970s of the largest “new economy” sector, health care, resulted from the interaction between the existing institutions of the welfare state and the broad effects of industrial decline.

The result was not so much the conservation of old family structures as it was aggravation of the difficulty of transition to two-earner households. Working-class women had to deal with increasingly contradictory demands on their time and energy and had to do so using scarcer resources.48 Young people—especially African Americans—raised in this environment entered a brutal labor market. The RAND Corporation study of Pittsburgh’s education system and labor market, for example, had expected to find rising wages for entry-level jobs, since a diminishing pool of young potential hires should have driven up the price of labor in that age cohort. But downward pressure on the higher tiers of the labor market instead cascaded into and swamped the entry-level labor market.

For the classic study of industrial job loss, see William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). 3. Thomas K. Glennan Jr. et al., Education, Employment, and the Economy: An Examination of Work-Related Education in Greater Pittsburgh (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1989). 4. Dennis C. Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1980); John H. Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002); “Strike Threat Effects,” August 30, 1967, box 1, Coordinating Committee Meetings, vol. 2, RCCP.


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

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

Because it was the first true stored-program computer-and because the Pentagon wanted replicas of its own for nuclear-weapons calculations- the Institute for Advanced Study's machine would serve as the model for first- generation computers constructed during the 1950s at the University of Illinois, the RAND Corporation, IBM, and the national laboratories at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Argonne. Software. By 1947, von Neumann and Goldstine had laid the foundations for software engineering with the first installment of "Planning and Coding Prob- lems for an Electronic Computing Instrument," a report that they would pub- lish in three parts over the next year and that by default would become the standard textbook for the whole first generation of programmers.

Not only did he see it as the kind of adolescent saber-rattling that was going to get us all incinerated, but he felt that his old friend had come to personify a dangerously seductive brand of intellectual hubris. Through the use of innovative analytical tools such NEW KINDS OF PEOPLE 91 as von Neumann's game theory, went the argument-an argument that was al- ready being embraced by strategic thinkers in the government and in newly formed think tanks such as the RAND Corporation-the nuclear-arms race could be rationalized, mathematized, reasoned about, and managed. Wiener begged to differ. He certainly didn't favor ilTationality in human af- fairs; the world, he felt, had already heard entirely too much about the "triumph of the will" from Hitler and his ilk. But he did want to see this rising generation of mathematical Cold Warriors be a little less naive about the uncertainties of the world.

One day the air-defense programming would be finished, and then what would they do? IBM had much the same reaction, as did Bell Labs, another subcontractor. The upshot was that the programming respon- THE FREEDOM TO MAKE MISTAKES 119 sibility, along with many of the original Lincoln Lab programmers, were eventu- ally transferred to Santa Monica and the RAND Corporation's system develop- ment division, which in December 1956 would break away and become the independent Systems Development Corporation. Second, in the early 1950s there probably were no more than a few thousand programmers in the whole country. So the SAGE project soon found itself in the business of mass education.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Considerably more significant for U.S. policy is Colombia, where the terrible crimes of earlier years mounted sharply in the 1990s, and Colombia became the leading recipient of U.S. arms and training in the hemisphere, in conformity to a consistent pattern. By the decade’s end political murders were running at about ten a day (since perhaps doubled according to Colombian human rights organizations), and the number of displaced people had risen to two million, with some 300,000 more each year, regularly increasing. The State Department and Rand Corporation concur with human rights organizations that some 75–80 percent of the atrocities are attributable to the military and paramilitaries. The latter are so closely linked to the military that Human Rights Watch refers to them as the army’s “sixth division,” alongside the five official divisions.

For the record, “there have been some 18 anti-American terrorist incidents in Western Europe and the Middle East in the three months since the Libyan raid, compared with about 15 during the 31/2 months before it” while “In the world as a whole, the rate of anti-American terrorism looks like being little different from last year,” the Economist observed (while lauding Reagan’s act of courage); and the Rand Corporation’s leading specialist on terrorism noted that terrorist attacks after the raid persisted at about the same level as before.55 Completing the record, on July 3 the FBI released a 41-page report reviewing terrorist incidents within the United States in 1985. Seven were listed, with two people killed.

Included are the plans to extend the “arms race” into space—a “race” with one competitor only—undermining the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and other international obligations. Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) is only a small component, and even that is understood to be an offensive weapon: “not simply a shield but an enabler of action,” the RAND corporation explained, echoing not only the thoughts but even the words of Chinese authorities, who, realistically, regard it as a weapon directed against them. Strategic analysts realistically describe the program as a means to establish U.S. global “hegemony,” which is what the world needs, they explain, echoing many distinguished predecessors.


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Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

It contains about one-eighth the energy of conventional oil on an energy-per-ton basis (5 million British thermal units (BTU) per ton versus almost 40 million BTU per ton in crude oil). It is not economic to exploit oil shales that would generate less than about 15 gallons of oil per ton. A 2005 study by the Rand Corporation concluded that oil prices would have to remain above $70 to $95 (2005$) per barrel for the firstgeneration mining and surface retorting plants to be profitable using existing technology. Such an oil price was surpassed in 2008, but it remains uncertain that such a price would be sustained in the future to justify commercial investment in large-scale recovery.

“Alberta oil sands frenzy fizzling,” Petroleum News, 13(51), December 21, 2008: 8; “Study sees pause in oil sands output growth,” Oil and Gas Journal, February 16, 2009: 5. 159. Rand Report (2005). Bartis, J. T., T. LaTourrette, L. Dixon, D. J. Peterson, and G. Cecchine (2005). Oil Shale Development in the United States: Prospects and Policy Issues, Rand Corporation, Monograph series. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid. 162. Biglarbigi, K., H. Mohan, M. Carolus, and J. Killen (2009). “Analytic approach estimates oil shale development economics,” Oil and Gas Journal, February 2, 2009: 48–53. 163. “Israel presses for oil from shale,” Business Week, July 5, 2006. 164. Dyni, J.

., 126 237 SEC rules, 69, 125–6 status in 2008, 31–2 oil resource pyramids, 160–5 global, 163–5 US, 161–2 oil sands Canada, 27, 29, 122, 132, 136, 168–70 US, 162, 168 oil shale global, 172–3 US, 162, 170–2 oil shocks, 155–6 oil, unconventional, 27, 165–75 oil-use efficiency see efficiency oil-use intensity, 148–52 oil wells, 96–7 oil window, 170 Oklahoma, 62 OPEC, 21, 23–6 dependence on, 36–7, 208 members, 23 price control, 24–6, 218 price rises in 1970s, 63–4 production, 24–5, 118, 218 quotas, 24, 67 reserves, 23 estimates, 67–8, 124–5 OPEC Basket, 24, 41, 56 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, see OAPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, see OPEC Orimulsion, 167 Orinoco heavy-oil belt, 167 overshoot and collapse, 60 palm oil, 212–13 panic, see oil crises patent activity, 222 PDVSA, 168 peak oil, 3–4 effects, 62 Hubbert predictions, 7–9, 11–12 238 Index peak oil (cont’d ) modern proponents, 124 oil company views, 16 oil discovery volume and, 73–4 oil endowment and, 68–9 US Department of Energy predictions, 81 peanut oil, 212 Pennsylvania, 1, 20, 160, 176 Peru, oil reserves, 144 petroleum composition, 18–19 definition, 17 refinement, 18–19 unconventional, 27 see also gasoline and oil petroleum endowment, 178–9 Petroleum Producers Association, 20 petroleum products, from barrel of oil, 37–8 Petroleum Week, 88 placer deposits, 156 plankton, 17 platinum, 106 political stability, 217, 221 population growth, 5, 58–61, 111 Porter, Edward, 114 predictions, 2, 4–13, 60–3, 87–93, 95–99, 123–4, 128, 130, 134–5, 223 price elasticity of demand, 45, 56 price gouging, 48–9 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 217 primary recovery, 162 private investment, 144 processing gain, 38, 39 producer rebound, 200 production costs, 23, 42–3, 133–4, 142 production decline, scarcity and, 98–103 profitable oil extraction prices, 113–4 Prudhoe Bay oil field, 128 Qatar, 23, 74, 176 Rand Corporation, 172 reasonable certainty, 125–6 rebound, 199–200 recession, 25, 154–5 recovery factor, definition, 18 remaining reserves, 28 renewable energy resources, 216 renewable resources, 98–100, 102 Requa, Mark L., 63 research and development spending, 222 reserve additions, 127, 130, 136–7 reserve base, 184 reserve growth, 28, 127, 134–6 reserves booking, 125–6 definition, 17, 122 private investment and, 144 revisions based on backdating, 136 see also gold reserves; natural gas reserves; oil reserves resource endowment, 6 resource pyramid, 156–73 resource substitution, 107–8, 207 resources definition, 17, 122 non-renewable, 100–3 renewable, 98–100, 102 reserves vs., 126 rock bit, 223 Royal Dutch Shell in-situ recovery method, 170 oil discoveries, 144 oil reserves, 23, 69, 125–6 Russia heavy oil, 166–7 natural gas, 145 oil production, 32, 144–5 oil reserves, 144 Sasol, 176 Saudi Arabia oil consumption, 74 oil production, 32, 71–2 Index incremental cost, 114 spare capacity, 118 oil reserves, 72 OPEC membership, 23 scarcity, 61, 77–9, 98–116, 186, 196, 219, 222 scarcity rent, 116–18 Science, 2, 5, 65, 90 Scientific American, 106 SEC, 69, 125, 126 SEC Rule (4–10), 125 secondary recovery, 162 security, 12–3, 64, 195, 217–9, 221 Shell see Royal Dutch Shell Shell Canada, 169 Shenhua China Coal Liquefaction Corporation, 177 silver, 106, 108 Simmons, Mathew, 104 Simon-Ehrlich bet, 103–5 Simon, Julian, 103–4 Six Day War (1967), 112–13, 115 Smithsonian Institute, 63 social disintegration, 217 solar power generation, 214 “sour” oil, 40 South Africa, transportation fuels from coal, 176 South America, heavy oil, 167 South Korea, vehicle ownership, 205 South Pars field, 138 soybean oil, 212–13 Spindletop, 160 spot price, 48 St.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

And once the intel agencies started allocating more of their budgets for zero-day exploits and attack tools off the private market, there was even less incentive to turn over the underlying zero-day flaws to vendors for patching. Instead, they started upping the classification levels and secrecy around these programs. The irony is that such secrecy did little to make Americans more secure. Zero-days do not stay secret indefinitely. One study by RAND Corporation, the research corporation that concentrates on U.S. defense planning, found that while the average zero-day exploit can stay secret for nearly seven years, roughly a quarter of zero-day exploits will be discovered within a year and a half. Earlier studies determined that the average life-span of a zero-day is ten months.

And yet, the “move fast and break things” mantra Mark Zuckerberg pushed in Facebook’s earliest days has failed us time and time again. The annual cost from cyber losses now eclipses those from terrorism. In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And that was the conservative estimate. Individual data sets predicted annual cyber losses of more than two trillion dollars.

The references to the number of lines of code in Linux, the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter Aircraft, and Microsoft Vista were sourced from Richard Danzig’s 2014 article, “Surviving on a Diet of Poisoned Fruit: Reducing the National Security Risks of America’s Cyber Dependencies,” published by the Center for a New American Security. Willis H. Ware’s prescient 1967 RAND report was officially titled, “Security and Privacy in Compute Systems,” but came to be called the “Ware Report.” It is available in George Washington University’s National Security Archive: nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=2828418-Document-01-Willis-H-Ware-RAND-Corporation-P. The 1970 Anderson Report for the Defense Science Board Task Force is available here: csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/publications/conference-paper/1998/10/08/proceedings-of-the-21st-nissc-1998/documents/early-cs-papers/ware70.pdf. Two comprehensive accounts of NSA’s budget and management challenges in the pre-9/11 era are George Cahlink’s September 1, 2001 piece, “Breaking the Code,” for Government Executive magazine, and Roger Z.


pages: 186 words: 49,595

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

Consecrate them with a lofty mission; inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them of country, of glory, of power, of great memories. The above quote from Italian nationalist Guiseppe Mazzini opens the 2003 report “The Youth Factor: The New Demographics of the Middle East and the Implications for U.S. Policy.” The report, authored by Graham Fuller, formerly of the CIA, US Foreign Service, and RAND Corporation, joined a chorus of voices from the Washington, DC establishment in the post-9/11 and post-Cold War era trumpeting the need to contain and capture the hearts and minds of Arab and Muslim youth through “soft power.” With up to 75 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region under thirty-five years old, the young were well placed to act as what Mazzini calls the “apostles for a new religion.”

., 26 Obama, Barack, 2, 42, 83, 106, 148 2008 Presidential Campaign, 36, 40, 119 One Million Voices Against FARC, 35 See also FARC Open Door, 14 Open Source Center, 40 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 7 Othman, Ahmed, 47, 59 Otpor, 33–5 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 154 PlayStation, 8, 74 Police Day, 89–90, 96 Policy Planning, 2, 23, 29, 33, 41–2 See also State Department pornography, 4, 9 Port Said, 75 Powell, Colin, 26 al-Qadaseen. See Church of the Two Saints Rabaa al-Adawaya, 137, 140 Radio Sawa, 32 Ramadan, Tariq, 146–7 RAND Corporation, 25 Rebel. See Tamarud Reporters Without Borders, 103–4 Revolution 2.0, 1, 42, 64, 79, 121, 149 See also Ghonim, Wael Ross, Alec, 42–3 Sabahi, Hamdeen, 124 Said, Khaled, 46, 47–101, 107, 108, 110–11, 150–5 January 25th event and, 5, 19 See also “We Are All Khaled Said” saint, 151–5 Saint Avatatas, 11 Sakhr, 7 Sakr, Rehab, 121 Salafi Front, 91–2 satellite dishes, 7, 8–10, 12 Satellite Thief (Harami al-Dish), 9 Saweris, Nagib, 10 Schmidt, Eric, 44 See also Google Serbia, 18, 33–4 Shafik, Ahmed, 120, 122 Sharp, Gene, 35, 88 Sidi Bouzid, 99, 101 silent stand, 65–68, 87–89, 97 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 136–41, 155–6 6th of April Youth Movement, 22–3, 34, 59, 86–7, 107 AYM and, 35, 38, 46 members of, 37, 75, 107, 110, 119 Skype, 35 soft power, 25–7, 156 Spacenet Internet cafe, 47, 49 State Department, 2, 23–4, 28–44, 106, 146–8 Stepka, Matthew, 1 Stone, Biz, 22 See also Twitter Suez, 114 canal, 14 Supreme Constitutional Court, 136 Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), 3, 74, 120 taboos, 12–14, 158 Al Taghrir.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

New funding model for journalism: try doing it for a change.”10 WikiLeaks new level of visibility prompted New York Times reporter Noam Cohen to pose a fascinating question: “What Would Daniel Ellsberg do with the Pentagon Papers today?” Would he have given them to The New York Times and waited for them to be analyzed and published? Or would he just post them online? Back in 1970–71, it had taken Ellsberg, then a high-level analyst with the Rand Corporation, several months to photocopy the ten-thousand-page secret history of America’s war, and months more of efforts to get them published. Ellsberg told Cohen, “As of today, I wouldn’t have waited that long. I would have gotten a scanner and put them on the Internet.” Ellsberg admitted that the government’s effort to stop their publication was useful in garnering public attention; when Nixon’s Justice Department got a court injunction stopping the Times from continuing to publish the papers, Ellsberg passed copies to The Washington Post.

Ellsberg was a defense analyst with top security clearances for many years before he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers. He had worked on nuclear war planning policy for the National Security Council before studying Vietnam policy for the Pentagon and State Department. In the fall of 1968, he was working for the Rand Corporation, still with his clearances, and was part of a group tasked by Henry Kissinger—the incoming national security adviser to Presidentelect Richard Nixon—to prepare a study of options for the new president on Vietnam. While presenting that report to Kissinger, he tried to warn of the dangers of relying too much on top secret information.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Indeed, it had largely written off SpaceX, as the company was popularly known, and anyone else trying to build new rockets in the United States. “Successful new entry into the relevant markets is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future,” the FTC concluded. A government-mandated study of the launch market published by the RAND Corporation a year later was similarly skeptical: “The evaluation of Falcon 9 at this time presents an unclear picture . . . The lack of launch experience raises questions about the validity of the available launch prices . . . [and] makes an objective evaluation of the actual costs of this new vehicle extremely difficult.”

Decker, General Accounting Office, letter to Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces (“Defense Space Activities: Continuation of Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program’s Progress to Date Subject to Some Uncertainty”), GAO-04-778R, June 4, 2004. “statements or projections”: Decker, “Defense Space Activities.” “or face extinction”: Decker, “Defense Space Activities.” “supplier readiness, and transportation”: Forrest McCartney et al., National Security Space Launch Report (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2006), 30. whole fracas to rest: David Bowermaster, “Boeing Probe Intensifies over Secret Lockheed Papers,” Seattle Times, January 9, 2005. “support the loss of competition”: Kenneth Krieg, Letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Majoras, August 15, 2006. surpass $1 billion in 2018: Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Budget Estimates, Space Procurement, Air Force, May 2017

See also McDonnell Douglas NASA space taxi program bids, 112–13 reusable (X-15), 16, 215–16 SpaceX challenges, 78, 107 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 59, 206–7, 228 Antares, 121, 206–7, 228 Antares explosion, 206–8 Cygnus, 121, 206, 208 NASA space taxi program, 121, 137 Orlando Sentinel, 142 P; PayPal, 2, 18, 45, 66 Pegasus, 235 Peregrine vehicle, 242 Pettit, Donald, 149, 157–58, 164 PICA-X, 156 Planetary Resources, 56 Planetary Society, 124 Powell, Colin, 75 Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, 140 Putin, Vladimir, 10, 181, 183, 185 Q; Qualcomm, 51, 234 R; Ramon, Ilan, 73 RAND Corporation, 38 Raptor engine, 243–44 Rasky, Dan, 156 RD-180 (Russian engine), 59, 182, 190 injunction on imports, 187–88 McCain bill banning imports, 190 Reaction Research Society, 51, 63 Reagan, Ronald, 19, 53 Red Mars (Robinson), 46 Ressi, Adeo, 59 reusable rockets, 195–96, 241, 250. See also Falcon 9; New Shepard Richards, Bob, 242 Robert J.


The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

James T. Bartis, Tom LaTourrette, Lloyd Dixon, D. J. Peterson, and Gary Cecchine, Oil Shale Development in the United States: Prospects and Policy Issues (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005). Figures were converted from 2005 dollars to 2012 dollars by using CPI. 32. James T. Bartis, Frank Camm, and David S. Ortiz, Producing Liquid Fuels from Coal: Prospects and Policy Issues (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2008). Figures were converted from 2007 dollars to 2012 dollars by using CPI. 33. Bartis et al., Oil Shale Development in the United States. 34. Ibid. 35. Quoted in David Ignatius, “An Economic Boom Ahead?”

“I know that when something has a bad name,” Jonas says, “people are very hesitant to go back there, even if things have totally changed.” That change is what a few investors are betting on. Modern oil prices and new technology could eventually make oil shale economically viable. In 2005, Jim Bartis at the RAND Corporation led a team to study the ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ON THE HORIZON • 63 issue. They estimated oil shale could become profitable at an oil price between $80 and $110 a barrel, with costs eventually falling over time as the industry gained experience.31 (Three years later, Bartis brought together another group of researchers to look at the prospect of turning coal into liquid fuel; they concluded it could work with prices around sixty to seventy dollars per barrel.)32 But oil shale would take a lot of time to develop at a commercial scale; the RAND teams estimated it would be at least twenty years before production might be brought up to a million barrels a day.


pages: 328 words: 100,381

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

For this reason, contractors are specifically prohibited from carrying out what the federal regulations call “inherently government functions.” One reason for this is obvious: “Their interest is just not the interest of the government. It’s the interest of their company,” said Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon’s former policy adviser on recruitment matters. Rostker studies government workforce issues at the Rand Corporation. Despite these rules, in Top Secret America, contractors carry out inherently governmental work all the time in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency. What started as a clever temporary fix has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal government is still even able to stand on its own.

Longoria killed two enemy snipers, helped recapture the escapees, moved wounded Pakistani casualties, and tended to seventeen dead Pakistani soldiers in what the Pentagon called “the bloodiest escape and firefight in Pakistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.” For his efforts, he was awarded the Bronze Star in a private ceremony. In contrast to its successes, which usually went unpublicized, JSOC’s mistakes reverberated around the world. In what the Rand Corporation labeled “the single most serious errant attack of the entire war,” on July 1, 2002, a JSOC-operated AC-130 gunship fired upon and killed at least forty-eight civilians in the small village of Kakarak in the Deh Rawod area of Uruzgan province. The incident took many inside the Pentagon by surprise, a senior air force officer said at the time, as most people had already shifted their attention to preparing for war with Iraq.

By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). Rebecca Grant. The First 600 Days of Combat: The U.S. Air Force in the Global War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: IRIS Press, 2004). Benjamin S. Lambeth. Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2005). Matt J. Martin (with Charles W. Sasser). Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2010). General Richard B. Myers, USAF, Ret. (with Malcolm McConnell). Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security (New York: Threshold Editions [A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.], 2009).


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

These numbers double because the spacecraft will need fuel to decelerate when it reaches its destination. Gathering this much antimatter will be impossible for the foreseeable future. At the moment, it would cost $100 billon just to create one milligram of antimatter.11 For those wanting to try this at home—the calculation, not actually building an interstellar rocket—the RAND Corporation used to sell the nifty (and very retro) Rocket Performance Calculator, dating from 1958.12 This circular slide rule incorporates the rocket equation and it can still be found occasionally on eBay, making for a great conversation piece. Figure 50. NASA’s version of the Project Orion concept, where pulsed nuclear fusion projects the power.

For more recent technical design work, see “Physics of Rocket Systems with Separated Rockets and Propellant” by A. Zuppero 2010, online at http://neofuel.com/optimum/. 11. “Reaching for the Stars: Scientists Examine Using Antimatter and Fusion to Propel Future Spacecraft,” April 1999, NASA, online at http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/prop12apr99_1/. 12. The Rand Corporation, online at http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2300.html. 13. “Galactic Matter and Interstellar Flight” by R. W. Bussard 1960. Astronautica Acta, vol. 6, pp. 179–94. 14. “Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails” by R. L. Forward 1984. Journal of Spacecraft, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 187–95. 15.

., 239 Los Angeles Times, 71 Losing My Virginity (Branson), 86, 87 Louis IX, king of France, 23 Louis XVI, king of France, 68 Lovelock, James, 286 Lowell, Percival, 163–64 Lucian of Samosata, 20 Lucretius, 18–19 Luna program, 50–51 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, 156 Lunokhod rover, 143 Lynx rocket plane, 101 M5 fiber, 161 McAuliffe, Christa, 55, 74 Mack 3 Blackbird, 69 McKay, Chris, 173 McLellan, William, 283 magnetic implants, 207 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 190 magnetic sails, 186, 223 magnitude of time, 248–50, 249 Manhattan Project, 36, 221 Manifest Destiny, applied to space, 146–47, 199 Manned Habitat Unit, 169 many worlds concept, 17–20, 17, 49, 267 Mao Zedong, 141 Marconi, Guglielmo, 237 Mariner 2, 51 Mariner 4, 164 Marino, Lori, 190 Marriott hotels, 145 Mars, 28, 237, 270 challenges of travel to, 166–70 distance from Earth to, 50, 148, 166 Earth compared to, 171–72, 216 establishing a colony on, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 200–201, 203, 214, 248 evidence of water on, 124–25, 163–66, 165, 173 fly-bys of, 51, 170 imaginative perceptions of, 163–65 latency on, 178 map of, 163 obstacles to exploration of, 66–67, 148 one-way journey to, 166, 170–71, 200 as potentially habitable, 124–25, 163, 165–66, 171, 172–74, 234, 278 privately funded missions to, 170–71 probes to, 40, 51, 52, 164–65, 176, 246 projected exploration of, 94–98, 101, 104, 115, 119, 157, 161, 163–74, 178, 181, 182 property rights on, 145, 198–99 sex and reproduction on, 200 simulated journey to, 169–70 soil of, 170 staging points for, 161 terraforming of, 172–74, 182, 216, 227 tests for life on, 52 Mars Direct, 169 Mars500 mission, 169 Mars One, 170–71, 198–201 Mars Society, 166 Mars 3 lander, 51 Masai people, 120 Massachusetts General Hospital, 250 Masson-Zwaan, Tanja, 199 mathematics, 19 as universal language, 236–37 Matrix, The, 260 matter, manipulation of, 258 matter-antimatter annihilation, 220, 220, 221–22 Mavroidis, Constantinos, 182 Max-Q (maximum aerodynamic stress), 46 Maxwell, James Clerk, 183 Mayor, Michel, 126–28, 133 medicine: challenges and innovation in, 92–93, 263 cyborgs in, 205 medicine (continued) as lacking in space, 200 in life extension, 259 nanotechnology in, 225, 259 robots in, 180, 181, 182, 205 mediocrity, principle of, 261 Mendez, Abel, 278 mental models, 13–17, 18–19 Mercury: orbit of, 126, 215 property rights on, 145 as uninhabitable, 124 mercury poisoning, 118 Mercury program, 41, 42, 71, 74, 272 meta-intelligence, 94 meteorites, 152, 160, 160, 164, 195 methane, 52–53, 125, 132, 278 as biomarker, 217–18 methanogens, 217 “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, A” (Goddard), 30, 31 Methuselah, 131 mice, in scientific research, 48–49, 250–51 microbes, microbial life, 97–98, 173, 174, 217, 241, 246, 286 habitable environments for, 122–25, 165–66, 186 microcephaly, 203 microgravity, 115 microsatellites, 90 Microsoft, 84, 188 microwaves: beaming of, 223–24 signals, 187 Microwave Sciences, 223 Middle East, population dispersion into, 8, 118 migration: early human population dispersion through, 5–9, 9, 15, 19 motivation for, 9–12, 11 military: covert projects of, 69–72 Eisenhower’s caveat about, 79 in Internet development, 77, 78–79 nanotechnology in, 180–81, 225 in rocket development, 30, 32–39, 55–56, 71 in space programs, 73, 76, 79, 144, 153 Milky Way galaxy, 227, 240, 253, 263, 270 ancient Greek concept of, 18 Drake equation for detectable life in, 188, 233–35 Earth-like exoplanets in, 129–33, 233, 291 formation and age of, 235 size of, 242 Millis, Marc, 290 mind control, 245 mind uploading, 259 miniaturization, see nanotechnology minimum viable population, 201, 251 mining: of asteroids, 155–56, 182, 214 of Enceladus, 227 on Moon, 214 by robots, 178, 182 Minsky, Marvin, 177, 179 MirCorp, 75 mirrors, 173 Mir Space Station, 75, 115, 167–68 Miss Baker (monkey), 47–48, 48 Mission Control, 43, 100, 158, 269 MIT, 38, 77, 90, 141, 226, 257 mitochondrial DNA, 6, 9 Mittelwerk factory, 33, 35 Mojave Desert, 71, 82, 83 population adaptation to heat in, 118–19 molecules, in nanotechnology, 151 Mongols, 23, 24 monkeys, in space research, 47–48, 48 Montgolfier brothers, 68 Moon: age of, 50 ancient Greek concept of, 18 in asteroid capture, 156 distance from Earth to, 49–50, 150, 166, 267 first animals on, 49 first man on, 71, 158 latency on, 178 lunar base proposed for, 157–63, 158, 160, 195, 214, 248 manned landings on, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56, 63, 71, 84, 99, 104, 108, 143, 157, 158, 176, 219, 270, 272 obstacles to exploration of, 66 orbit of, 25 probes to, 40, 51, 129, 140, 143 projected missions to, 92, 143, 157–63, 166, 214, 275 property rights on, 145–47, 198–99 proposed commercial flights to, 102 in science fiction, 20, 26 soil of, 159, 160, 162 as staging point for Mars, 161 staging points for, 148 telescopic views of, 31, 49–50 as uninhabitable, 124, 166 US commitment to reach, 41–45 Moon Treaty (1979), 146 Moon Treaty, UN (1984), 279 Moore, John, 203 Moravec, 259–60 Morgan, Barbara, 74 Morrison, Philip, 187, 239 Mosaic web browser, 79 Moses, 148 motion, Newton’s laws of, 25, 67–68 multistage rockets, 29 multiverse, 252–57, 255 Musk, Elon, 94–98, 97, 100–101, 112–13, 148, 205 mutation, 6–7 cosmic rays and, 204 7R, 10–12, 11, 15 mutually assured destruction, 42 Mylar, 184, 225 N1/L3 rocket, 44, 54 nanobots, 179–82, 181, 224–28 NanoSail-D, 184, 185 nanosponges, 180 nanotechnology, 151–52, 179–82, 208, 214, 245, 280, 283 projected future of, 257–59 see also nanobots National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 83, 90, 96, 97–98, 114, 116–17, 128, 144, 153, 156, 176, 178, 182, 184–85, 185, 195, 200, 205, 206, 216, 224, 226, 271, 275, 280, 290 and Air Force, 71 artistic depiction of space colonies by, 196, 196 budget of, 39, 42, 43, 49, 54, 64, 75, 99, 104, 140, 144, 158, 166, 188, 238, 270, 272, 284 cut back of, 45, 49, 54, 188 formation of, 38–39, 145, 269 private and commercial collaboration with, 99–102, 104 revival of, 103–5 space program of, 51, 55–56, 71–76, 92, 157–58, 285–86 stagnation of, 63–67, 141, 147, 166 National Geographic Society, 7, 265 National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 187–88 National Science Foundation (NSF), 78–79 Native Americans, 118 naturalness, 256 natural selection, 6, 16, 123, 164, 251, 291 Nature, 187 Naval Research lab, 37 Navy, US: Bureau of Aeronautics, 30 in rocket development, 36–37 Nayr, Ernst, 238 Nazis, 48 Propaganda Ministry of, 32 von Braun and, 32–34, 141, 269 NBC, 75 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 43 “needle in a haystack” problem, 188–89, 242–43 “Nell” (rocket), 29 Neptune, 127, 131, 225 as uninhabitable, 125 Nergal, 163 Netscape, 80 New Mexico, 88, 88, 105 Newton, Isaac, 24–25, 25, 30, 67–68, 110, 262, 267 New York Times, 30, 94 Nicholas, Henry, 214 Niven, Larry, 198, 253 Nixon, Richard, 108, 167 Nobel Prize, 126, 180, 214 nomad planets, 128 Noonan, James, 266 nuclear fission, 220, 220, 221 nuclear fusion, 110, 161–62, 220, 221, 221, 222 nuclear reactors, 224 nuclear weapons, 36, 42, 78, 129, 146, 197–98, 222, 234–35, 244, 245, 246, 286 Nuremberg Chronicles, 17 Nyberg, Karen, 200 Obama, Barack, 104 Oberth, Hermann, 28, 31–32, 36, 268 oceans: acidification of, 195 sealed ecosystem proposed for, 197 Oculus Rift, 176 Ohio, astronauts from, 74 Okuda, Michael, 228 Olsen, Ken, 213 100 Year Starship project, 224 100 Year Starship Symposium, 229 101955 Bennu (asteroid), 156 O’Neill, Gerard, 196, 251–52 Opportunity rover, 165 optical SETI, 190, 243 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 100–101, 275 orbits: concept of, 25 geostationary, 149–50, 150 legislation on, 146 low Earth, 49, 54, 63, 70–71, 70, 74–75, 97, 100, 110, 113–14, 151, 155, 184 manned, 40–41, 141–42 staging points from, 148 orcas, 190 Orion spacecraft, 104 Orteig, Raymond, 90 Orteig Prize, 90–91 Orwell, George, 35 OSIRIS-REx, 156 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 145–47, 198–99 “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” (Clarke), 201 oxygen, 156, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173–74, 182, 193–95, 214 Oymyakon, Siberia, population adaptation to cold in, 119–20 ozone, as biomarker, 217 Pacific Ocean, 9, 224 Pac-Man, 175 Page, Larry, 92 Paine, Thomas, 167 Pale Blue Dot (Sagan), 121 “Pale Blue Dot,” Earth as, 53, 118–22, 121, 130 Paperclip, Operation, 141 parabolic flight, 93 paradox, as term, 241 Paratrechina longicornis (crazy ant), 193 Parkinson’s disease, 202–3 particle physics, standard model of, 256 Pascal, Blaise, 120 Pauley, Phil, 196–97 PayPal, 95, 97 Pensées (Pascal), 120 People’s Daily, 162 People’s Liberation Army, 144 Pericles, 18 Pettit, Don, 100, 273 phenotype, 6 philanthropy, 95 PhoneSat, 185 photons, 183, 186 in teleportation, 229, 230, 231 photosynthesis, as biomarker, 217 pigs, 250 Pinker, Steven, 16 Pioneer probes, 50, 51–52 piracy, 24 Pitcairn Island, 202 planetary engineering, 172 Planetary Resources, 156 planetary science, 51–52, 176 Planetary Society, 184 planets: exploration of, 49–53 formation of, 156 plate techtonics, 132, 241 play, imagination in, 10, 14 pluralism, 17–20, 17, 49 plutonium, 66 poetry, space, 272–73 politics, space exploration and, 63–64, 104, 141, 214, 238 Polyakov, Valeri, 115, 167–68 population bottleneck, 201–2, 287 Poynter, Jane, 193 Princess of Mars, A (Burroughs), 164 Principia (Newton), 25 Project Orion, 221, 221 Project Ozma, 187–88, 237, 253 prokaryotes, 172 property rights, in space, 145–47, 198 Proton rockets, 65, 113 proton scoop, 222–23 Proxmire, William, 238 Puerto Rico, 239, 243 pulsar, 131 Pythagorean Theorem, 238 Qian Xuesen, 141 Qi Jiguang, 24 Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, 92 quantum entanglement, 230–32, 230 quantum genesis, 255 quantum mechanics, 258 quantum teleportation, 230–32, 230 quantum theory, 189 qubits, 230 Queloz, Didier, 126–28, 133 R-7 rocket, 37 R-16 rocket, 43 radiation, infrared, 109, 253–54, 254 radioactivity, as energy source, 124, 181 radio waves, 66, 187, 189, 242 ramjets, 222–23 RAND Corporation, 222 Rare Earth hypothesis, 241 RCS Energia, 106 RD-180 engine, 72 Reagan, Ronald, administration of, 167, 271 reality TV, 75, 171, 214, 282 “Realm of Fear,” 229 reasoning, human capacity for, 13–17, 18–19 red dwarfs, 131 Red Mars (Stanley), 174 Red Scare, 141 Redstone rocket, 36–37, 71 reindeer, 119–20 remote sensing, 175–91, 224 RepRap Project, 227 reproduction, sexual, 6, 172 Ride, Sally, 74 “Right Stuff,” as term, 71, 114 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), 272 Ringworld series (Niven), 253 risk: as basic to human nature, 9, 262 genetic factor in, 10–12 of living on Mars, 167–70 in pushing human limits, 120 of space tourism, 102, 105–9, 155 of space travel, 42–43, 55–56, 56, 106–9, 152–53 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 174 robonaut project, 179 robots, robotics: as aids to humans, 249, 250 in asteroid redirection, 104 commercial, 178 ethical issues of, 179 nanotechnology in, 179–82, 181 remote control of, 177–78 remote sensing through, 176 self-assembly and self-replication by, 226–28, 258, 259 in spacecraft, 50, 100, 100 space exploration by, 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 see also cyborgs; nanobots Rocketdyne, 112 rocket equation, 27, 53, 72–73, 110–11, 111, 148, 220, 268 rocket fuel, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161 comparison of efficiency of, 219–24 Rocket Performance Calculator, 222 rockets: alternatives to, 148–53 “bible” of, 267 challenges in launching of, 43–44, 46–49, 106, 107, 111–12, 148 comparison of US and Soviet, 44 cost of, 112–13, 113 developing technology of, 21–39, 43, 101, 103, 112–13, 183, 262 fuel for, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161, 220–21 launched from planes, 84 liquid-fueled, 28–29, 29 physics and function of, 110–14 proposed energy technologies for, 220–24 reusable, 101, 103, 111, 112, 113 solar sails compared to, 183 as term, 23 visionaries in development of, 26–30, 94 in warfare, 22–24, 30, 32–34 see also specific rockets “Rockets to the Planets in Space, The” (Oberth), 28 Rogers Commission, 271 Rohrabacher, Dana, 284 Rome, ancient, 18, 67, 163 Rovekamp, Roger, 207 rovers, 66–67, 92, 125, 140, 143, 158, 165, 167 nanotechnology in, 181–82 remote sensing through, 176 Rozier, Jean-François de, 68 RP-1 kerosine, 110 RS-25 rocket, 112 Russia, 23, 26–27, 149, 178 space program of, 37, 65–66, 72, 75, 84, 91, 104, 106, 107–8, 113, 114, 140, 143, 168, 184, 195, 200, 271 space tourism by, 75, 102 tensions between US and, 72 see also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 27, 47 Russian Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 72, 82–86, 85, 88, 88, 89, 91, 97–98, 105–6, 214 Rutan, Dick, 83–84 Rutan Aircraft Factory, 83 Saberhagen, Fred, 177, 259 Sagan, Carl, 53, 121–22, 121, 176–77, 184, 198, 234–35, 238, 240 Sahakian, Barbara, 98 Sahara Desert, 238 sails: solar, 183–86, 185 wind-driven, 67–68, 183, 262 Salyut space station, 54, 108 satellites: artificial Earth, 36–39, 37, 40, 65, 71, 106 commercial, 96, 105 communications, 101, 142, 153 in energy capture, 253 geostationary, 149 GPS, 144 launching of, 154, 154 miniature, 90, 184–85 Saturn: moon of, 125, 227 probes to, 52–53 as uninhabitable, 125 Saturn V rocket, 43, 44, 46, 54, 83, 104, 111, 113, 113, 166 Scaled Composites, 83, 89 science fiction, 192, 196, 222, 223, 239, 250, 253 aliens in, 186–87 in film, 28, 204 Mars in, 164, 174 roots of, 20 technologies of, 228–32, 259 see also specific authors and works scientific method, 213 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 187–90, 234, 239, 254 evolution and technology of, 237–39, 242–43, 242 lack of signals detected by, 236–37, 240–44 new paradigms for, 258 “Searching for Interstellar Communications” (Cocconi and Morrison), 187 sea travel: early human migration through, 8, 9 exploration by, 109, 262 propulsion in, 67–68 self-replication, 226–28, 258, 259 Senate, US, Armed Services Preparedness Committee of, 39 SETI Institute, 188 78–6 (pig), 250 sex: promiscuous, 12 in reproduction, 6, 172 in space, 200, 214 Shackleton Energy Company, 161 Shane, Scott, 98 Shatner, William, 88–89 Shelley, Mary, 206 Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”), 145 Shenzhou 10, 142–43 Shepard, Alan, 41, 84 Shostak, Seth, 243 Siberia, 65, 119–20, 238 population dispersion into, 8, 118, 218 Sidereal Messenger, The (Galileo), 270 Siemienowicz, Kazimierz, 267 Simonyi, Charles, 75 Sims, 175 simulation: infinite regression in, 261 living in, 257–62 simulation hypothesis, 261 Sinatra, Frank, 45 singularity, 207 in origin of cosmos, 255 and simulation, 257–62 technological, 258–59 Singularity University, 94, 259 Skylab space station, 54, 116 Skype video, 176 smart motes, 181, 225 smartphones, 92, 185 Smithsonian Institution, 30, 81 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 85, 91, 271 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 103 Snowden, Edward, 178 social media, 195 Sojourner rover, 165 SolarCity, 96–97 solar flares, 167 solar power, 96, 181, 183–86 solar sails, solar sailing, 183–86, 185, 223, 225, 227 Solar System: discovery of first planet beyond, 126–27 edge of, 50, 53, 121 formation of, 156 habitability potential in, 122, 124–26 latency variations in, 178 probes into, 51–52, 66, 177, 185–86, 208, 270 projected travel within, 248–49, 263 property rights in, 145–47, 198 worlds beyond, 126–29, 156, 208, 215, 250, 263 solar wind, 162, 223 sound barrier, breaking of, 69, 71 South America, 11, 202, 218 Soviet Union, 30, 34, 37, 141 fall of, 47, 65, 75, 197, 271–72 rocket development in, 35–39 space program failures and losses of, 43, 47, 50–51, 54, 269 space program of, 37–39, 40–43, 141, 149, 237, 271 Soyuz spacecraft, 43, 55, 75, 84, 91, 102, 106, 113, 143 crash of, 107–8 space: civilians in, 55, 74 civilian vs. military control of, 37–39, 69–71, 79, 153 commercialization of, 55, 63, 73–76, 79–80, 88–89, 92, 97, 99–109, 100, 110, 147, 153–56, 154, 199, 214, 249, 275 debris in, 144, 152 first American in, 41 first man in, 40–41, 41 first women in, 40, 74 as infinite, 18, 19, 22 as inhospitable to human beings, 53–54, 114–17, 121 legislation on, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 living in, 192–208 “living off the land” in, 166, 200 peaceful exploration of, 39 potential for human habitabilty in, 123 prototype for sealed ecosystem in, 192–97 Space Act (1958), 39, 90 Space Adventures, 102, 275 space colonization: challenges of, 197–201 cyborgs in, 204–8 evolutionary diversion in, 201–4 legal issues in, 198–200 of Mars, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 203 off-Earth human beings in, 215, 250–51 prototype experiments for, 192–97 space elevators, 27, 148–53, 150, 160–61, 185, 280 “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” 178 Spaceflight Society, 28 space hotels, 102–3 Space Launch System (SLS), 104 space mining, 155–56, 161–62 “Space Oddity,” 142 spaceplanes, 71–72, 85, 144 Spaceport America, 1–6, 105 Space Race, 35–39, 37, 40–43, 50, 55, 139 SpaceShipOne, 72, 85, 85, 88–89, 88, 91 SpaceShipTwo, 88, 101, 105 Space Shuttle, 45, 46, 49, 64, 72, 84, 85, 111–13, 112, 159, 167, 194, 219–20, 222, 275 disasters of, 55–56, 56, 74–75, 107, 111–13 final flight of, 271 limitations of, 55–56, 64–65 as reusable vehicle, 54–55 space sickness, 114 spacesuits, 89, 182, 195–96 space-time, 255, 255 manipulation of, 258 space tourism, 63, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 88–89, 91, 101–3, 154, 170, 214 celebrities in, 88, 101–2 revenue from, 154–55, 155 risks of, 102, 105–9, 155 rules for, 105 space travel: beyond Solar System, see interstellar travel bureaucracy of, 105–10, 271 cost of, 39, 42, 45, 49, 54, 55, 66, 75, 81–82, 91, 112–14, 113, 139–49, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 161, 166, 179, 183, 198, 214, 217, 222, 224–26, 252, 270, 275, 284 early attempts at, 21–22, 22 effect of rocket equation in, see rocket equation entrepreneurs of, 81–98 erroneous predictions about, 214 failures and disasters in, 21–22, 22, 38, 43, 47, 50–51, 54–56, 56, 63–64, 68, 72, 74–75, 101, 102, 107, 142, 184, 269, 271, 275 fatality rate of, 107–9 fictional vignettes of, 1–4, 59–62, 135–38, 209–12 Internet compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 life extension for, 250–51 lifetimes lived in, 251 living conditions in, 114–17 new business model for, 99–105 Newton’s theories as basis of, 25 obstacles to, 21, 63, 66–67, 105–109 space travel (continued) as part of simulation, 261–62 public engagement in, 45, 73, 85, 93, 162, 177, 217 remote sensing vs., 175–91 risks of, 43–44, 83, 89, 93, 105–9 speculation on future of, 76–80, 133, 213–32, 248–52 suborbital, 84 telescopic observation vs., 49–50 visionaries of, 26–39, 80, 94, 109 SpaceX, 96, 97, 100–103, 113–14, 275 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, 96, 100, 100, 102, 170 special theory of relativity, 228, 231 specific impulse, 220 spectroscopy, 127, 165, 176 spectrum analyzer, 237 Speer, Albert, 34 Spielberg, Steven, 238 Spirit of St.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Happily, he recovered sufficiently that he was able to receive his Nobel Prize in 1994; his life was made the subject of the award-winning book and film A Beautiful Mind.3 The Dartmouth delegate list is also intriguing for another reason. Apart from the obvious presence of academics, the school hosted representatives from industry, government and the military (and even the RAND Corporation – the California-based thinktank made notorious in the 1960s for dispassionately debating how to ‘win’ a nuclear war). Only a decade earlier, the Manhattan Project had combined the capabilities of US academia, industry, government and military to develop the first atomic bomb – an unequivocal demonstration of US scientific and technological power.

AI as Alchemy By the early 1970s, the wider scientific community was beginning to be more and more frustrated by the very visible lack of progress made on core AI problems, and by the continuing extravagant claims of some researchers. By the mid-1970s, the criticisms reached fever pitch. Of all the critics (and there were many), the most outspoken, and most publicly vitriolic was surely the American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus was commissioned by the RAND Corporation in the mid-1960s to write a report on the state of progress in AI. The title he chose for his report, Alchemy and AI, made very clear his disdain for the field and those who worked in it. Publicly equating the work of a serious scientist to alchemy is extraordinarily insulting. Re-reading Alchemy and AI now, I have to say I’ve never seen any other scientific report like it: the contempt is palpable and still rather shocking, more than half a century later.

A A* 77 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 205–8 accountability 257 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 87–8 adversarial machine learning 190 AF (Artificial Flight) parable 127–9, 243 agent-based AI 136–49 agent-based interfaces 147, 149 ‘Agents That Reduce Work and Information Overload’ (Maes) 147–8 AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) 41 AI – difficulty of 24–8 – ethical 246–62, 284, 285 – future of 7–8 – General 42, 53, 116, 119–20 – Golden Age of 47–88 – history of 5–7 – meaning of 2–4 – narrow 42 – origin of name 51–2 – strong 36–8, 41, 309–14 – symbolic 42–3, 44 – varieties of 36–8 – weak 36–8 AI winter 87–8 AI-complete problems 84 ‘Alchemy and AI’ (Dreyfus) 85 AlexNet 187 algorithmic bias 287–9, 292–3 alienation 274–7 allocative harm 287–8 AlphaFold 214 AlphaGo 196–9 AlphaGo Zero 199 AlphaZero 199–200 Alvey programme 100 Amazon 275–6 Apple Watch 218 Argo AI 232 arithmetic 24–6 Arkin, Ron 284 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) 87–8 Artificial Flight (AF) parable 127–9, 243 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 41 artificial intelligence see AI artificial languages 56 Asilomar principles 254–6 Asimov, Isaac 244–6 Atari 2600 games console 192–6, 327–8 augmented reality 296–7 automated diagnosis 220–1 automated translation 204–8 automation 265, 267–72 autonomous drones 282–4 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports 231 autonomous vehicles see driverless cars autonomous weapons 281–7 autonomy levels 227–8 Autopilot 228–9 B backprop/backpropagation 182–3 backward chaining 94 Bayes nets 158 Bayes’ Theorem 155–8, 365–7 Bayesian networks 158 behavioural AI 132–7 beliefs 108–10 bias 172 black holes 213–14 Blade Runner 38 Blocks World 57–63, 126–7 blood diseases 94–8 board games 26, 75–6 Boole, George 107 brains 43, 306, 330–1 see also electronic brains branching factors 73 Breakout (video game) 193–5 Brooks, Rodney 125–9, 132, 134, 243 bugs 258 C Campaign to Stop Killer Robots 286 CaptionBot 201–4 Cardiogram 215 cars 27–8, 155, 223–35 certainty factors 97 ceteris paribus preferences 262 chain reactions 242–3 chatbots 36 checkers 75–7 chess 163–4, 199 Chinese room 311–14 choice under uncertainty 152–3 combinatorial explosion 74, 80–1 common values and norms 260 common-sense reasoning 121–3 see also reasoning COMPAS 280 complexity barrier 77–85 comprehension 38–41 computational complexity 77–85 computational effort 129 computers – decision making 23–4 – early developments 20 – as electronic brains 20–4 – intelligence 21–2 – programming 21–2 – reliability 23 – speed of 23 – tasks for 24–8 – unsolved problems 28 ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing) 32 confirmation bias 295 conscious machines 327–30 consciousness 305–10, 314–17, 331–4 consensus reality 296–8 consequentialist theories 249 contradictions 122–3 conventional warfare 286 credit assignment problem 173, 196 Criado Perez, Caroline 291–2 crime 277–81 Cruise Automation 232 curse of dimensionality 172 cutlery 261 Cybernetics (Wiener) 29 Cyc 114–21, 208 D DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 87–8, 225–6 Dartmouth summer school 1955 50–2 decidable problems 78–9 decision problems 15–19 deduction 106 deep learning 168, 184–90, 208 DeepBlue 163–4 DeepFakes 297–8 DeepMind 167–8, 190–200, 220–1, 327–8 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 87–8, 225–6 dementia 219 DENDRAL 98 Dennett, Daniel 319–25 depth-first search 74–5 design stance 320–1 desktop computers 145 diagnosis 220–1 disengagements 231 diversity 290–3 ‘divide and conquer’ assumption 53–6, 128 Do-Much-More 35–6 dot-com bubble 148–9 Dreyfus, Hubert 85–6, 311 driverless cars 27–8, 155, 223–35 drones 282–4 Dunbar, Robin 317–19 Dunbar’s number 318 E ECAI (European Conference on AI) 209–10 electronic brains 20–4 see also computers ELIZA 32–4, 36, 63 employment 264–77 ENIAC 20 Entscheidungsproblem 15–19 epiphenomenalism 316 error correction procedures 180 ethical AI 246–62, 284, 285 European Conference on AI (ECAI) 209–10 evolutionary development 331–3 evolutionary theory 316 exclusive OR (XOR) 180 expected utility 153 expert systems 89–94, 123 see also Cyc; DENDRAL; MYCIN; R1/XCON eye scans 220–1 F Facebook 237 facial recognition 27 fake AI 298–301 fake news 293–8 fake pictures of people 214 Fantasia 261 feature extraction 171–2 feedback 172–3 Ferranti Mark 1 20 Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project 113–14 first-order logic 107 Ford 232 forward chaining 94 Frey, Carl 268–70 ‘The Future of Employment’ (Frey & Osborne) 268–70 G game theory 161–2 game-playing 26 Gangs Matrix 280 gender stereotypes 292–3 General AI 41, 53, 116, 119–20 General Motors 232 Genghis robot 134–6 gig economy 275 globalization 267 Go 73–4, 196–9 Golden Age of AI 47–88 Google 167, 231, 256–7 Google Glass 296–7 Google Translate 205–8, 292–3 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) 187–8 gradient descent 183 Grand Challenges 2004/5 225–6 graphical user interfaces (GUI) 144–5 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) 187–8 GUI (graphical user interfaces) 144–5 H hard problem of consciousness 314–17 hard problems 84, 86–7 Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) 277–80 Hawking, Stephen 238 healthcare 215–23 Herschel, John 304–6 Herzberg, Elaine 230 heuristic search 75–7, 164 heuristics 91 higher-order intentional reasoning 323–4, 328 high-level programming languages 144 Hilbert, David 15–16 Hinton, Geoff 185–6, 221 HOMER 141–3, 146 homunculus problem 315 human brain 43, 306, 330–1 human intuition 311 human judgement 222 human rights 277–81 human-level intelligence 28–36, 241–3 ‘humans are special’ argument 310–11 I image classification 186–7 image-captioning 200–4 ImageNet 186–7 Imitation Game 30 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 205–8 incentives 261 indistinguishability 30–1, 37, 38 Industrial Revolutions 265–7 inference engines 92–4 insurance 219–20 intelligence 21–2, 127–8, 200 – human-level 28–36, 241–3 ‘Intelligence Without Representation’ (Brooks) 129 Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems 100 intentional reasoning 323–4, 328 intentional stance 321–7 intentional systems 321–2 internal mental phenomena 306–7 Internet chatbots 36 intuition 311 inverse reinforcement learning 262 Invisible Women (Criado Perez) 291–2 J Japan 113–14 judgement 222 K Kasparov, Garry 163 knowledge bases 92–4 knowledge elicitation problem 123 knowledge graph 120–1 Knowledge Navigator 146–7 knowledge representation 91, 104, 129–30, 208 knowledge-based AI 89–123, 208 Kurzweil, Ray 239–40 L Lee Sedol 197–8 leisure 272 Lenat, Doug 114–21 lethal autonomous weapons 281–7 Lighthill Report 87–8 LISP 49, 99 Loebner Prize Competition 34–6 logic 104–7, 121–2 logic programming 111–14 logic-based AI 107–11, 130–2 M Mac computers 144–6 McCarthy, John 49–52, 107–8, 326–7 machine learning (ML) 27, 54–5, 168–74, 209–10, 287–9 machines with mental states 326–7 Macintosh computers 144–6 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) 306 male-orientation 290–3 Manchester Baby computer 20, 24–6, 143–4 Manhattan Project 51 Marx, Karl 274–6 maximizing expected utility 154 Mercedes 231 Mickey Mouse 261 microprocessors 267–8, 271–2 military drones 282–4 mind modelling 42 mind-body problem 314–17 see also consciousness minimax search 76 mining industry 234 Minsky, Marvin 34, 52, 180 ML (machine learning) 27, 54–5, 168–74, 209–10, 287–9 Montezuma’s Revenge (video game) 195–6 Moore’s law 240 Moorfields Eye Hospital 220–1 moral agency 257–8 Moral Machines 251–3 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) 306 multi-agent systems 160–2 multi-layer perceptrons 177, 180, 182 Musk, Elon 238 MYCIN 94–8, 217 N Nagel, Thomas 307–10 narrow AI 42 Nash, John Forbes Jr 50–1, 161 Nash equilibrium 161–2 natural languages 56 negative feedback 173 neural nets/neural networks 44, 168, 173–90, 369–72 neurons 174 Newell, Alan 52–3 norms 260 NP-complete problems 81–5, 164–5 nuclear energy 242–3 nuclear fusion 305 O ontological engineering 117 Osborne, Michael 268–70 P P vs NP problem 83 paperclips 261 Papert, Seymour 180 Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) 182–4 Pepper 299 perception 54 perceptron models 174–81, 183 Perceptrons (Minsky & Papert) 180–1, 210 personal healthcare management 217–20 perverse instantiation 260–1 Phaedrus 315 physical stance 319–20 Plato 315 police 277–80 Pratt, Vaughan 117–19 preference relations 151 preferences 150–2, 154 privacy 219 problem solving and planning 55–6, 66–77, 128 programming 21–2 programming languages 144 PROLOG 112–14, 363–4 PROMETHEUS 224–5 protein folding 214 Proust, Marcel 205–8 Q qualia 306–7 QuickSort 26 R R1/XCON 98–9 radiology 215, 221 railway networks 259 RAND Corporation 51 rational decision making 150–5 reasoning 55–6, 121–3, 128–30, 137, 315–16, 323–4, 328 regulation of AI 243 reinforcement learning 172–3, 193, 195, 262 representation harm 288 responsibility 257–8 rewards 172–3, 196 robots – as autonomous weapons 284–5 – Baye’s theorem 157 – beliefs 108–10 – fake 299–300 – indistinguishability 38 – intentional stance 326–7 – SHAKEY 63–6 – Sophia 299–300 – Three Laws of Robotics 244–6 – trivial tasks 61 – vacuum cleaning 132–6 Rosenblatt, Frank 174–81 rules 91–2, 104, 359–62 Russia 261 Rutherford, Ernest (1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson) 242 S Sally-Anne tests 328–9, 330 Samuel, Arthur 75–7 SAT solvers 164–5 Saudi Arabia 299–300 scripts 100–2 search 26, 68–77, 164, 199 search trees 70–1 Searle, John 311–14 self-awareness 41, 305 see also consciousness semantic nets 102 sensors 54 SHAKEY the robot 63–6 SHRDLU 56–63 Simon, Herb 52–3, 86 the Singularity 239–43 The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil) 239 Siri 149, 298 Smith, Matt 201–4 smoking 173 social brain 317–19 see also brains social media 293–6 social reasoning 323, 324–5 social welfare 249 software agents 143–9 software bugs 258 Sophia 299–300 sorting 26 spoken word translation 27 STANLEY 226 STRIPS 65 strong AI 36–8, 41, 309–14 subsumption architecture 132–6 subsumption hierarchy 134 sun 304 supervised learning 169 syllogisms 105, 106 symbolic AI 42–3, 44, 181 synapses 174 Szilard, Leo 242 T tablet computers 146 team-building problem 78–81, 83 Terminator narrative of AI 237–9 Tesla 228–9 text recognition 169–71 Theory of Mind (ToM) 330 Three Laws of Robotics 244–6 TIMIT 292 ToM (Theory of Mind) 330 ToMnet 330 TouringMachines 139–41 Towers of Hanoi 67–72 training data 169–72, 288–9, 292 translation 204–8 transparency 258 travelling salesman problem 82–3 Trolley Problem 246–53 Trump, Donald 294 Turing, Alan 14–15, 17–19, 20, 24–6, 77–8 Turing Machines 18–19, 21 Turing test 29–38 U Uber 168, 230 uncertainty 97–8, 155–8 undecidable problems 19, 78 understanding 201–4, 312–14 unemployment 264–77 unintended consequences 263 universal basic income 272–3 Universal Turing Machines 18, 19 Upanishads 315 Urban Challenge 2007 226–7 utilitarianism 249 utilities 151–4 utopians 271 V vacuum cleaning robots 132–6 values and norms 260 video games 192–6, 327–8 virtue ethics 250 Von Neumann and Morgenstern model 150–5 Von Neumann architecture 20 W warfare 285–6 WARPLAN 113 Waymo 231, 232–3 weak AI 36–8 weapons 281–7 wearable technology 217–20 web search 148–9 Weizenbaum, Joseph 32–4 Winograd schemas 39–40 working memory 92 X XOR (exclusive OR) 180 Z Z3 computer 19–20 PELICAN BOOKS Economics: The User’s Guide Ha-Joon Chang Human Evolution Robin Dunbar Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991 Orlando Figes The Domesticated Brain Bruce Hood Greek and Roman Political Ideas Melissa Lane Classical Literature Richard Jenkyns Who Governs Britain?


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

” [187] Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc). “If that scammer tries to sue me I’m going to lol so hard…” Twitter, 30 June 2017. [188] Kristy Kruithof, Judith Aldridge, David Décary Hétu, Megan Sim, Elma Dujso, Stijn Hoorens. “Internet-facilitated drugs trade: An analysis of the size, scope and the role of the Netherlands”. Rand Corporation, 2016. [189] Herb Weisbaum. “Ransomware: Now a Billion Dollar a Year Crime and Growing”. NBC News, 9 January 2017. [190] “Frequently Asked Questions: Find answers to recurring questions and myths about Bitcoin”. bitcoin.org. (Archive of 29 July 2015; archive of 4 August 2015; archive of 7 August 2015

“Is Bitcoin Under Attack?” Motherboard, 1 March 2016. [197] Izabella Kaminska. “The currency of the future has a settlement problem”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 17 May 2017. [198] Nathaniel Popper. “A Bitcoin Believer’s Crisis of Faith”. New York Times, 14 January 2016. [199] Rand Corporation’s estimate of the darknet drug market as $14.2m in January 2016 would make it $170m/year; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the whole global illegal drug market at $321.6 billion in 2003, and presumably more now. All these figures are extremely rubbery (which may be why the latest global figure is from 2003), but “less than 0.1%” seems a safe statement.


pages: 174 words: 56,405

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

In both cases, the approach consisted in encoding all the necessary information needed for translation in a specific representation model. The interlingua is thus an artificial language that has nothing to do with any existing language, whereas a pivot language uses an existing language (generally English) for this representation. Several research groups (in Washington and at Harvard and the Rand Corporation, for example) made every effort to develop large bilingual dictionaries (Russian-English), either manually or with the help of a statistical analysis of specific corpora, which helped ensure that the most frequent or the most important words would be processed first. Polysemy—the fact that a single word can have several meanings, such as “bank,” which can refer to a financial institution or the side of a river5—was seen from the beginning as one of the major problems to solve.

See Testing phase Professional translator, 10–13, 22, 47, 72, 78–79, 81, 89, 91–92, 109, 121, 199–204, 222, 224, 226–227, 243–246 Programming language, 15, 58, 65, 84 Prolog, 84 Promt, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234 Pronoun resolution, 175 Proper noun, 107, 115, 160, 192 Propositional semantics, 179 Proust, Marcel, 199 Pseudo-root (of a word), 51 Psychology, 8, 76 Public administration. See Governmental administration Punch cards, 46, 73 Quality of machine translation. See Evaluation Query, 238–239, 241 Rand Corporation, 63 Reordering rule, 27, 62, 173 Richens, Richard H., 51, 66, 270 Rule-based machine translation, 25–32, 49–74, 109, 170–174, 176, 190, 194, 217 Russia, 45–46, 232 Russian, 47, 53, 56, 60–61, 63, 79, 81–82, 85, 167, 210, 233, 250 Sabatakakis, Dimitris, 233 Samsung, 236, 249, 250 Schleyer, Johann Martin, 42 Search engine, 51, 92 Segment-based machine translation, 147–155 Semantic primitive, 47, 66–67 Semantic resources, 67, 159, 160, 172, 207, 228.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

For some varied examples, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994); Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (New York: Continuum, 2002). 73 See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2001). 74 For an excellent history of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, which focuses on the behaviorist paradigm at military think tanks like the Rand Corporation, see Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). The major part of the book deals with the Korean War, but there is a fascinating chapter on the shift in counterinsurgency strategy during the Vietnam War away from attempting “constructively” to change the psychology of the enemy—winning hearts and minds—toward simply and coercively trying to change the enemy’s behavior. 75 Arquilla and Ronfeldt consider swarming the primary military strategy of netwar.

The major part of the book deals with the Korean War, but there is a fascinating chapter on the shift in counterinsurgency strategy during the Vietnam War away from attempting “constructively” to change the psychology of the enemy—winning hearts and minds—toward simply and coercively trying to change the enemy’s behavior. 75 Arquilla and Ronfeldt consider swarming the primary military strategy of netwar. See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2000). 76 Much of the U.S. writing on unilateralism is tinged with the hypocritical pathos that Rudyard Kipling’s notion of the “white man’s burden” carried in a previous era. For laments on the solitude and reluctance of the United States in a unilaterialist role, see Samuel Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (March-April 1999): 35-49; and Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997). 77 We should note that human rights has become fundamental—a European legal philosopher from the last century would say “dogmatic”—in the field of international law.

We will return to discuss these electronic movements when we consider questions of immaterial property in chapter 2. 110 See, for example, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwar. 111 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein (New York: Zone, 1987), especially chapter 11. 112 See Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2000). 113 See, for example, James Kennedy and Russell Eberhart with Yuhai Shi, Swarm Intelligence (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2001). 114 Kennedy and Russell, with Shi, 103-104. For a more colorful account of insect communication, see Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees, trans.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2014/07/the_cannibal_cop_gilberto_valle_goes_free_what_about_michael_van_hise_and.html. Already law enforcement agencies: Walter L. Perry et al. (2013), “Predictive policing: The role of crime forecasting in law enforcement operations,” RAND Corporation, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/243830.pdf. US National Institute of Justice (13 Jan 2014), “Predictive policing research,” http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/strategies/predictive-policing/Pages/research.aspx. This notion of making certain crimes: Michael L. Rich (Mar 2013), “Should we make crime impossible?”

IBM Corporation (2011), “New York State Tax: How predictive modeling improves tax revenues and citizen equity,” https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/leadership/nystax/assets/pdf/0623-NYS-Tax_Paper.pdf. the police use it: Walter L. Perry et al. (2013), “Predictive policing: The role of crime forecasting in law enforcement operations,” RAND Corporation, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/243830.pdf. Terrorist plots are different: John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart (2011), Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security, Oxford University Press, chap. 2, http://books.google.com/books?id=jyYGL2jZBC4C.

These tend to be totalitarian: Here’s a proposal to institute a sort of “cyber draft” to conscript networks in the event of a cyberwar. Susan W. Brenner and Leo L. Clarke (Oct 2010), “Civilians in cyberwarfare: Conscripts,” Vanderbilt Journal of Trans-national Law 43, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/jotl/manage/wp-content/uploads/Brenner-_Final_1.pdf. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act: RAND Corporation (20 Mar 2001), “Overview of the Posse Comitatus Act,” in Preparing the U.S. Army for Homeland Security, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1251/MR1251.AppD.pdf. Charles Doyle and Jennifer K. Elsea (16 Aug 2012), “The Posse Comitatus Act and related matters: The use of the military to execute civilian law,” Congressional Research Service, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42659.pdf.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The first study, completed in May 1946, was on the feasibility of launching a satellite into space for a variety of military uses from photoreconnaissance to weather reporting and communications. The Douglas enterprise, called Project RAND, for “research and development,” was separated from the aircraft firm within a couple of years and metamorphosed into the RAND Corporation, located in Santa Monica, California, the think tank that provided the soon to be independent U.S. Air Force with strategic and tactical analyses throughout the Cold War. Then, in January 1946, with less than a month to go before his retirement to his ranch in Northern California, Arnold had taken his final step.

The aircraft, for example, while next-generation, had to be achievable within what could reasonably be foreseen in the advance of technology. Schriever, of course, lacked the knowledge to complete such projections by himself. To formulate them he had to organize teams of scientists and engineers and other specialists in each area, drawing on the talent pool available to him from the Scientific Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation, and consultants recruited from the universities and industry. The Development Planning job turned out to be excellent preparation for the work that lay ahead of him in overseeing the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile. Because he was always dealing with what was to be accomplished tomorrow and not today, he was learning how to differentiate between what was future-feasible and future-fantasy and to do so in a variety of disciplines, not just in aeronautical engineering, where he had specific competence.

The first American astronauts to venture into space were, in fact, to ride up on military missiles and to return in capsules that were modified versions of the initial hydrogen bomb warhead. Bennie imparted some of the exhilaration of this adventure in a secret briefing he gave to the staff of the Air Force’s think tank, the RAND Corporation, in nearby Santa Monica on January 31, 1955. He spoke of a warhead flashing through space at the previously unimaginable speed of 20,000 feet per second, of the “invulnerability” of this nuclear spear point to Soviet defenses. And yet, he said, the real objective of the adventure was to contribute to the preservation of peace.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

The Defense Department and National Science Foundation soon became the prime funders of much of America’s basic research, spending as much as private industry during the 1950s through the 1980s.24 The return on that investment was huge, leading not only to the Internet but to many of the pillars of America’s postwar innovation and economic boom.11 A few corporate research centers, most notably Bell Labs, existed before the war. But after Bush’s clarion call produced government encouragement and contracts, hybrid research centers began to proliferate. Among the most notable were the RAND Corporation, originally formed to provide research and development (hence the name) to the Air Force; Stanford Research Institute and its offshoot, the Augmentation Research Center; and Xerox PARC. All would play a role in the development of the Internet. Two of the most important of these institutes sprang up around Cambridge, Massachusetts, just after the war: Lincoln Laboratory, a military-funded research center affiliated with MIT, and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a research and development company founded and populated by MIT (and a few Harvard) engineers.

His family had immigrated from Poland when he was two and settled in Philadelphia, where his father opened a small grocery store. After graduating from Drexel in 1949, Baran joined Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in their new computer company, where he tested components for UNIVAC. He moved to Los Angeles, took night classes at UCLA, and eventually got a job at the RAND Corporation. When the Russians tested a hydrogen bomb in 1955, Baran found his life mission: to help prevent a nuclear holocaust. One day at RAND he was looking at the weekly list sent by the Air Force of topics it needed researched, and he seized on one that related to building a military communications system that would survive an enemy attack.

“It’s just this one little case that seems to be an aberration,” he added, referring disparagingly to Kleinrock.72 Interestingly, until the mid-1990s Kleinrock had credited others with coming up with the idea of packet switching. In a paper published in November 1978, he cited Baran and Davies as pioneers of the concept: “In the early 1960’s, Paul Baran had described some of the properties of data networks in a series of RAND Corporation papers. . . . In 1968 Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratories in England was beginning to write about packet-switched networks.”73 Likewise, in a 1979 paper describing the development of distributed networks, Kleinrock neither mentioned nor cited his own work from the early 1960s.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Take, for example, Paul Baran (1926–2011), a Polish-born engineer who was raised in Philadelphia and Boston. Baran is widely remembered today for innovating packet-switching and distributed-network designs, which now are central to modern-day networking, but his struggles are less well remembered. In 1960 at the RAND Corporation, a research think tank under contract with the U.S. Air Force, Baran articulated the “hot-potato heuristic” behind modern-day data traffic on the Internet: break down a message into packets (or envelopes) of information, release each packet to travel on its own traffic-reducing pathway to its final destination, and resequence and receive all packets in their original order.

In the early 1960s, Baran also designed the celebrated idea of a distributed network in which every node in a network connects to its neighboring nodes and not to any decentralized or centralized node arrangement (figure 3.2). Figure 3.2 Three network types: (a) Centralized, (b) decentralized, and (c) distributed. Source: From Paul Baran, “Introduction to Distributed Communication Networks.” On Distributed Communications, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3420-PR, August 1964, 2. Reproduced with permission of The Rand Corp. Widely celebrated as a prototype to “end-to-end” intelligence and a liberal democratic mode of communication, Baran’s network innovations were colored and shaped by the cold war military complex as well as cybernetic sources.

“The Scientific Conceptualization of Information.” Annals of the History of Computing 7 (2) (1985): 117–140. Aspray, William, and Paul E. Ceruzzi. The Internet and American Business. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Baran, Paul. “Introduction to Distributed Communication Networks.” On Distributed Communications. RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-3420-PR, August 1964. Bartol, Kathryn M. “Soviet Computer Centres: Network or Tangle?” Soviet Studies 23 (4) (1972): 608–618. Becker, Abraham S. “Input-Output and Soviet Planning: A Survey of Recent Developments.” Memorandum prepared for the United States Air Force, RAND Memorandum RM 3523-PR, March 1963.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

They note that the large documents often prepared for strategy making “provide detail, but no reference data with predictive power. Interestingly, the more detailed the information you have, the more you lead yourself to believe that you know; and the more your confidence grows, the higher the risk of arriving at the wrong conclusions.” 5 An interesting example of this bias at work appears in the Rand Corporation’s study of forty new-process chemical plants. The early cost estimates, the ones used to justify the projects, averaged 49 percent of the ultimate cost. The early estimates ranged (one standard deviation) from 27 to 72 percent of the ultimate cost. One of Rand’s summary observations was this: We can detect no trend of improvement in cost estimating over the 12 years or so covered by plants in our data base, nor can we discern any change in expectations about plant performance.

Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 6. 6. Edward W. Merrow, Kenneth Phillips, and Christopher W. Myers, Understanding Cost Growth and Performance Shortfalls in Pioneer Process Plants (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1981), 88. INDEX account smoothing, 105–106 action plan, 143, 309, 315–316, 324–325 Active Defense concept, 154–155 addressability of challenges addressable strategic challenges, 73–75, 323 chunking the challenge, 76 filtering process, 41–42 finding the crux of Intel’s challenges, 81–82 finding where you can win, 63–64 obstacles to dealing with hard challenges, 321–322 Sustainable Development Goals, 128–131 addressable strategic challenges (ASCs), 73–75, 323 AdWords, 52–53 aerobics studio, 183–185 Afghanistan, war in, 132–136, 153, 292–293 agency problems, 173 agency theory: incentive pay, 262–263 Airbnb, 199–200, 202 Airbus, 195 aircraft production Boeing’s financial structure, 258 Curtiss-Wright, 236–237 effect of Boeing’s cost-cutting, 264 the importance of experience, 196–198 AirLand Battle, 151–156, 161 airline industry container shipping comparisons, 165–166 Ryanair, 59–62 Akers, John, 242 Allen, James, 281 Alphabet.

incentive pay, 263–264 measuring efficiency, 250 Petzl America, 121–123 phenakistoscope, 50–51 Pixel Buds (Google), 270–271 Plan Dog, 64–66, 73–74, 130 platforms, 199–201 Porter, Michael, 33, 167 powdered metals, 191–192 power and leverage building a power base, 115–118 creation through coherence, 123–124 the crux as a constraint, 32 discomfort with power, 111–114 lack of executive power for creating a strategy, 115–116 marketing and sales, 118–120 repairing GM’s organizational dysfunction, 220 sources of, 11 strategy statements as substitutes for, 110–114 The Practice of Management (Drucker), 251 price cuts, market response to, 185–186 priorities, strategic, 303–307, 328–329 problem solving bouldering, 1–4 changing corporate points of view, 143–144 defining strategy, 13 the ongoing strategy process, 54–55 research on, 296 Procter & Gamble, 124–125, 190–191 profits and profitability analyzing production and shipping costs, 163–164 competitive advantage, 184–185 current earnings, 257–258 industry-analysis framework, 167 profit before tax, 161–162 proximate objectives, 324 psychology: perceived reality, 50–51 public face, constructing, 327–329 publicly traded stock, 268–269 Qualcomm, 78 quarterly earnings estimates, 257–260 question-answer dialogue (Strategy Foundry), 316–317 Quicken, 191 railway construction, 157–160 Rand Corporation, 325–326 rational choice: boundedness, 35 R/C devices, 255–256 RCA, 215–216 real estate market, 124 Redfin brokerage, 124 red-team exercises, 322–323 reference classes, 325–326 reference-group neglect, 103 reflective thinking, 318–319 refractory metals, 191–192 reframing the situation, 140–142, 148–149, 151–156 regime change, 292–293 renewal, organizational, 225–227 Research in Motion (RIM), 176 resource allocation, 171–172 restaurant industry: close coupling of activities, 190 revenue generation arbitrary unsupported goals, 242–244 identifying challenges in the Strategy Foundry, 306 mechanics of growth, 88 Netflix cash costs, 17–19 rewards of problem solving, 3–4 robotics, 208–209 rock climbing, 1–5, 54, 121–123, 275 The Roof of the Dog’s Ass boulder problem, 1–5, 27 Roosevelt, Franklin, 65, 131–133 Rosenthal, Brian, 157–158 Rude Awakening (Keller), 219 Rumsfeld, Donald, 292–294, 296 Ryanair, 48, 59–62 Sales Force Automation (SFA), 57–58 Salesforce.com, 48, 55–59 Samsung, 195 Sankarlingam, Velchamy, 210 scaling, 195–198 GM’s reform, 221 identifying challenges in the Strategy Foundry, 306 semiconductor industry, 76–77 Schultz, Howard, 48 scientific equipment, 118–120 Scozzafava, Ralph, 247 search engines, 52–53 seedlings, 104 semiconductor production, 76–79, 81–82, 95, 103, 189–190, 197 See also Nvidia share price growth, 88–89 Shell International, 186–187 shipping, 164–166, 195 short-term valuation, 260–261 Silicon Graphics, 103 Simon, Herbert, 35–36 simplification, organizational, 226–227 Singapore: unemployment, 43–44 skin-care products, 124–125 Skou, Soren, 166 Slaoui, Moncef, 276 Smelser, Paul, 190–191 smooth earnings, 105–106 social fabric, business as, 110–111 social media downside of, 206 Facebook and Twitter, 214 network effects, 199 platform strategies, 199–201 smartphone use, 147 social networking, 59 SoftBank, 107–108 software, 224, 227–228 software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, 59, 230 Southwest Airlines, 48, 60, 124 space shuttle, 4–6, 125–128 space travel, 4–7, 37 SpaceX, 5–7 specialization identifying challenges in the Strategy Foundry, 306 organization dysfunction, 217 speculators, 266–267 Stark, Harold, 65–66 Starry, Donn, 155 Steiner, George A., 272–273 stock options, 263–264 stock value effect of mergers and acquisitions, 97–101 McGraw-Hill, 93 paying for mergers and acquisitions, 102 Stonecipher, Harry, 258 strategic commitment, 282–284 strategic effectiveness, 89–91 strategic extension, 89–91 strategic navigation, 326 strategic planning accentuating the positive and avoiding the negative, 140–142 for arbitrary financial outcomes, 282–284 battling for corporate resources, 171–172 in businesses, 281–284 climate-control systems, 287–289 convergence on action, 290–294 defining goals and objectives, 249–250 finding the best process, 294–297 goals versus strategy, 241–242 groupthink, 290–292 mission statements, 278–281 owning the challenge, 289–290 for pandemics, 273–276 the Second Iraq War, 292–294 strategy versus management, 248–256 water resource management, 276–278 See also Strategy Foundry strategy, defining, 13, 110 strategy, the art of, 5, 8–9 Strategy Foundry, 285 causes of failure, 315 challenge-based planning, 298–299 creating an action plan, 310–312 identifying the challenges of the business, 302–307 information gathering, 299–302 internal and management issues, 307–310 key tools, 315–329 participant questions, 301–302 preconditions for success, 313–314 preparations, 299 time viewer, 319–320 strategy statements, 112–114 streaming services, 17–19, 21–22, 25–27 Strunk, William, 91 subscription strategies, 19, 26, 57–58, 84, 178, 199 Success Score Card, 282–284 supply-chain issues, 254–255 surgical robotics, 208–209 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 128–130 Swan, Robert, 79–80, 83 swearing in (Strategy Foundry), 311, 326–327 Swedish view of business, 109–111 Symbian OS (Nokia), 223–225 synergies, 102–103, 123–124 tactics versus strategy, 75 Taliban, 132–134 telecommunications, 102, 179.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

One is confirmation bias, which operates primarily at the personal level, biasing the way we think—as does its close kin, motivated reasoning. Another is conformity bias, which operates more at the social level, biasing the way we interact—as does its close cousin, epistemic tribalism. “Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning have been widely researched and explored in both political and nonpolitical contexts,” write the RAND Corporation’s Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich in their 2018 report, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. The research would not please Socrates, who teaches us to be humble about our beliefs, to assume we are often wrong, and to seek out challenging information and opinions.

“This was a form of dissembling that was so brazen and comprehensive, so far from standard political fibbing and selective spin, that it left a population essentially impotent.”24 As Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Russian propaganda became particularly adept at deploying what RAND Corporation researchers dubbed a “firehose of falsehoods.”25 After Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain in 2018, Russian media blamed Britain. And/or Ukraine. And/or it was an accident. And/or it was suicide. And/or it was a revenge killing by relatives. And/or Russia did not produce the nerve agent which was used.

See also disinformation; information warfare; trolls and trolling propositions for reality, 86–90, 95–98, 124 Protestantism and creed war, 39, 49–50 public choice, 229–30, 243 Publick Occurrences, mission statement of, 5–6 Pulliam, Eugene, 136 punitiveness of canceling, 219 Purdue University, 235, 250 Putin, Vladimir, 157, 166, 167, 173, 181, 184 QAnon, 183 race and racism: cancel culture and, 13, 126–27, 211, 213, 215, 220, 242, 250–51; emotional safetyism and, 203; empiricism and, 90; free speech and, 229, 252, 253; partisan identification and, 31 RAND Corporation, 164 RAR (Reedies Against Racism), 250–51 Rauch, Jonathan: Kindly Inquisitors, 15–16, 88, 98–99, 199, 203, 249, 253 reality: conformity bias and, 38–39; conservative media defining, 176; digital media splintering, 131–33, 169; emotional safetyism and, 208; identity-protective cognition and, 31; network epistemology and, 71–73, 86–87; objectivity of, 9, 86–87; rules for, 88–92; troll epistemology and, 167–68, 184–85 reality-based communities, 4; beliefs accommodated by, 114–17; boundaries of, 17, 96–97; common cores of, 103–08; defined, 16; digital media and, 119, 132, 154; error correction in, 73–75; filtering function of, 124–26; free speech and, 96; globalization of knowledge in, 68–70; marginalizing bad ideas in, 258–60; organization of knowledge in, 96–100; Peirce and, 61; persuasion in, 92–94, 134; public goods of, 75–78; reality in, 86–87; rules for, 88–92, 100; safety-based communities vs., 204; scientific development in, 62–68, 70–73; self-correction in, 110; social funnel of, 95–96; triumphs of, 41–42; troll epistemology vs., 164, 186–88, 263; viewpoint diversity in, 198–99; Wikipedia and, 140–43 reason: biases and, 29–30, 33–34; Lincoln on, 233; Montaigne on, 52–53; state of nature and evolution of, 22–24 Reddit, 135, 158 reductionism in cancel culture, 219 Reed College, 250–51 Reedies Against Racism (RAR), 250–51 Reformation, 52 Reid, Harry, 180 Reifler, Jason, 177 religion and religious difference, 49–51, 56, 80, 114–15, 233 repetition bias, 28 republican virtues, 48, 112, 113 research universities, 68–69 Resnick, Brian, 31, 257 retractions, 6, 73–75, 179.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

“People ask me if I knew I’d get a Nobel prize. I always say no, but I knew I’d get a PhD.”5 However, despite Markowitz’s confidence—and the huge legacy it would leave—whether it would actually qualify for a PhD in economics was oddly uncertain. Markowitz had in 1952 left Chicago for the RAND Corporation, a prestigious think tank in sunny California, and had to return to defend his thesis to the faculty. He was unconcerned, thinking as he landed in Chicago, “I know this subject cold. Not even Dr. Milton Friedman [the University of Chicago’s legendary economics professor] can give me a hard time.”6 Unfortunately, Friedman was unconvinced.

After that, he had to serve two years in the Army, stationed at Fort Lee in Virginia. Sharpe luckily avoided combat duty in the Korean War, and although he enjoyed service, he discovered that he could shorten the two years of active duty to just six months if he went to work for a government contractor. One of his UCLA professors had recommended that he join the RAND Corporation after he was finished in the Army anyway, and since RAND was an Air Force–backed research institute, Sharpe was able to join it as an economist in 1956 while pursuing a doctorate at UCLA. RAND proved formative. Some of its employees joked that it stood for “Research And No Development,” and its intellectualism was inspiring to the young economist.

., 51 Optimized Portfolios As Listed Securities (OPALS), 195–96, 247 Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, 177 Pacific Commodities Exchange, 170 Pacific Vegetable Oil, 169 Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis, 111 Parsons, James, 199–200, 201 passive investing brief overview of, 7–8 Buffett-Seides wager, 1–2, 3–4, 6, 9–11, 15–17 index inclusion effect, 254–62 origin story of, 69–77, 164–65 problems with, 266–84, 287–90, 294–99 Samuelson on, 106–7 Singer on, 18–19, 287–88, 290 Wallace’s tale, 265–66 Peanuts (comic), 38 Pedersen, Lasse Heje, 276–77 Penn Central Transportation Company, 172–73 pension funds, 79–80, 83–85, 274, 292 AG Becker and, 142–43 Buffett on, 4–5, 7, 8, 83 DFA and, 144–45, 151, 159, 162, 164 Wells Fargo and, 75–78, 80, 185, 186, 188, 190–91 Pensions & Investments, 68 Peru, 257 Peter Cooper Village, 220 Peterson, Pete, 210, 211, 213–14 Petry, Johannes, 256–57 Petty, Tom, 248n Philadelphia National Bank, 92 Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PSE), 172–73 Phillips, Noah, 295–96 Pilcher, Simon, 274–75 Pimco, 261 Pimco Total Return Fund, 124 PNC Bank, 214, 217, 219 Poincaré, Henri, 22–23 political donations, 66 “portfolio,” 40 portfolio insurance, 171–72, 178–79, 189 “Portfolio Selection” (Markowitz), 41 Pratchett, Terry, 95 PRIMECAP Management, 123 Princeton University, 53–54, 87, 90–93, 108 “probability law,” 24 “Problem of Twelve, The” (Coates), 297–98 “program trading,” 78n Project Amethyst, 201 ProShares, 248 Protégé House, 16 Protégé Partners, 2, 3, 9 Buffett-Seides wager, 1–2, 3–4, 6, 9–11, 15–17 proxy advisors, 288–90 Purcell, Philip, 216 Purdey shotgun, 239 Qatar Investment Authority, 223–24 Qontigo, 242n “Quantifiers,” 53, 55–68 Quotron, 149–50 RAND Corporation, 41–42, 43–44 Random Character of Stock Prices, The (Cootner), 36–37 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 54, 115 random walk hypothesis, 25, 36–37, 49, 50, 51, 82–83 “Random Walks in Stock Market Prices” (Fama), 50 Ranieri, Lewis S., 207 Renshaw, Edward, 34, 45, 86 Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), 42, 59–60 “retail money,” 162 Revenue Act of 1978, 119 Reynolds Securities, 111 Riefenstahl, Leni, 163 Riepe, Jim, xi Bogle-Brennan schism, 133 Bogle dinners, 127 founding of Vanguard, 88, 104–5, 104n, 109, 110 setting up first FIIT (“Bogle’s Folly”), 110–11, 112, 114 at T.


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

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

Sponsored by the Office of Civil Defense (SRI 7979–007), November, 1967; Mitchell, H. H., The Rand Corporation. Guidelines for the Control of Communicable Disease in the Postattack Environment. Sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission (RM-5090-TAB), August, 1966; Mitchell, H. H., The Rand Corporation. Plague in the United States: An Assessment of Its Significance as a Problem Following a Thermonuclear War. Sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission (RM-4868-TAB), June, 1966; Mitchell, H. H., The Rand Corporation. The Problem of Tuberculosis in the Postattack Environment. Sponsored by the U.S. Air Force (RM-5362-PRB), June 1967; Pogrund R. S., The Rand Corporation. Nutrition in the Postattack Environment.

Most vodka was sold for less than eight dollars a liter, and some was available in street kiosks for a dollar. “Between December 1990 and December 1994, consumer prices [in Russia] increased by 2,020 times for all goods and services, by 2,154 times for food products, but only 653 times for alcoholic beverages,” stated a report issued jointly by the California-based Rand Corporation and Moscow’s Center for Demography and Human Ecology.35 “This means that over this period, in relative terms, alcohol became over three times cheaper than these other products.”36 Adult alcohol consumption in 1996 was 18 liters a year of pure alcohol, or the rough equivalent of 38 liters of 100-proof vodka, according to the Russian Ministry of Health.

More probable was a cycle in which greater numbers of uninsured Americans spiraled into debt trying to pay their share of premiums and deductibles, possibly returning to work prematurely following illness, and, as a result, becoming less healthy. Few tears were shed among Washington insiders. The GOP leadership washed its hands of health care—block grants shifted funds to the states, so if Rhode Island’s populace wanted universal health care, well, fine, they could have it. But could they? A 1997 Rand Corporation survey found that few, if any, of the fifty states could sustain the sort of tax increase that would be necessary to supply health coverage to all their citizens. Without substantial federal assistance, expanded access to medicine seemed unlikely—indeed, more probable was rising noninsurance in every state in the United States.615 What was public health to do?


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

One was the reconstitution of the National Guard, from 1979 according to Nicaraguan exiles and Salvadoran officers who participated, with aid and training from agents of the neo-Nazi Argentine generals acting “as a proxy for the United States in Central America” (terrorism specialist Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation) from 1980, and direct U.S. control from 1981. The second track was an early offer of aid to the new government, but designed so as to strengthen the private business sector. U.S. aid was also supported by international banks, which feared that Nicaragua would not be able to service the vast debt resulting from their collaboration with Somoza, particularly now that he had fled with a large part of the country’s remaining assets.

Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America (Stanford U., 1979); Dr. Thorn Kerstiens and Drs Piet Nelissen, Report on the Elections in Nicaragua, 4 November 1984, on behalf of [Dutch] Government Observers; David Felix, “How to Resolve Latin America’s Debt Crisis,” Challenge, Nov./Dec. 1985; Brian Jenkins, New Modes of Conflict (Rand Corporation, June 1983); Inter-American Development Bank Report No. DES-13, Nicaragua, Jan. 1983, cited in Penrose, op. cit.; Jim Morrell, “Nicaragua’s War Economy,” International Policy Report, Nov. 1985; Morrell, “Redlining Nicaragua,” ibid., Dec. 1985; Jim Morrell and William Goodfellow, “Contadora: Under the Gun,” International Policy Report, May 1986; David MacMichael, testimony, International Court of Justice, Sept. 16, 1985, UN A/40/907, S/17639, 19 Nov. 1985, 26; Thomas W .


After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, general purpose technology, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Teledyne

As he assumed his White House position in April, Flanigan inherited from Ellsworth’s staff the previously mentioned Tom Whitehead as one of his staff; Whitehead was Flanigan’s primary assistant for NASA issues. Whitehead held a doctorate in management from MIT, where he had first majored in engineering. He during the 1960s had spent time at the Rand Corporation, a think-tank steeped in a systems analysis approach to assessing policy issues. Flanigan and Whitehead were to play key policy roles 46 A f t e r A p o l l o? Nixon assistants Peter Flanigan (left) and Clay Thomas Whitehead (right). (Photographs WHPO 1092–21 and MUG-W-322, courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum) in shaping the approach that the Nixon administration would take to the post-Apollo space program.

This skeptical perspective would lead Rice in the following weeks to seek the least costly shuttle program possible, putting him in direct opposition to NASA’s insistence that only a large space shuttle made sense. Rice’s background was in the type of systems analysis that had been developed at the Rand Corporation (which he would later head) and applied during the 1960s under Robert McNamara at the DOD; both Rice and Niskanen had worked at DOD then. Rice had pushed NASA to take a “whole systems” approach to evaluating the shuttle and possible alternatives for space transportation in terms of their cost-effectiveness.

Keith Glennan, first NASA administrator; Peter Goldmark, CBS Laboratories; Najeeb Halaby, Pan American Airlines; Frederich Kappel, former head of AT&T; Foy Kohler, former ambassador to the Soviet Union; William Deming Lewis, Lehigh University; John Love, governor of Colorado; Richard Olgilvie, Governor of Illinois; Henry Rowen, Rand Corporation; Leon Schacter, Amalgamated Meat Cutter and Butchers Workman Union; Dan Seymour, J. Walter Thompson Company; and Frank Stanton, CBS. (Stanton had also been one of the nongovernment people consulted by Lyndon Johnson in 1961 as he prepared the recommendations to President Kennedy that led to Project Apollo.) 15.


pages: 423 words: 126,375

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

This was largely a function of the failure to plan effectively for “Phase IV” operations, or those that would take place once regime change occurred. The inadequacy of planning for stabilization and reconstruction activities following the cessation of major combat operations is now well understood. A study by the RAND Corporation concludes, No planning was undertaken to provide for the security of the Iraqi people in the post conflict environment, given the expectations that the Iraqi government would remain largely intact; the Iraqi people would welcome the American presence; and local militia, police, and the regular army would be capable of providing law and order.

At least I’m drawing combat pay. I have a spare cot for you if you make it to Baghdad. My HQ is in the Martyr’s Monument east of the Tigris River. Alcohol not allowed, but bring cigars. Otherwise, enjoy the summer and drink a cold one for me. Ready First! Pete This page intentionally left blank Notes 1. Baghdad 1. RAND Corporation, “Iraq: Translating Lessons into Future DoD Policies,” Washington, D.C., February 7, 2005. 2. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006). 3. George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 181. 4. Samuel R.

Stout, Williamson Murray, and James G. Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2006), 91–95. 2. Rusafa 1. Bruce Hoffman, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” Washington, D.C., RAND Corporation, June 2004; Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May–June 2005, 8–12; Huba Wass de Czege, “On Policing the Frontiers of Freedom,” Army 56, no. 7 (2006), 14–22. 2. The first two were killed before my arrival. Private Shawn Pahnke was killed on June 16, 2003, and Private First Class Robert Frantz was killed on June 17, 2003. 3.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

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

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

“You cannot make decisions simply by asking yourself whether something might be nice to have,” the new secretary of defense said. “You have to make a judgment on how much is enough.”4 And McNamara knew what kind of person he needed to make those judgments: he needed an economist. He hired Charles Hitch, the head of the economics department at the Rand Corporation, a think tank created by the air force after World War II to keep some of the nation’s best minds working on military problems. Though academics no longer could be compelled to take orders, they could be induced to work on interesting questions in beachfront offices in Santa Monica, California.

Lee Iacocca, then a Ford vice president, warned that enforcing the rules “could prevent continued production of automobiles.”31 Instead, General Motors created a filter called a catalytic converter to neutralize the pollution.* The Value of Life One of the first assignments the air force gave the Rand Corporation in the late 1940s was to figure out the best way to blow up the Soviet Union. Rand’s experts carefully considered the problem and advised the air force to send wave after wave of cheap, slow bombers into the teeth of the Soviet defenses. They had put a price on the bombs and the airplanes, but not on the pilots.

Arnold Harberger, “Sense and Economics: An Oral History with Arnold Harberger,” conducted by Paul Burnett in 2015 and 2016, Oral History Center, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 123. Neil Irwin, “Finland Shows Why Many Europeans Think Americans Are Wrong About the Euro,” New York Times, July 20, 2015. Chapter 9. Made in Chile 1. Charles J. Hitch, “The Uses of Economics,” November 17, 1960, Rand Corporation. 2. The provision of technical assistance to Latin America, primarily in the areas of agriculture, geology, aviation, and child welfare, was initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt and expanded by Truman and Eisenhower. “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” Truman declared in his 1949 inaugural address.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Eisenhower did not buy this, and nor did his Catholic successor John F. Kennedy. But Draper did not give up. His Population Crisis Committee gradually won over many of the most influential people in American public life to the thesis that coercive population control was essential to defeating communism. Eventually, with the help of a RAND Corporation study which argued (using an absurd 15 per cent discount rate) that children had negative economic value, Draper and his allies won Lyndon Johnson’s endorsement in 1966, and population control became an official part of American foreign aid. Under its ruthless director Reimert Ravenholt, the Office of Population grew its budget till it was larger than that of the rest of the entire US aid budget.

Barack Obama is in no doubt that, as he put it in a speech in 2012, ‘The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet.’ He was referring to the fact that the decentralised network we know today began life as the Arpanet, a project funded by the Pentagon, and that relied on an idea called packet switching, dreamt up by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation, whose motive was chiefly to make something that could survive a Soviet first strike and still transmit messages to missile bases to retaliate. Hence the decentralised nature of the network. That’s nonsense, say others. The internet is more than package-switching. It requires computers, communications, all sorts of software and other protocols, many of which the government-funded research projects would have bought from private enterprise.

(with Paul Paddock) 207 Page, Larry 188 Pagel, Mark 80, 81–2 Pakistan 32, 206 Paley, William 38–9, 41–2, 51 Panama 286 Paris 102, 121, 254 Park, Walter 139 Parris, Matthew 303 Parys Mine Company, Anglesey 278 Pascal, Blaise 273 Paul, Senator Rand 241 Paul, Ron 114, 285, 292, 295 Paul, St (Saul of Tarsus) 8, 258, 264 Pauling, Linus 121 Pax Romana 239 Peace High School, Hyderabad (India) 181 Peel, Robert 246, 283–4 Peer-to-Peer Foundation 308 Peninsular War 280 People’s Printing Press 288 personality: and the blank slate 156–7, 158–9; and genes 159, 160–2; and homicide 169–71; innateness of behaviour 157–8; intelligence from within 165–7; non-genetic differences 162–5; and parenting 159–60, 161–2; and sexual attraction 172–3; and sexuality 167–9 Peterloo massacre (1819) 245 Pfister, Christian 276 Philippe, duc d’Orléans 286 Philippines 190 Philips, Emo 140 Philostratus 258 Phoenicia 101 Pinker, Steven 28, 30, 31–3, 172–3; The Better Angels of Our Nature 28–9 Pinnacle Technologies 136 Pitt-Rivers, Augustus 127 Pixar 124 Planned Parenthood Foundation 204 Plath, Robert 126 Plato 7, 11 Plomin, Robert 165, 167 Poincaré, Henri 18, 121 Polanyi, Karl 133 Polanyi, Michael 253 politics 314–16 Poor Law (1834) 195 Pope, Alexander 15 Popper, Karl 253; ‘Conjectures and Refutations’ 269 Population: American eugenics 200–3; control and sterilisation 205–8; and eugenics 197–9; impact of Green Revolution 208–10; Irish application of Malthusian doctrines 195–7; Malthusian theory 193, 194–5; and one-child policy 210–14; post-war eugenics 203–5 Population Crisis Committee 206 Portugal, Portuguese 134 Pottinger, Sir Harry 233 ‘Primer for Development’ (UN, 1951) 232 Prince, Thomas 242 Pritchett, Lant 179–80; The Rebirth of Education 176 Procter & Gamble 130 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 194–5 Prussia 176 Psychological Review 159 Putin, Vladimir 305 ‘The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage’ (Henrich, Boyd & Richerson) 89 Pythagoras 85 Pythagorism 259 Qian XingZhong 213 Quesnay, François 98 Raines, Franklin 292 Ramsay, John 25 RAND Corporation 206, 300 Ravenholt, Reimert 206 Ray Smith, Alvy 124 Reagan, Ronald 254, 290 Red Sea 82 Reed, Leonard 43 Reformation 216, 220 religion: and climate change/global warming 271–6; and cult of cereology (crop circles) 264–6; existence of God 14–15; heretics and heresies 141–2; as human impulse 256–8; predictability of gods 259–60; and the prophet 260–3; temptations of superstition 266–8; variety of beliefs 257–8; vital delusions 268–71 Renaissance 220 Ricardo, David 104–5, 106, 246 Richardson, Samuel 88 Richerson, Pete 78, 89 Ridley, Matt, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves 110–11, 126–7 Rio de Janeiro 92 Roberts, Russ 4 Robinson, James 97–8 Rockefeller Foundation 229, 230–1 Rodriguez, Joã 47–8 Rodrik, Dani 228 Rome 257, 259, 260 Romer, Paul 109 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 251 Roosevelt, Theodore 197 Rothbard, Murray 243 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 165, 216 Rowling, J.K. 122 Royal Bank 281 Royal Mint 278, 279 Royal Navy 297 Royal United Services Institution 198 Rudin, Ernst 202 Rufer, Chris 226 Runciman, Garry, Very Different, But Much the Same 94 Rusk, Dean 206–7 Russell, Lord John 195 Russia 119, 204, 227–8, 250, 303 Russian Revolution 318 Sadow, Bernard 126 Safaricom 296 St Louis (ship) 202–3 St Maaz School, Hyderabad (India) 181 Salk Institute, California 67 San Marco, Venice 53 Sandia National Laboratory 136 Sanger, Margaret 201, 204 Santa Fe Institute 93, 126 Santayana, George 10 Sapienza, Carmen 67 Satoshi Nakamoto 307–8, 309–10, 312 Schiller, Friedrich 248 Schmidt, Albrecht 222 Schumpeter, Joseph 106, 128, 251; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 106–7; Theory of Economic Development 106 science: as driver of innovation 133–7; as private good 137–9; pseudo-science 269 Science (journal) 70 Scientology 263 Scopes, John 49 Scotland 17, 280–2, 286 Scott, Sir Peter 211 Scott, Sir Walter (‘Malachi Malagrowther’) 283 Second International Congress of Eugenics 200 Second World War 105, 138, 203, 231, 252, 254, 318 Self-Management Institute 226 Selgin, George 297; Good Money 279, 280 Shade, John 188 Shakespeare, William 15, 131, 216, 224 Shanker, Albert 180 Shaw, George Bernard 197 Shaw, Marilyn 155–6 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 16 Shelley, Percy 16 Shockley, William 119 Shogun Japanese 130 Sierra Club 204 Silk Road 311–12 Silvester, David 274 Simon, Julian 209 Singapore 190 Sistine Chapel, Rome 256 Skarbek, David, The Social Order of the Underworld 237–8 Skinner, B.F. 156, 267–8 Skirving, William 244 skyhooks 7, 13, 14, 18, 65, 67, 71, 150, 267 Slumdog Millionaire (film, 2008) 185 Smith, Adam 3, 20, 21, 22–7, 28, 33, 110, 112, 117, 234, 243, 244, 246, 249; The Theory of Moral Sentiments 23–4, 27, 28, 37–8, 98; The Wealth of Nations 24, 38, 98–100, 103–4, 137 Smith, John Maynard 53 Smith, Joseph 263, 264, 266 Smithism 110 Snowden, Edward 303 SOLE (self-organised learning environment) 186 Solow, Robert 108, 137 Somalia 32 Song, Chinese dynasty 101 Song Jian 210–11, 212–13 South America 247 South Korea 125, 190, 229 South Sea Bubble (1720) 285, 294 South Sudan 32 Soviet-Harvard illusion 3 Soviet Union 114, 122 Spain 101, 247 Sparkes, Matthew 313 Sparta 101 Spencer, Herbert 216–17, 249, 253 Spenser, Edmund 15 Spinoza, Baruch 20, 141–2, 148, 268; Ethics 142; l’Esprit des lois 142–3 Sputnik 138 Stalin, Joseph 250, 252, 253 Stalling, A.E. 10 Stanford University 184, 185 Stealth bomber 130 Steiner, George, Nostalgia for the Absolute 266 Steiner, Rudolf 271 Steinsberger, Nick 136 Stephenson, George 119 Stewart, Dugald 38, 244 Stiglitz, Joseph 292 Stockman, David 288, 289–90; The Great Deformation 294 stoicism 259 Stop Online Piracy Act (US, 2011) 304 Strawson, Galen 140 Stuart, Charles Edward ‘The Young Pretender’ 282 Stuart, James Edward ‘The Old Pretender’ 281 Sudan 32 Summers, Larry 110 Sunnis 262 Suomi, Stephen 161 Sveikauskas, Leo 139 Swan, Joseph 119 Sweden 101, 284 Switzerland 32, 190, 247, 254 Sybaris 93 Syria 32 Szabo, Nick 307, 310; ‘Shelling Out: The Origins of Money’ 307 Tabarrok, Alex 132; Launching the Innovation Renaissance 132 Taiwan 190 Tajikistan 305 Taleb, Nassim 3, 92, 107, 135, 285, 312 Tamerlane the Great 87 Taoism 259, 260 Taylor, Winslow 250 Taylorism 250, 251 Tea Act (UK, 1773) 282n Tea Party 246 technology: biological similarities 126–31; boat analogy 128; computers 123–5, 126; copying 132–3; electric light 1–2; and fracking 136; inexorable progress 122–6, 130–1; innovation as emergent phenomenon 139; and the internet 299–316; light bulbs 118–19, 120; many-to-many 300; mass-communication 200; open innovation 130; patents/copyright laws 131–2; and printing 220; and science 133–9; simultaneous discovery 120–2; skunk works 130; software 131 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) lecture 177 Thatcher, Margaret 217 Third International Congress of Eugenics 201–2, 204 Third World 231–2 Thrun, Sebastian 185 Time (magazine) 241 The Times 308 Togo 94 Tokyo 92 Tolstoy, Leo 217 Tooby, John 43 Tooley, James 181–4 Toy Story (film, 1995) 124 Trevelyan, Charles 195 Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror 29 Tucker, William 90; Marriage and Civilization 89 Tullock, Gordon 35 Turner, Ted 213 Twister (messaging system) 313 Twitter 310, 313 U-2 reconnaissance plane 130 Uber 109 UK Meteorological Office 275 UN Codex Alimentarius 254 UN Family Planning Agency 213 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 254–5 UN General Assembly 305 UNESCO 205 Union Bank of Scotland 281 United Nations 131, 213, 232, 305 United States 34, 122, 125, 138, 139, 176, 200–2, 232, 235–8, 245, 247, 250, 254, 284–5, 286, 302 United States Supreme Court 50 universe: anthropic principle 18–20; designed and planned 7–10; deterministic view 17–18; Lucretian heresy 10–12; Newton’s nudge 12–13; swerve 14–15 University of Czernowitz 106 University of Houston 71 University of Pennsylvania 133 UNIX 302 Urbain Le Verrier 120–1 US Bureau of Land Management 240 US Department of Education 240 US Department of Homeland Security 240, 241 US Federal Reserve 285, 286, 288, 293, 297, 309 US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission 294 US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 240 US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration 240 US Office of Management and Budget 290 Utah 89 Uzbekistan 305 Vancouver 92 Vanuatu 81 Vardanes, King 258 Veblen, Thorstein 249 Verdi, Giuseppe: Aida 248; Rigoletto 248 Veronica (search engine) 120 Versailles Treaty (1919) 318 Victoria, Queen 89 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 10, 23 vitalism 270–1 Vodafone 296 Vogt, William 205, 209; Road to Survival 204 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 14, 15, 20, 22, 25, 41, 143, 243, 268; Candide 15 Volvo 101 Wagner, Andreas 47 Wall Street Journal 125, 132 Wallace, Alfred Russell 20, 54–5, 196 Wallison, Peter 294 Walras, Léon 106 Waltham, David, Lucky Planet 19 Walwyn, Thomas 242 Wang Mang, Emperor 267 Wang Zhen 212 Wannsee conference 198 Wapinski, Norm 136 Washington, George 220, 222, 240 Washington Post 241 Watson, James 121, 145 Webb, Beatrice 197 Webb, Richard 5, 319 Webb, Sidney 197 Webcrawler 120 Wedgwood family 38 Wedgwood, Josiah 199 Weismann, August 55 Wells, H.G. 197, 251 West, Edwin 178; Education and the State 177 West, Geoffrey 93 West Indies 134, 286 Whitney, Eli 128 Whittle, Frank 119 Whole Foods 227 Wikipedia 188, 304–5 Wilby, Peter 315 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 198, 247 Wilkins, Maurice 121 Wilkinson, John 278–9 Willeys 278–9, 280 Williams, Thomas 278 Williamson, Kevin 33; The End is Near and it’s Going to be Awesome 238–9 Wilson, Catherine 12 Wilson, Margo 171 Wolf, Alison, Does Education Matter?


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

That explains why about one-third: Philip Bump, “America’s Outsourced Spy Force, by the Numbers,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/contract-security-clearance-charts/314442/. In 2005 the air force hired the RAND Corporation: Evan S. Medeiros et al., A New Direction for China’s Defense Industry, Rand Corporation, 2005, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG334.pdf. blocked the purchase: Steven R. Weisman, “Sale of 3Com to Huawei Is Derailed by U.S. Security Concerns,” New York Times, February 21, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/business/worldbusiness/21iht-3com.html.

It feared that Huawei’s equipment and products—everything from cell phones to giant switches that run telephone networks to corporate computer systems—were riddled with secret “back doors.” Classified intelligence reports and unclassified congressional studies all warned that one day the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Ministry of State Security would exploit those back doors to get inside American networks. In 2005 the air force hired the RAND Corporation to examine the threat from Chinese networking firms. Huawei was high on the list of threats: RAND concluded that a “digital triangle” of Chinese firms, the military, and state-run research groups were working together to bore deeply into the networks that keep the United States and its allies running.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

In more or less chronological order, Karen Goldberg, of the MacArthur High School math department for letting me play with what passed for a computer there, Henry Kendall of MIT, for letting me play with a real one, Harry Lewis at Harvard, for suggesting that my empty course brackets be filled at the Business School; Bruno Augenstein and Willis Ware, at RAND Corporation, for getting me interested in real-time artificial intelligence; Steve Wyle at LISP Machines and Don Putnam and Lew Roth at Inference Corporation for encouragement and assistance to hammer the square peg of early artificial intelligence into the round hole of finance; Dale Prouty, Yossi Beinart, and Mark Wright of Integrated Analytics for rounding off the peg into MarketMind and later QuantEx; Ray Killian and Frank Baxter of Jefferies and ITG, for noticing that the rounded peg now did fit the finance hole.

They were more of a diversion than an avocation, but the accident of the brackets had more influence subsequently than I could have imagined at the time. Harry also enlisted me as the computer science department’s representative on the Committee on Graduate Education, which gave me a reason to hang out in the dean’s office. Grad students wait for deans, and while perusing the reading material near his couch I found he was on the board of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. He suggested it Intr oduction xxi might be a nice place to work, right on the beach with no blizzards. I put it on my list. Gray Silver Shadow When the time came to find a real job, I was going out to the University of California at Los Angeles to interview for a faculty position, and I added RAND to the schedule.

In Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, Defense Technology International editor Sharon Weinberger tells the remarkable story of how tens of millions of dollars were spent on a crackpot idea for what amounted to a nuclear hand grenade, despite the efforts of the most senior Pentagon scientists to scuttle the project, and the dubious utility of such a weapon. Who would want to throw it? Does the world need a nuke that fits in a lunch bag?10 My personal favorite for a bad technology idea, now in second place after the models that helped create the financial meltdown (but only because it was never built), was described at a RAND Corporation seminar in the early 1980s by then Undersecretary of 288 Nerds on Wall Str eet Defense Bill Perry (later Secretary of Defense in the Clinton years, and not to be confused with the Fridge of the Chicago Bears). I asked him what the worst idea ever to cross his desk at the Pentagon was. Without hesitation, he said that, to his consternation, a proposal had gotten as far as his office to place a huge array of nuclear-powered rocket engines on the far side of the moon, and in the event of hostilities, fire the rockets to plunge the moon into the Soviet Union.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

MIT professor of urban planning: Eran Ben-Joseph, ReThinking a Lot (MIT Press, 2012), pp. xi–xix. Hyperloop is the brainchild: For the original whitepaper: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf. Robert Goddard: Malcolm Browne, “New Funds Fuel Magnet Power for Trains,” New York Times, March 3, 1992. RAND corporation: Robert Salter, “The Very High Speed Transit,” Rand Corporation, 1972. See: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html. In January 2013: For the full story of Hyperloop One development, see: https://hyperloop-one.com/our-story#partner-program. (Author note: Peter’s VC firm is an investor.) Josh Giegel: Author interview, 2019.

If successful, it would zip you across California in thirty-five minutes—or faster than commercial jets. Musk’s idea wasn’t entirely new. Sci-fi dreamers have long envisioned high-speed travel through low-pressure tubes. In 1909, rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard proposed a vacuum train concept similar to the Hyperloop. In 1972, the RAND Corporation extended this into a supersonic underground railway. But just like flying cars, turning sci-fi into sci-fact required a series of convergences. The first of these convergences wasn’t technological. Rather, it was about the people involved. In January 2013, Musk and venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar were on a humanitarian mission to Cuba when they fell into a discussion about the Hyperloop.


Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip A. Fisher

book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, data science, El Camino Real, estate planning, fixed income, index fund, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, profit motive, RAND corporation, Salesforce, the market place, transaction costs, vertical integration

This would tend to justify the price-earnings ratio of around 20 at which this stock has frequently sold in the past five years. “Indicating that this growth may continue for many years to come, the Rand Corporation, brilliant research arm of the Air Force owned by the government, has been quoted in the press as predicting an important future in the 1960's for the as yet almost non-existent field of beryllium metal as a structural material. The Rand Corporation, among other things correctly foretold, shortly after the war, the development in titanium. “More immediate than any eventual market that may develop for beryllium as a structural material, 1958 should see this company bring into volume production another brand-new product.

See also Products Production, low-cost Products Professional advisor. See Financial advisors Profitability Profit margins Profits short-range vs. long-range Promotional companies. See also Young companies Promotion from within Q Quality, of people Quibbling over eighths and quarters R Rand Corporation Raychem Corporation RCA Recessions and bonds Reporting Research, consulting Research and development. See also Market research; Scuttlebutt and size Research scientists, as advisors Risk Rogers Corporation Rohm & Haas Roosevelt, Franklin D. S Safety of investment Sales potential increases in and profit margins research and development and Sales organization Saving, and stock prices Scale School of Random Walkers Scuttlebutt Sears Second dimension, of a conservative investment Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Securities dealers.


pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

The semicolon suggests continuity, a genuine break, and more to come. For a life course in desperate need of punctuation, the grown-up gap year is the perfect way to rectify the run-on sentence. Many people are already taking time off, in one form or another. Some even call it retirement. A 2010 study from the RAND Corporation shows that a sizable portion of the U.S. population first retires and then “unretires,” an act researchers find is primarily by design and not the result of unexpected circumstances. In other words, many may be using the cover of retirement, followed by unretirement, as a kind of de facto gap period.

CHAPTER 7: TEN STEPS TOWARD A NEW STAGE 131 Carl Jung argued that: Carl Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, by Carl Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 131 In her groundbreaking “Grandmother Hypothesis”: Kristen Hawkes, “Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity,” American Journal of Human Biology 15 (2003). 132 Historian Jill Lepore: Jill Lepore, “Baby Talk: The Fuss About Parenthood,” New Yorker, June 29, 2009. 135 the “optimal design for a new stage of life”: “On the Brink of a Brand-New Old Age,” New York Times, January 2, 2001. 135 it’s almost as if the GPS program: I’m indebted to my former colleague John Gomperts for this image. 139 A 2010 study from the RAND Corporation: Nicole Maestas, “Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work After Retirement,” Journal of Human Resources 45, no. 3 (2010): 718–748. 139 In Britain, for example, there are an estimated 200,000: Geraldine Bedell and Rowena Young, eds., The New Old Age: Perspectives on Innovating Our Way to the Good Life for All (London: National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, 2009), http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/the-new-old-age.pdf. 139 Daniel Pink suggests: Daniel H.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The British Empire had died and now was officially cremated. Work on computers and their acronymic names took off everywhere, with added urgency when the Soviets tested their atomic bomb in 1949: Turing’s MADAM; Maurice Vincent Wilkes’s EDSAC Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator at Cambridge; Rand Corporation’s UNIVAC - Universal Automatic Computer; and topping them all acronymically, Nick Metropolis’ MANIAC - Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer. Each contained more vacuum tubes, more memory and more sophisticated programming. Most were funded directly or indirectly by the Army or Navy, to research guided missiles, hydrogen bombs and aircraft design.

NORAD was nervous about being out of touch, especially with its command center dug into the mountains near Cheyenne. So the Air Force sprinkled money around for research on ways to resolve the vulnerability of communications networks, which were dependant on centralized phone switches. Some of it went to the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica, California think-tank spun out of Douglas Aircraft in 1948 to worry about such things. One researcher there, Paul Baran, was an electrical engineer who had worked at nearby Hughes Aircraft. In August 1964, he laid out his theory in a paper titled “On Distributed Computing.” You can read it at RAND’s website.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

But since mutual cooperation is not unilaterally stable, we drag each other into the sabotaging abyss of equilibrium, hence the “dilemma”. Despite the simplicity of such games, they have occasionally been applied to rather serious and high-stakes problems. During the Cold War, researchers at the RAND Corporation (a long-standing think tank for political and strategic consulting) and elsewhere used game-theoretic models to try to understand the possible outcomes of US-Soviet nuclear war and détente—efforts that were memorably if darkly lampooned in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, which ends with the Prisoner’s Dilemma–like nuclear annihilation of the world.

See also precise specification goal racial data and bias and algorithmic violations of fairness and privacy, 96 and college admissions models, 77 and dating preferences, 94–97 and “fairness gerrymandering,” 86–89 and fairness issues in machine learning, 65–66 and forbidden inputs, 66–67 and Google search, 14–15 and lending decisions, 191 and scope of topics covered, 19 and unique challenges of algorithms, 7 RAND Corporation, 100 randomization and differential privacy, 36–37, 40–44, 47 random lending, 69–71 random sampling, 18–19, 40 and self-play in machine learning, 131–32 and trust in data administrators, 45–47 rare events, 144 regulation of data and algorithms. See laws and regulations reidentification of anonymous data, 22–31, 33–34, 38 relationship status data, 51–52 religious affiliation data, 51–52 reproducibility (replication) crisis, 19–20, 156–60 residency hiring, 126–30 resume evaluation, 60–61 Rock-Paper-Scissors, 99–100, 102–3 Roth, Alvin, 130 RuleFit algorithms, 173 runs on banks, 95–96 sabotage, 99–100 Sandel, Michael, 177–78 SAT tests and fairness vs. accuracy of models, 65, 74–80 and predictive modeling, 8 and word analogy problems, 57 and word embedding models, 59–60 scale issues, 139, 143–45, 192.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Thanks also to Sunlen Miller, Sami Sockol, Emily Eckland, Alexandra Coll, Emma Coll, Cynthia Zeiss, and Victoria Green for their research and organizing skills Bruce Hoffman, Kim Cragin, Daniel Byman, Martha Crenshaw, Rohan Gunaratna, Nadia Oweidat, Sara Daly, Heather Gregg, and Anna Kasupski of the Rand Corporation’s Early Al Qaeda History Working Group, where I was an ad hoc participant, provided generous support and inspiring scholarship. Anna Kasupski’s work on financial issues proved particularly valuable. In other research forums, Dan Benjamin and Steven Simon made serious discourse unusually enjoyable.

The brief analysis of U.S. and Saudi governmental attitudes toward the war here and elsewhere in this chapter is drawn from the research for Ghost Wars, chapters 1–5. 4. Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, p. 155. 5. The company had a zakat fund: Interview with Carmen Bin Laden, September 29, 2004. Also, Rand Corporation researcher Anna Kasupski, reviewing materials about the early history of the Services Office in Peshawar, located a 1985 document describing donations from a Bin Laden family foundation. “Rand: Early History of Al Qaeda Working Group, 2006.” 6. Pakistani air force veterans, Mohammed Daoud: Interview with David Grey, February 21, 2006.

The Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal, 1983–1988, National Security Archive document set, George Washington University. “The 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” July 2004. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. PROCEEDINGS OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF AL QAEDA WORKING GROUP, 2006–2007, Rand Corporation; Bruce Hoffman and Kim Cragin, co-directors; Daniel Byman, Martha Crenshaw, Peter Bergen, Lawrence Wright, Rohan Gunaratna, Nadia Oweidat, Sara Daly, Heather Gregg, Ann Kasupski, researchers and presenters. RECORDS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It’s present in the Corbusian doctrine that the ideal and correct ratio of spatial provisioning in a city can be calculated from nothing more than an enumeration of the population, it underpins the complex composite indices Jay Forrester devised in his groundbreaking 1969 Urban Dynamics, and it lay at the heart of the RAND Corporation’s (eventually disastrous) intervention in the management of 1970s New York City.40 No doubt part of the idea’s appeal to smart-city advocates, too, is the familial resemblance such an algorithm would bear to the formulae by which commercial real-estate developers calculate air rights, the land area that must be reserved for parking in a community of a given size, and so on.

Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society, London: Little, Brown, 1995. 12.The reality of the US remote assassination program is comprehensively detailed in the Intercept, “The Drone Papers,” October 15, 2015, theintercept.com. 13.Daniel Gonzales and Sarah Harting, “Designing Unmanned Systems With Greater Autonomy,” Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2014. For a poignant, if chilling, depiction of an autonomous combat system nearing the threshold of self-awareness, see Peter Watts, “Malak,” rifters.com, 2010. 14.American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” June 2014, aclu.org; see also Daniel H.

., 195 Ostrom, Elinor, 171 output neuron, 215 overtransparency, 240–1, 243 Pai, Sidhant, 98 Pandora music service, 220 Panmunjom Truce Village, 65 Pareto optimality, 55, 59 Paris, 1–6, 292 Pasquale, Frank, 244, 253 path dependence, 232, 299 PayPal, 120, 136, 220 PCWorld, 45 People Analytics, 198, 226, 232 perceptron, 214 Père Lachaise cemetery, 2, 5, 26 persoonskaart, Dutch identity card, 60 Pew Research Center, 41, 193 Pinellas County, Florida, 256 Placemeter, 51 polylactic acid plastic filament (PLA), 94, 98, 101 Pokémon Go, 63–5, 76, 79 Polari, 311 policy network, 264 Pollock, Jackson, 261 Pony Express, 256 porosity, 28, 173 POSIWID, 155, 302 Postcapitalism (Paul Mason), 88 power/knowledge, 62 predictive policing, 227, 230, 232, 235 PredPol, 229, 231, 236, 244, 254 proof-of-work, 128–30, 140–1, 143, 290 prosopagnosia. See faceblindness Protoprint, 99–100, 102 provisioning of mobile phone service, 17, 56 Průša, Josef, 105 psychogeography, 40, 51 Quantified Self movement, 33–6, 40 Radical Networks conference, 314 radio frequency identification (RFID), 200, 296 Radiohead, 35 RAND Corporation, 56–8 RATP, 5 recall, 217, 234–5 redboxing, 229–30 regtech, 157 Reich, Robert, 196 Relentless (AN and Omerod), 265 Rensi, Ed, 195 RepRap 3D printer, 86–7, 93, 104–5, 306 RER, 2, 5 Richelieu, Cardinal, 62 Rifkin, Jeremy, 88, 205, 312 RiteAid, 197 Riverton, Wyoming, 63 Royal Dutch Shell Long-Term Studies Group, 287 Samsung, 285–6 Sandvig, Christian, 252 “Satoshi Nakamoto,” 115, 118, 147, 303 scenario planning, 287 Schneier, Bruce, 45, 243 Scott, James C., 311 SCUM Manifesto (Valerie Solanas), 191 Seoul, 6, 18, 54, 264–5, 284 Metro, 54 Sennett, Richard, 111 sentiment analysis, 198 Serra, Richard, 70 SHA–256 hashing algorithm, 123 Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, 18–19, 43 Shodan search engine, 43 Shoreditch, London neighborhood, 136 Shteyngart, Gary, 246 Sidewalk Labs.


pages: 497 words: 124,144

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Columbine, company town, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, Kitchen Debate, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, skunkworks, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money, white picket fence

The idea, at the time, had been met with skepticism by the National Security Council, owing to its technological complexity, though it was hardly revolutionary. The notion of using the cosmos as a surveillance platform had long stirred the imagination of rocket scientists and spies on both sides of the cold war divide. As early as 1946, a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation, had envisioned successors of von Braun’s V-2 rockets one day carrying cameras beyond the stratosphere. Von Braun himself had made a similar pitch to the army brass in 1954. “Gone was the folksy fellow with rolled-up sleeves and Disneyesque props,” wrote the historian William Burrows of the meeting.

The message from Moscow was loud and clear: a Soviet satellite would soon be orbiting the earth, and ordinary citizens would be able to see and hear it. The warning signals did not fall completely on deaf ears in America. The New York Times started researching a story about an impending Soviet launch. The RAND Corporation also carefully clipped all the Soviet press briefs and forwarded them to the Pentagon with an appended note concluding that the Soviets must be serious. But in Washington, no one had time for talk of satellites. The country was in the throes of a looming crisis that had begun with the opening of the school year and was quickly escalating into a major challenge to President Eisenhower’s authority

a Ford repair shop at Fifth and K streets: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, p. 104. “I don’t ‘believe’ that the Soviets are ahead”: New York Times, February 6, 1957. 132 “Every day we don’t reverse our policy is a bad day for the Free World”: Ibid., August 18, 1957. a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 46. “Gone was the folksy fellow”: Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 145. 133 SR-71 Blackbird: http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/sr-71/html. Bissell was alarmed that it was not even at the blueprint stage: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, p. 134. 134 to personally inspect every Jupiter C launch: Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, p. 243.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Murdoch and Ross Anderson (9 Nov 2014), “Security protocols and evidence: Where many payment systems fail,” FC 2014: International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_2. 100Amazingly, the UK may make this: Patrick Jenkins and Sam Jones (25 May 2016), “Bank customers may cover cost of fraud under new UK proposals,” Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/e335211c-2105-11e6-aa98-db1e01fabc0c. 100And similarly, in the US: Federal Trade Commission (Aug 2012), “Lost or stolen credit, ATM, and debit cards,” https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0213-lost-or-stolen-credit-atm-and-debit-cards. 101“security is a tax on the honest”: Bruce Schneier (2012), Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive, Wiley, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Wiley Title/productCd-1118143302.html. 101“guard labor”: Arjun Jayadev and Samuel Bowles (Apr 2006), “Guard labor,” Journal of Development Economics 79, no. 2, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387806000125. 101The tech analyst firm Gartner estimates: Gartner (16 Aug 2017), “Gartner says worldwide information security spending will grow 7 percent to reach $86.4 billion in 2017,” https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3784965. 101If we want more security: Allison Gatlin (8 Feb 2016), “Cisco, IBM, Dell M&A brawl may whack Symantec, Palo Alto, Fortinet,” Investor’s Business Daily, https://www.investors.com/news/technology/cisco-ibm-dell-ma-brawl-whacks-symantec-palo-alto-fortinet. 102A 2017 Ponemon Institute report concluded: Ponemon Institute (20 Jun 2017) “2017 cost of data breach study,” http://info.resilientsystems.com/hubfs/IBM_Resilient_Branded_Content/White_Papers/2017_Global_CODB_Report_Final.pdf. 102A Symantec report estimated: Symantec Corporation (23 Jan 2018), “2017 Norton cyber security insights report: Global results,” https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/about/2017-ncsir-global-results-en.pdf. 103“We found that resulting values are”: I was a member of the steering committee for this research project. Paul Dreyer et al. (14 Jan 2018), “Estimating the global cost of cyber risk,” RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2299.html. 6. WHAT A SECURE INTERNET+ LOOKS LIKE 105“disconcerting lack of regard”: Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad (1 Dec 2016), “#Toyfail: An analysis of consumer and privacy issues in three internet-connected toys,” Forbrukerrådet, https://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/toyfail_report_desember2016.pdf. 106Germany banned My Friend Cayla: Philip Oltermann (17 Feb 2017), “German parents told to destroy doll that can spy on children,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/17/german-parents-told-to-destroy-my-friend-cayla-doll-spy-on-children. 106Mattel’s Hello Barbie had: Samuel Gibbs (26 Nov 2015), “Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/26/hackers-can-hijack-wi-fi-hello-barbie-to-spy-on-your-children. 106In 2017, the consumer credit-reporting agency Equifax: Tara Siegel Bernard et al. (7 Sep 2017), “Equifax says cyberattack may have affected 143 million in the U.S.,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/business/equifax-cyberattack.html.

Dan Goodin (17 May 2017), “Fearing Shadow Brokers leak, NSA reported critical flaw to Microsoft,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/fearing-shadow-brokers-leak-nsa-reported-critical-flaw-to-microsoft. 165Vulnerabilities are independently discovered: Andy Greenberg (7 Jan 2018), “Triple Meltdown: How so many researchers found a 20-year-old chip flaw at the same time,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/meltdown-spectre-bug-collision-intel-chip-flaw-discovery. 165This implies that if the US government: In 2017, I tried to estimate the annual rate of rediscovery, using available data sets, and found it to be between 11% and 22%. Independently, a group of researchers from the RAND Corporation tried to estimate it as well, using different assumptions and a different data set; they found the rate to be less than 6%. We’re all blind folks touching different parts of the elephant. We each extrapolate from our own tiny pieces of data. Clearly we’re not going to learn much about the NSA’s capabilities this way.

Trey Herr, Bruce Schneier, and Christopher Morris (7 Mar 2017), “Taking stock: Estimating vulnerability recovery,” Belfer Cyber Security Project White Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2928758. Lillian Ablon and Timothy Bogart (9 Mar 2017), “Zero days, thousands of nights: The life and times of zero-day vulnerabilities and their exploits,” RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1751.html. 165Plus, NOBUS doesn’t take into account: Scott Shane, Matthew Rosenberg, and Andrew W. Lehren (7 Mar 2017), “WikiLeaks releases trove of alleged C.I.A. hacking documents,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-cia-hacking.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html.


pages: 56 words: 17,340

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

First of all, it's a very close paraphrase of official government policy-very close, in fact. When it's government policy, it's called low-intensity conflict or counterterror. Incidentally, it's not just the United States. As far as I'm aware, this practice is universal. Just as an example, back in the mid 1960s the Rand Corporation, the research agency connected with the Pentagon mostly, published a collection of interesting Japanese counterinsurgency manuals having to do with the Japanese attack on Manchuria and North China in the 1930s. I was kind of interested-I wrote an article on it at the time comparing the Japanese counterinsurgency manuals with U.S. counterinsurgency manuals for South Vietnam, which are virtually identical.s That article didn't fly too well, I should say.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Thanks to AID, these students are prepared for the open yet sometimes opaque world of neo-medieval diplomacy in which individuals can play multiple roles and juggle multiple issues at the same time. There is no better example of this than Zalmay Khalilzad. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the ouster of the Taliban, Khalilzad—an Afghan American working for the RAND Corporation—was appointed special envoy and then ambassador to the country. Armed with knowledge of Dari and Pashto and billions of U.S. dollars, and eventually backed by tens of thousands of American troops, he set about nation building and playing warlord politics. For three years he was constantly whispering in Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s ear, and allegedly also in the ears of his opponents, earning him the label “viceroy.”

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Ronfeldt, David. Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1996. Root, Hilton L. Alliance Curse: How America Lost the Third World. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008. Rosenau, James N. Distant Proximities: The Dynamics and Dialectics of Globalization. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity.


pages: 263 words: 78,433

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

affirmative action, classic study, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, job satisfaction, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, Multics, RAND corporation

There is also a growing body of evidence to suggest that burned-out and emotionally fatigued doctors commit more medical errors.18 Measuring this precisely is quite difficult, but the higher doctors score on measures of burnout, the more errors they admit to making. In contrast, doctors who are more engaged in their work and life report fewer errors.19 A seminal study by the Rand Corporation followed twenty thousand patients and their doctors for two years.20 These were patients with ordinary chronic illnesses—diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and depression—not acutely ill patients in the hospital. Patients and doctors alike were extensively interviewed. One of the most intriguing findings of the study was that patients were much more likely to take their prescribed medications when they were cared for by doctors who were satisfied with their jobs and lives.

See litigation manipulation, 13–14 Manning, Yvonne (patient who died of breast cancer, daughter filed suit), 178–85 MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), 52 medical education: and empathy loss, 30–36, 47, 147–50, 159; hidden curriculum of, 33–36; humanities studies, 49–50; integrated clerkships, 50–52; medical error education, 136–37; and medical terminology, 36–38; mixed messages of, 31–33; multiculturalism studies, 52–54; self-discipline demands of, 18; on shame, 136–37; and slang/gallows humor, 37–40, 43; structure of, 3–4, 32; and time management, 74–75, 143–45, 160–62 medical error: and disillusionment, 160; emotional toll of, 2, 124–27, 134–36, 175–76; and guilt, 87–89; medical education on, 136–37; reduction, 139; studies, 137–38 medical experience, 3 Medicine in Translation (Ofri), 26–27, 62–63, 97, 203, 206–7 Mercedes (patient who was thought to have Lyme disease), 175–76, 199–201 misdiagnosis, 85, 90–91, 175–77; anchoring bias error in, 2, 86–89; consequences of, 87–90, 124–27, 176–77; rates of, 92 Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences, 54, 133–34, 193 multiculturalism studies, 52–54 music, 151–53 Natalie (psychiatric patient who attempted suicide), 187–89 negative emotions, 2 oath of Maimonides, 7, 10 Occam’s razor, 88 Ofri, Danielle, 26–27, 62–63, 97, 200–201, 203, 206–7 On Apology (Lazare), 128, 133 oncologists, 107–9, 134–36, 183–84 online ratings, 196–99 organ transplant, 25–28, 62–63, 95, 142, 170–72, 202–5 Osler, William, 3–4, 56, 57, 147, 210, 212 Overdiagnosed (Welch), 191–92 overdose, drug, 19–22, 76–83 overwhelmed, feeling: and decision making, 74–75; and empathy loss, 159; and fatigue, 30, 34, 70, 148, 169; and medical education structure, 32; and revulsion, 7–9, 10–12, 40–43, 57–58; and time pressures, 83–84 Paolini, Herdley (psychologist who created physician wellness program), 162–66 pain, perception of, 29–30 patient: emotion, 211–12; empathy and health outcomes of, 56–57, 110–13; patient-doctor relationship, 192–93, 210–11; patient-satisfaction surveys, 193, 196–99; personality traits, 12–15; view of misdiagnosis, 85 patient care consequences: and anger, 37, 132–33, 147–50, 159, 210; of grief, 98–105, 108–13, 122–23; of litigation, 139, 154–57, 178, 187, 190–92; of shame, 132–33 Peabody, Francis, 212 peaked T waves, 66–67 personal bias, 13–15 personal enrichment, 150–52 personality traits: patient, 12–15; physician, 133 physician evaluations, 196–99 Physicians Foundation study, 153–54 positive emotions, 2, 210–11 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 105–6, 108 Potter syndrome, 99, 101 pride, 124–25, 175–76 prognosis, difficulty telling, 25–28, 61–62, 127 pulmonary embolism, 86–89, 91–92 quality-measures movement, 3, 193–95 racial bias, 29–30 Rand Corporation study, 160 rape, 6–9, 141 Remen, Rachael Naomi, 165 report cards, 193–95 respect, 53–56 revulsion, 7–9, 10–12, 40–43, 57–58 risk management, 173–75, 181–85. See also litigation Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Humanism and Professionalism study, 49–50 sadness. See grief “self-induced” illness, 10, 18–22, 113–19, 146 self-judgment, 199–201 shame: and apology, 128, 133, 139; averting, 139; benefits of, 132, 139; and expectations, 130–31; and guilt, 125–29, 135–36, 138–39; medical education on, 136–37; patient care consequences of, 132–33 Shem, Samuel, 43–44 short-sightedness, 57–59 Singular Intimacies (Ofri), 200–201 slang/gallows humor.


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Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

And the programme is well intentioned: officers visit people on the watch list to offer access to intervention programmes and help to turn their lives around. But there are concerns that the Strategic Subject List might not be living up to its promise. One recent investigation by the non-profit RAND Corporation concluded that appearing on it actually made no difference to an individual’s likelihood of being involved in a shooting.41 It did, however, mean they were more likely to be arrested. Perhaps – the report concluded – this was because officers were simply treating the watch list as a list of suspects whenever a shooting occurred.

(TV show) 97–9 John Carter (film) 180 Johnson, Richard 50, 51 Jones Beach 1 Jones, Robert 13–14 judges anchoring effect 73 bail, factors for consideration 73 decision-making consistency in 51 contradictions in 52–3 differences in 52 discretion in 53 unbiased 77 judges (continued) discrimination and bias 70–1, 75 intuition and considered thought 72 lawyers’ preference over algorithms 76–7 vs machines 59–61 offenders’ preference over algorithms 76 perpetuation of bias 73 sentencing 53–4, 63 use of algorithms 63, 64 Weber’s Law 74–5 Jukebox 192 junk algorithms 200 Just Noticeable Difference 74 justice 49–78 algorithms and 54–6 justification for 77 appeals process 51 Brixton riots 49–51 by country Australia 53 Canada 54 England 54 Ireland 54 Scotland 54 United States 53, 54 Wales 54 discretion of judges 53 discrimination 70–1 humans vs machines 59–61, 62–4 hypothetical cases (UK research) 52–3 defendants appearing twice 52–3 differences in judgement 52, 53 hypothetical cases (US research) 51–2 differences in judgements 52 differences in sentencing 52 inherent injustice 77 machine bias 65–71 maximum terms 54 purpose of 77–8 re-offending 54, 55 reasonable doubt 51 rehabilitation 55 risk-assessment algorithms 56 sentencing consistency in 51 mitigating factors in 53 substantial grounds 51 Kadoodle 15–16 Kahneman, Daniel 72 Kanevsky, Dr Jonathan 93, 95 kangaroos 128 Kant, Immanuel 185 Kasparov, Gary 5-7, 202 Kelly, Frank 87 Kerner, Winifred 188–9 Kernighan, Brian x Killingbeck 145, 146 Larson, Steve 188–9 lasers 119–20 Leibniz, Gottfried 184 Leroi, Armand 186, 192–3 level 0 (driverless technology) 131 level 1 (driverless technology) 131 level 2 (driverless technology) 131, 136 careful attention 134–5 level 3 (driverless technology) 131 technical challenge 136 level 4 (driverless technology) 131 level 5 (driverless technology) 131 Li Yingyun 45 Lickel, Charles 97–8 LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) 119–20 life insurance 109 ‘Lockdown’ (52Metro) 177 logic 8 logical instructions 8 London Bridge 172 London School of Economics (LSE) 129 Loomis, Eric 217n38 Los Angeles Police Department 152, 155 Lucas, Teghan 161–2, 163 machine-learning algorithms 10–11 neural networks 85–6 random forests 58–9 machines art and 194 bias in 65–71 diagnostic 98–101, 110–11 domination of humans 5-6 vs humans 59–61, 62–4 paradoxical relationship with 22–3 recognising images 84–7 superior judgement of 16 symbolic dominance over humans 5-6 Magic Test 199 magical illusions 18 mammogram screenings 94, 96 manipulation 39–44 micro-manipulation 42–4 Maple, Jack 147–50 Marx, Gary 173 mastectomies 83, 84, 92, 94 maternity wards, deaths on 81 mathematical certainty 68 mathematical objects 8 McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch 122 mechanized weaving machines 2 Medicaid assistance 16–17 medical conditions, algorithms for 96–7 medical records 102–7 benefits of algorithms 106 DeepMind 104–5 disconnected 102–3 misuse of data 106 privacy 105–7 medicine 79–112 in ancient times 80 cancer diagnoses study 79–80 complexity of 103–4 diabetic retinopathy 96 diagnostic machines 98–101, 110–11 choosing between individuals and the population 111 in fifteenth-century China 81 Hippocrates and 80 magic and 80 medical records 102–6 neural networks 85–6, 95, 96, 219–20n11 in nineteenth-century Europe 81 pathology 79, 82–3 patterns in data 79–81 predicting dementia 90–2 scientific base 80 see also Watson (IBM computer) Meehl, Paul 21–2 MegaFace challenge 168–9 Mercedes 125–6 microprocessors x Millgarth 145, 146 Mills, Tamara 101–2, 103 MIT Technology Review 101 modern inventions 2 Moses, Robert 1 movies see films music 176–80 choosing 176–8 diversity of charts 186 emotion and 189 genetic algorithms 191–2 hip hop 186 piano experiment 188–90 algorithm 188, 189–91 popularity 177, 178 quality 179, 180 terrible, success of 178–9 Music Lab 176–7, 179, 180 Musk, Elon 138 MyHeritage 110 National Geographic ­Genographic project 110 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 135 Navlab 117 Netflix 8, 188 random forests 59 neural networks 85–6, 95, 119, 201, 219–20n11 driverless cars 117–18 in facial recognition 166–7 predicting performances of films 183 New England Journal of ­Medicine 94 New York City subway crime 147–50 anti-social behaviour 149 fare evasion 149 hotspots 148, 149 New York Police Department (NYPD) 172 New York Times 116 Newman, Paul 127–8, 130 NHS (National Health Service) computer virus in hospitals 105 data security record 105 fax machines 103 linking of healthcare records 102–3 paper records 103 prioritization of non-smokers for operations 106 nuclear war 18–19 Nun Study 90–2 obesity 106 OK Cupid 9 Ontario 169–70 openworm project 13 Operation Lynx 145–7 fingerprints 145 overruling algorithms correctly 19–20 incorrectly 20–1 Oxbotica 127 Palantir Technologies 31 Paris Auto Show (2016) 124–5 parole 54–5 Burgess’s forecasting power 55–6 violation of 55–6 passport officers 161, 164 PathAI 82 pathologists 82 vs algorithms 88 breast cancer research on corpses 92–3 correct diagnoses 83 differences of opinion 83–4 diagnosing cancerous tumours 90 sensitivity and 88 specificity and 88 pathology 79, 82 and biology 82–3 patterns in data 79–81, 103, 108 payday lenders 35 personality traits 39 advertising and 40–1 inferred by algorithm 40 research on 39–40 Petrov, Stanislav 18–19 piano experiment 188–90 pigeons 79–80 Pomerleau, Dean 118–19 popularity 177, 178, 179, 183–4 power 5–24 blind faith in algorithms 13–16 overruling algorithms 19–21 struggle between humans and algorithms 20–4 trusting algorithms 16–19 power of veto 19 Pratt, Gill 137 precision in justice 53 prediction accuracy of 66, 67, 68 algorithms vs humans 22, 59–61, 62–5 Burgess 55–6 of crime burglary 150–1 HunchLab algorithm 157–8 PredPol algorithm 152–7, 158 risk factor 152 Strategic Subject List algorithm 158 decision trees 56–8 dementia 90–2 prediction (continued) development of abnormalities 87, 95 homicide 62 of personality 39–42 of popularity 177, 178, 179, 180, 183–4 powers of 92–6 of pregnancy 29–30 re-offending criminals 55–6 recidivism 62, 63–4, 65 of successful films 180–1, 182–3, 183 superiority of algorithms 22 see also Clinical vs Statistical Prediction (Meehl); neural networks predictive text 190–1 PredPol (PREDictive POL­icing) 152–7, 158, 228–9n27 assessing locations at risk 153–4 cops on the dots 155–6 fall in crime 156 feedback loop 156–7 vs humans, test 153–4 target hardening 154–5 pregnancy prediction 29–30 prescriptive sentencing systems 53, 54 prioritization algorithms 8 prisons cost of incarceration 61 Illinois 55, 56 reduction in population 61 privacy 170, 172 false sense of 47 issues 25 medical records 105–7 overriding of 107 sale of data 36–9 probabilistic inference 124, 127 probability 8 ProPublica 65–8, 70 quality 179, 180 ‘good’ changing nature of 184 defining 184 quantifying 184–8 difficulty of 184 Washington Post experiment 185–6 racial groups COMPAS algorithm 65–6 rates of arrest 68 radar 119–20 RAND Corporation 158 random forests technique 56–9 rape 141, 142 re-offending 54 prediction of 55–6 social types of inmates 55, 56 recidivism 56, 62, 201 rates 61 risk scores 63–4, 65 regulation of algorithms 173 rehabilitation 55 relationships 9 Republican voters 41 Rhode Island 61 Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport 132 risk scores 63–4, 65 Robinson, Nicholas 49, 50, 50–1, 77 imprisonment 51 Rossmo, Kim 142–3 algorithm 145–7 assessment of 146 bomb factories 147 buffer zone 144 distance decay 144 flexibility of 146 stagnant water pools 146–7 Operation Lynx 145–7 Rotten Tomatoes website 181 Royal Free NHS Trust 222–3n48 contract with DeepMind 104–5 access to full medical histories 104–5 outrage at 104 Rubin’s vase 211n13 rule-based algorithms 10, 11, 85 Rutherford, Adam 110 Safari browser 47 Sainsbury’s 27 Salganik, Matthew 176–7, 178 Schmidt, Eric 28 School Sisters of Notre Dame 90, 91 Science magazine 15 Scunthorpe 2 search engines 14–15 experiment 14–15 Kadoodle 15–16 Semmelweis, Ignaz 81 sensitivity, principle of 87, 87–8 sensors 120 sentencing algorithms for 62–4 COMPAS 63, 64 considerations for 62–3 consistency in 51 length of 62–3 influencing 73 Weber’s Law 74–5 mitigating factors in 53 prescriptive systems 53, 54 serial offenders 144, 145 serial rapists 141–2 Sesame Credit 45–6, 168 sexual attacks 141–2 shoplifters 170 shopping habits 28, 29, 31 similarity 187 Slash X (bar) 113, 114, 115 smallpox inoculation 81 Snowden, David 90–2 social proof 177–8, 179 Sorensen, Alan 178 Soviet Union detection of enemy missiles 18 protecting air space 18 retaliatory action 19 specificity, principle of 87, 87–8 speech recognition algorithms 9 Spotify 176, 188 Spotify Discover 188 Sreenivasan, Sameet 181–2 Stammer, Neil 172 Standford University 39–40 STAT website 100 statistics 143 computational 12 modern 107 NYPD 172 Stilgoe, Jack 128–9, 130 Strategic Subject List 158 subway crime see New York City subway crime supermarkets 26–8 superstores 28–31 Supreme Court of Wisconsin 64, 217n38 swine flu 101–2 Talley, Steve 159, 162, 163–4, 171, 230n47 Target 28–31 analysing unusual data ­patterns 28–9 expectant mothers 28–9 algorithm 29, 30 coupons 29 justification of policy 30 teenage pregnancy incident 29–30 target hardening 154–5 teenage pregnancy 29–30 Tencent YouTu Lab algorithm 169 Tesco 26–8 Clubcard 26, 27 customers buying behaviour 26–7 knowledge about 27 loyalty of 26 vouchers 27 online shopping 27–8 ‘My Favourites’ feature 27–8 removal of revealing items 28 Tesla 134, 135 autopilot system 138 full autonomy 138 full self-driving hardware 138 Thiel, Peter 31 thinking, ways of 72 Timberlake, Justin 175–6 Timberlake, Justin (artist) 175–6 Tolstoy, Leo 194 TomTom sat-nav 13–14 Toyota 137, 210n13 chauffeur mode 139 guardian mode 139 trolley problem 125–6 true positives 67 Trump election campaign 41, 44 trust 17–18 tumours 90, 93–4 Twain, Mark 193 Twitter 36, 37, 40 filtering 10 Uber driverless cars 135 human intervention 135 uberPOOL 10 United Kingdom (UK) database of facial images 168 facial recognition algorithms 161 genetic tests for Huntington’s disease 110 United States of America (USA) database of facial images 168 facial recognition algorithms 161 life insurance stipulations 109 linking of healthcare ­records 103 University of California 152 University of Cambridge research on personality traits 39–40 and advertising 40–1 algorithm 40 personality predictions 40 and Twitter 40 University of Oregon 188–90 University of Texas M.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Our recent military history is punctuated with city names — Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles [!], Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo — but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come."8 To help develop a larger conceptual framework for MOUT, military planners turned in the 1990s to Dr. Strangelove's old alma mater, the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for wargaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping to strategize the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These days RAND does cities: its researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city public health, and the privatization of public education.

tenure 80 slum-dwellers 32 Konadu-Agyemang, Kwadwo 84—5, 96 structural adjustment programs Korff, Riidiger 65, 83, 183 155-6 Korogocho 44 Khulna City 128 Krasheninnokov, Alexey 166 Kibaki, Mwai 101 Krishnakumar, Asha 140-1 Kibera 92, 94, 95, 101, 139, 143, 145 Krung Thep see Bangkok kidney trade 190 Kuala Lumpur 47, 111, 188 Kingston 32 Kumasi 35, 141-2 Kinshasa 191-8 inequalities 97 Lagos military planning 204 anti-IMF protests 162 population 4 "architecture of fear" 116 public services 155 beautification campaign 104 sewage 139 economic recession 14 slum-dwellers 23, 25 environmental disasters 129 urbanization 2, 16 evictions 101, 102 water 146 fires 128 Kipling, Rudyard 22, 138 land speculation 87 Kirkby, Richard 62 military planning 204 Klak, Thomas 67 overcrowding 93—4 Kohl, Helmut 153 population 4, 5 - 6 Kolkata (Calcutta) relocations 98 Dhapa dump 47 renting 35 evictions 101—2 road networks 119 housing 66 sewage 138 informal sector 181—2 slum-dwellers 23 inner city poverty 32 street-dwellers 36—7 Kipling on 22 structural adjustment programs NGOs 77 152 overcrowding 92 traffic accidents 132, 133 population 4 urbanization 1, 2, 8 poverty line 25n20 Victoria Island 115 privies 143 land speculation 82, 84-9, 91 refugees 55-6 land-titling 80-2, 90 rickshaws 189-90 landlordism 42-3, 44, 82-4, 86-7, 89 slum dwellers 26, 27 see also renting landslides 122-3 Lisbon 42 Laquian, Aprodicio 177 Lobito 49 Larkin, Emmet 16 London 82-3, 94, 175 Latin America conservative reform 81 Los Angeles 12, 16, 36, 124, 203 Luanda inequality 157—8 evictions 102-3 informal sector 176-7, 180, 182 growth of 16 inner-city poverty 32 poverty 25 labor 46-7 refugees 49 loss of manufacturing segregation 97 employment 164 modernization 15 unemployment 164 water sales 145—6 NGOs 77 Lubove, Roy 92 renting 43 Luce, Edward 171 rural migrants 46 Lusaka sanitation problems 137, 139, 148 demolitions 111 semi-proletarianization 174 disease 143 slow urban growth 54—5 poverty 31 squatting 38, 39, 83 segregation 96 structural adjustment programs shantytowns 37 155, 156 urbanization 5, 8, 10, 59-60 sites-and-services scheme 74 urban migration 51 women 158—9 Layachi, Azzedine 125-6 McNamara, Robert 71, 72, 75 Lee-Smith, Diana 44 magic 194, 195, 196-8 Lesbet, Djaffar 65 Malan, Rian 60-1 Lewis, Oscar 32 Malawi 97 liberalization 15, 155-6, 175 Malaysia 9, 26, 47, 188 Lilongwe 97 Mallaby, Sebastian 75, 76 Lima Mamayes 122 earthquakes 127 Managua 118-19 housing 34, 67 Manchester 16, 137, 138 middle classes 33 Mandalay 47-8, 107 population 4 Mangin, William 71 poverty 26-7, 32, 157 Manila squatters 89 beautification campaigns 104 urbanization 1, 16 class conflicts 98-9 Manila (Cont'd.) fires 127, 128 flooding 123-4 gated communities 116 structural adjustment programs 148, 152-3 urbanization 16 Mexico City hazardous slum locations 121 disease 143-4 land ownership 84 environmental disasters 126, 129, land prices 9 2 , 9 9 130 land-titling 82 housing 61—2 population 4 land ownership 91 poverty 26 loss of manufacturing Smoky Mountain 47, 127 employment 164 water sales 145 pollution 129, 133, 137 World Bank project 73 population 2n6, 4, 5 Manshiyet Nasr 93 region-based urbanization 10 Maoism 53, 56 regularization 80-1 Maputo 25, 143 renting 43, 45 Marcos, Imelda 73, 104 rural migrants 46, 55 Marcus, Steven 137-8, 174 Santa Cruz Meyehualco 47 Maroko 101 satellite cities 99 Marx, Karl 16 slum-dwellers 23, 26, 27, 31 Marxism 174 taxation 68 Mathare 142 urban growth 17, 59-60 Mathey, Kosta 66 Meyer, Hannes 61 Mayhew, Henry 20 micro-enterprises 80, 179, 180, 181, Mbuji-Mayi 8 megacities 2, 4, 5-8, 50-1, 147 megaslums 26, 28, 92, 150 183-4 middle classes 32, 43, 157, 202 car use 132,133 Megawati Sukarnoputri 113 housing policy 65, 66, 69 Mehta, Suketu 141 India 97, 100, 150, 171, 172 Mejfa, Manuel 105-6 inner-city housing 83 Mexico land ownership 91 debt crisis 159 property investment 86 housing 67 Russia 166 informal sector 176-7 tax evasion 67 poverty 26, 32, 157, 164-5, 184 World Bank urban projects 73, 74 rural areas 11 slum-dwellers 23, 24 see also elites; social class Middle East 39, 58, 165, 185 migrants 27-9, 46, 51-61, 168n63, 169-70, 172 sewage 138, 140 slum-dwellers 1 8 , 2 3 , 2 6 , 3 1 Milanovic, Branko 21 street-dwellers 36 military planning 202-6 urban development authorities Mitchell, Timothy 85 68-9 Mitlin, Diana 77 water sales 145 Mobutu, Sese Seko 58-9, 191, 192, women 141 193, 194 World Bank project 73-4 Mogadishu 203 Mwacan, Angeline 146 Mohan, Rakesh 40 Mwangi, Meja 138 Moi, Daniel Arap 101 Myanmar (Burma) 52, 107-8 Molina, Humberto 86 Mombasa 18 Nairobi Monrovia 137 child mortality 146 Montevideo 32-3 colonial period 51 Morel, Edmundo 105-6 evictions 101, 102 mortality 146-7 fires 128 Moscow 22, 166-7 inequality 95 Moser, Caroline 159 landlordism 44, 87 Mugabe, Robert 113, 114 overcrowding 94 Mumbai (Bombay) population growth 18 child labor 186 rack-renting 35, 42 colonial period 52 sewage 138, 139, 143 death rates 146-7 water contamination 137 deindustrialization 13 encroachment into protected areas 136 water sales 144-5 Naples 22, 42, 83, 94, 175-6 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 61, 200 evictions 102 natural disasters 122-8 housing 34, 65—6 Navarro 49 inequalities 96, 97 Nedoroscik, Jeffrey 33, 86, 190 land ownership 84 Negri, A. 201 overcrowding 92 Nehru, Jawaharlal 61, 200 pollution 133-4 neoclassical theory 163 population 4, 5 neoliberalism 16, 79, 81, 141, 163, 200 privatization 171 Chile 156 refugees 55-6 Colombian drug cartels 165 satellite cities 99 cost-recovery 72 neoliberalism (Cont'd.) flexible labor 185 Old Havana 32 Olympic Games 106-7 globalization 174 Orientalism 205-6 impact on healthcare 147-8 overcrowding 53, 92-4 India 170, 171, 172 individualism 184 informal sector 180, 186 Pakistan land speculation 84 Mexico 159 poverty 165—6 optimism 202 refugees 48, 56 privatization of toilets 141 South Africa 154 Nepal 23 slum population 24 Palm Springs 42 Paris 64, 98 New Bombay 65-6, 99 Payatas 124 New York 4, 5, 44, 92 Payne, Geoffrey 80, 126 NGOs see non-governmental peasants 53-4, 55, 60, 91, 169, 174 organizations Peattie, Lisa 72-3 Nguyen Due Nhuan 66 Peil, Margaret 87 Nicaragua 38 Penang 47 Nientied, Peter 88 Pentecostalism 195, 196 Nigeria Perez Jimenez, Marcos 54, 59 beautification campaign 104 peripherality 37-8, 93 child mortality 148 Peru housing 66-7 housing policy 62 slum population 24 informal sector 177 structural adjustment programs 152, 156 recession 157 rural migrants 27 Nkrumah, Kwame 200 slum population 24 Nlundu, Thierry Mayamba 198 squatting 38 Nock, Magdalena 11 Pezzoli, Keith 91 non-governmental organizations Philippines (NGOs) 70, 71, 75-9, 154, 184 beautification campaigns 104—5 North Korea 54 health spending 148 Nuru, Karin 51 slum population 24 World Bank project 73 Oberai, A. 67-8, 74, 179 Phnom Penh 35, 54, 107, 145 Ofeimun, Odia 101 Pinochet, Augusto 109, 156 Okome, Onookome 1 Pol Pot 54, 107 politics 100, 109-11 pollution 129-30, 133-4, 136-7, 143, 145-6 polycentric urban systems 9 , 1 0 structural adjustment programs 152, 153 toilets 141-2 transport 132 population density 92-3, 95-6, 99 water 146 population growth 2, 3, 7, 18 World Bank policies 164 Port-au-Prince 92, 142, 188, 204 property rights 45, 79-80, 179 Portes, Alejandro 180, 185n40 protests 161-3 Potts, Deborah 156 PRSP see Poverty Reduction Strategy poverty 24-6, 27, 151-73 Papers Africa 6, 18 public transport 131-2 Algeria 165 Puerto Rico 122 China 170 Pugh, Cedric 72, 160 Eastern Europe 167 Pusan 16 India 5, 170, 171, 172, 173 Putin, Vladimir 167 inner city 31-7 Latin America 156-7 Quarantina 47 Mexico 164-5, 184 Quito 32, 86, 136, 146, 159 Nigeria 156 overurbanization 16 racial segregation 96-7 Pakistan 165-6 Raftopoulos, Brian 114 periurban 201 Rakodi, Carole 155 profiting from 82-9 RAND Corporation 203-4 rural 51 Rangel, Jose Vincente 123 Russia 166 Rangoon 47-8, 102, 107-8, 144 UN-HABITAT report 20, 21 Reagan, Ronald 153 urban hazards 124, 128 refugees 48-9, 55-6, 100, 194 urbanization of 50 regularization 80-1 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) 75-6 privatization renting 42-5 see also landlordism resistance 109-11, 161-3, 202 Algeria 165 Rhodesia see Zimbabwe Congo 193 rickshaws 188-90 education 203 Rigg, Jonathan 26 healthcare 149, 159 Riis, Jacob 20 housing 63, 71 Rio de Janeiro India 171 hazardous slum locations 122 Rio de Janeiro (Cont'd.) 150 inequality 157 colonial period 52, 53 inner city poverty 32 India 171 pollution 129 Mumbai 73 population 4 Santa Cruz Meyehualco 47 slum clearances 99, 102, 108 Santiago 10, 32, 109, 176 slum dwellers 27, 31 Santo Domingo 96, 102, 105-6, 203 verticalization of favelas 93 Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Range (RSPER) 5 Sao Paulo deindustrialization 13 favelas 17, 34 riots 162 gated communities 117-18 Riskin, Carl 168 industrialization 16 road networks 118-19 inner-city poverty 32 Roberts, Bryan 182 loss of manufacturing Robotham, Don 164 employment 164 Rocha, Mercedes de la 184 pollution 129, 130, 133 Rodenbeck, Max 33 population 4 Rodgers, Dennis 118-19 region-based urbanization 10 Rogerson, Christine 160-1 regularization 81 Roma 167 rent prices 86 Roy, Ananya 102 slum dwellers 23 Roy, Arundhati 79, 140 water contamination 136 RSPER see Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Range SAPs see structural adjustment programs Ruggeri, Laura 115,119-20 Schenk, Hans 46, 128 rural areas 1 0 , 1 1 , 1 6 0 Schenk-Sandbergen, Loes 141 China 9, 53-4 Schneider, Cathy 109 India 171-2 Schultz, George 153 see also peasants Scott, James 39 Russian Federation 23-4, 166-7 SCRSs see substandard commercial Sabana Perdida 105 Seabrook, Jeremy 9, 70, 72, 100 residential subdivisions Sadat, Anwar 110-11 Dhaka 189 Sadr City 144, 205 hazardous slum locations 121, St.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

See Gary Rubinstein, “The Hidden Attrition of Success Academy,” Gary Rubinstein’s Blog, January 4, 2018, https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-hidden-attrition-of-success-academy/; and Leo Casey, “Student Attrition and ‘Backfilling’ at Success Academy Charter Schools: What Student Enrollment Patterns Tell Us,” Albert Shanker Institute, February 18, 2016. 17. Jennifer Li, “What New York City’s Experiment with Schoolwide Performance Bonuses Tells Us About Pay for Performance. Research Brief,” RAND Corporation, 2011. 18. Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek, “One Century of Global IQ Gains: A Formal Meta-Analysis of the Flynn Effect (1909–2013),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 3 (2015): 282–306. 19. “Racial and Ethnic Achievement Gaps,” Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project, Stanford CEPA, no date, https://cepa.stanford.edu/educational-opportunity-monitoring-project/achievement-gaps/race/. 20.

Ones, “A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of the Predictive Validity of the Graduate Record Examinations: Implications for Graduate Student Selection and Performance,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 1 (2001): 162. 10. RAND Education, “Teachers Matter: Understanding Teachers’ Impact on Student Achievement,” RAND Corporation, 2012, https://www.rand.org/pubs/corporate_pubs/CP693z1-2012-09.html. 11. See, for example, Catherine Rampell, “SAT Scores and Family Income,” New York Times, August 27, 2009. 12. Mark Dynarski, Ning Rui, Ann Webber, and Babette Gutmann, “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After One Year.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

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

Increasingly, American society is plagued by a widespread sense of alienation and despair evident in myriad ways: the nationwide opioid epidemic, rising rates of suicide, and historically low levels of trust in the US government. According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trust, only 18 percent of Americans say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” (3 percent) or “most of the time” (15 percent).60 The Rand Corporation’s recent report Truth Decay found that popular distrust and wariness had spread far beyond people’s feelings about the government. The report’s authors described “declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information” and growing “uncertainty and anxiety” throughout the United States.61 In other spheres, belief in education as an escape route out of poverty is dampened by the resegregation of public schooling and skyrocketing college tuition, while fresh reports of widespread future job loss due to technology and artificial intelligence seem to appear on a daily basis.

“Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” New York Times, August 15, 2015. Kardashian, Kim. Selfish. New York: Rizzoli, 2016. Kavanagh, Jennifer, and Michael D. Rich. “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.” Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2018. Kazmin, Amy. “‘I Am a Troll’ by Swati Chaturvedi.” Financial Times, February 20, 2017. Kellaway, Lucy. “The Bliss of Being 396 Miles from My Lost Smartphone.” Financial Times, September 25, 2016. Khan, Lina M. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3 (January 2017). King, Jamilab.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

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

Meanwhile, the experiments will continue in the testing areas. 2. Laboratory Animals The concept “testing area” merits particular notice. Similarly, “American strategists have described the civil war in El Salvador as the ‘ideal testing ground’ for implementing low-intensity conflict doctrine” (a.k.a. international terrorism), a DOD-sponsored RAND Corporation report on the experiment concludes. In earlier days, Vietnam was described as “a going laboratory where we see subversive insurgency...being applied in all its forms” (Maxwell Taylor), providing opportunities for “experiments with population and resource control methods” and “nation building.”

Among a series of unpleasant—hence unmentionable—facts is the similarity of these operations to the no less brutal and atrocious ones conducted by the United States a few years later near China’s southern border, operations that peaked in murderous violence shortly after the Japanese documents on Manchuria were released by the RAND Corporation in 1967, to be shelved with appropriate silence by the cultural managers.7 The similarity is not entirely accidental. Apart from the fact that the same thoughts naturally come to the minds of similar actors facing similar circumstances, US counterinsurgency doctrine was consciously modelled on the practices and achievements of World War II fascism, though it was the Nazis who were the preferred model.

., 35–36, 38 Pollin, Robert, 156 Pol Pot, 140, 180, 186–87, 251, 348, 350–51, 369 Pool, Ithiel, 52 Porter, Bernard, vii Portes, Richard, 113 Portugal, 187 in New World Order, 66, 181, 188 Portuguese colonialism, 6–7, 6–9, 11, 19, 180 Posey, Darrell, 162 postcolonialism decolonization period, 54–62 Pozzi, Pablo, 257 Prescott, Paul, 364 Preston, Lewis, 86 prisons, 153–154, 177, 224, 392–93 colonialism and, 16, 27, 272 role in New World Order, 83, 153–54, 168, 238 Puebla Institute, 289 Puerto Rico, 272, 336 Puette, Walter, 385 Putin, Vladimir, xii Qaddafi, Muammar, 29, 164 Rabe, Stephen, 215, 234–35 Rabin, Yitzhak, 53 Rabinowitz, Dorothy, 344 race, 38, 217, 275, 277, 281 in colonialism, ix, 27, 36, 274, 281, 307 See also blackness; Noirisme; whiteness racism, 6, 31–32, 48, 74, 195, 275, 277–78, 281, 292, 307, 396, 398 See also colonialism; imperialism; slavery Ramírez, Ivan, 249 RAND Corporation, 169–70, 308, 331 Reagan, Ronald, xii, 89, 112, 114, 268–69, 350, 372, 382 Cold War policy, 157 economic policy, 54, 68, 70–71, 85, 109, 144, 146, 149–50, 155, 228, 385–87 Grenada policy, 117 Guatemala policy, 238 Haiti policy, 284, 286 Korea policy, 141 Nicaragua policy, 206 South Africa policy, 39 Reding, Andrew, 82 refugees, 33, 346 Cuban refugees, 284 Haitian refugees, 284, 293, 296, 298, 302 Indonesian refugees, 181, 187 Salvadoran refugees, 249 from US slavery, 194 Reston, James, 178–79 Reuter, Edzard, 77–78 Rivera, Brooklyn, 120 Roberts, Brad, 257 Robinson, Anthony, 107–09 Röling, Bert, 327 Romania, 81, 111–12, 141 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 59, 96, 197–98, 277, 328, 339–40 Roosevelt, Theodore, 31, 277 Root, Elihu, 215 Rosenfeld, Stephen, 183–84 Rostow, Walt, 174, 176 Roth, Kenneth, 290, 292 Rubinstein, Danny, 53 Rumsfeld, Donald, x Rusk, Dean, 171–73, 183, 225 Russell, Bertrand, 50 Russia, xii, xiii, 92–94, 127, 332 in post–Cold War era, 77, 81, 108, 111–13, 113–15, 151 See also Soviet Union Ryan, Hewson, 283 Sachs, Jeffrey, 107 Sandel, Michael, 253 Sandinistas, 49, 105, 121–22, 201, 205, 263–67, 300 Sarney, José, 260 Saudi Arabia, 52, 56, 235 Savimbi, Jonas, 129 Scanlan, Christopher, 245 Schlesinger, Arthur, xi, 38, 200 Schmidt, Hans, 274, 276–77, 280–81, 303 Schoultz, Lars, 42, 166 Schweid, Barry, 148 Scott, Peter Dale, 171 Seabrook, Jeremy, 237 Serrano, Jorge, 240–41 sexism, 74, 398 Sexton, Patricia, 389, 396 sexual violence, 227, 239, 243 forced sterilization, 277–78 Shamir, Yitzhak, 53 Shawcross, William, 186–87 Shenon, Philip, 180, 333 Sheppar, Nathaniel, 118 Shlaudeman, Harry, 119 Shorrock, Tim, 140 Shultz, George, 141, 286 Sihanouk Norodom, 350–51 Simes, Dimitri, 123, 125 Simpson, John, 257 Singapore, 83–84, 257, 350 Sioux, 32, 363 Skidmore, Thomas, 225–227, 229–30 slavery, x, 43–44, 311–12, 319 in Bolivia, 195 in Brazil, 231–32 in Cuba, 196–97 global slave trade, 6–7, 9, 19, 28–29 in Haiti, 271, 275–76 in India, 241 in US, 33, 36–37, 193–94, 361 Slim, T-Bone, 380 Sloan, Alfred, 309 Smith, Adam, viii, 318 on colonialism, 4–5, 9–11, 20–22, 379 on economics, 13–17, 24–25, 390 legacy of, 77, 79 Smith, Joseph, 214 Smith, Stephen, 143 Smith, Wayne, 203 Smucker, Philip, 354 Somoza García, Anastasio, 140, 263, 265–66, 299 South Africa, 4, 134, 320, 386 actions in Angola, 39, 100, 129–30, 206–07 South Commission, 61 South Korea, 13, 55, 358 in New World Order, 84, 140–42, 145, 256 South-North Human Genome Conference, 159 Soviet Union, 73, 150, 169, 185–86, 220, 325, 360 in Cold War, xii, 62–66, 96–107, 129–30, 157, 167, 199, 210 collapse of, 72, 77, 84, 122–23, 125, 127, 131, 157, 251–52, 395 dissidents, 43 role in Third World, 60, 93–94, 123 See also Cuban missile crisis; Russia Spaatz, Carl Andrew, 326 Spain, 13, 101, 337 Spanish colonialism, 6–7, 9–10, 17, 29, 42–44, 195, 196, 271, 273–274 Stackhouse, John, 353–54 Stavrianos, Leften, 92 Stein, Herbert, 157, 410n15 Stephens, Uriah, 319 Stevens, John, 336 Stewart, Allan, 234–35 Stigler, George, 14, 22 Stimson, Henry, 58, 97 Stivers, William, 279 Story, Joseph, viii Strange, Susan, 70 Strauss, Robert, 115 structural adjustment policies, 4, 85–87, 117, 134, 149, 209, 224, 235–37, 249, 269, 273, 354 Sued-Badillo, Jalil, 272, 420n49 Suharto, 170, 174, 176, 178, 180–81, 185–87, 190, 209, 253 Sukarno, 168–69, 168–70, 173–75, 178, 184 Summers, Lawrence, 151–52 Suskind, Ron, 117 Sweden, 86, 94 Swift, Jonathan, 357 Switzerland, 211, 275 Taft, William Howard, 217 Taiwan, 83, 257, 285 Taylor, Humphrey, 383 Taylor, Lance, 147 Taylor, Maxwell, 165, 421n62 Thailand, 187, 231, 241–42, 349–50 Thatcher, Margaret, 76–77 Thomasson, Gordon, 305–07 Thompson, Edward, 15 Thompson, E.P., 382 Thompson, John, 105 Tibbets, Paul, 327 Tibet, 331 Times Literary Supplement, vii Timor, 140, 180–81, 185–90, 349, 369 Togo, 86 Tojo, Hideki, 340 Torricelli, Robert, 296 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François-Dominique, 271–72, 279, 302 Tracy, James, 10–11 transnational corporations (TNCs), 62, 144, 150, 162, 164, 181 in New World Order, 70, 83–84, 88, 132–33, 146 Tran Viet Cuong, 353 Trevelyan, Charles, 16 Trilateral Commission, 52, 367 Trinidad-Tobago, 86 Trotsky, Leon, 95 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 281 Truman, Harry, 47, 63, 96, 99, 218, 221, 328, 405n16 Turkey, 13, 48, 52, 150, 203, 229 Twain, Mark, 43, 202, 253 Tyler, John, 35, 334–36 Tyler, Patrick, 67–68, 347 Ubico, Jorge, 239 Uchitelle, Louis, 157 Ukraine, 114 UN Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 118 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 73, 85 Underhill, John, 30 UN Economic Commission for Africa, 76 UN Economic Commission for Europe, 112 UNESCO, 73, 231 UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 231 UN High Commission on Refugees (UNCHR), 298 UN Human Development Program, 85 United Arab Emirates, 148–149 United Nations (UN), 100, 127–28, 243, 352 US role in, 73, 100, 185–87, 211, 350 universities, 73–75, 169, 175 under neoliberalism, 74–75 UN Report on Human Development, 231 UN Security Council, 73, 127, 350 UN World Economic Survey, 269 Uruguay, 244 USAID, 117, 119, 248, 284, 290, 305, 307 US International Trade Commission, 162 US-Japan semiconductor agreement, 132 Vandenberg, Arthur, 101 Venezuela, 134, 139, 214, 233–37 Vickery, Michael, 241–42, 369–70 Vidal, Gore, 74 Vietnam, 308, 330 French policy toward, 95 invasion of Cambodia, 349–51, 369 in New World Order, 345–58, 369–71 Phoenix program, 182 US policy toward, 39–40, 65, 242, 279 Vietnam war, 70, 165, 174–78, 184, 235, 332–34, 344, 355–59, 369–77, 398 critics of, 165–66, 339, 380 MIAs, 365–68 My Lai massacre, 357–60, 363 Vieux, Steve, 261, 268 Voluntary Export Arrangements, 132 Vries, David de, 362 Wain, Barry, 181 Wall Street Journal, 68, 82, 117, 134, 154–55, 158, 181, 214, 296, 338, 386 Walters, Vernon, 224 War of 1812, 33, 366 Warsaw Pact, 63, 104 Washington, George, 30, 193, 315 Washington Post, 41, 98, 183, 211, 213, 250, 297, 326, 334, 358, 371 Watanabe, Michio, 326, 328 Watergate, 29 Watkins, Kevin, 162–63 Webster, Daniel, 33 Weisman, Steven, 326, 328, 338–44 Welles, Sumner, 197–98 Whipple, H.B., 43 whiteness, 10, 48, 308 in colonialism, 37, 130, 195, 197, 274, 317, 335 honorary whiteness, 4 in transnational adoption, 110 See also race Whitman, Walt, 36 Whitney, Craig, 359 Wilensky, Gail, 320 Wilentz, Amy, 285, 290, 304 Williams, Roger, 30 Wilson, Horace, 18 Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 104, 217, 252–53, 276, 277–79, 307, 394, 396 Wimer, Javier, 118 Wines, Michael, 183 Wintle, Justin, 358 Wohlstetter, Albert, 166 Wolfowitz, Paul, 68 women targets of advertising, 80, 314 targets of environmental toxins, 356 targets of violence, 28, 31, 265, 361 women’s equality, 382 women’s political groups, 182 women’s work, 306 See also sexism Wood, Leonard, 211 Woodward, Robert, 59 World Bank, 82–83, 103, 107–08, 149–52, 195, 228, 248, 284–85, 288 role in New World Order, 85–86, 115, 143, 176, 226, 254, 370 World Court, 29, 128, 188, 211, 349 World Health Organization, 208, 240, 245, 307 World War I, 54, 98, 215, 394 World War II, 34, 45, 58–59, 102, 188, 221, 234, 245, 331 aftermath of, 42, 69, 94, 142–43, 146, 15­­­6–57, 215–17, 303, 365 economic impact of, 54 Pearl harbor bombing, 326 Tokyo Tribunal, 327 ­­See also Nuremberg Tribunal Wortzel, Lawrence, 308 Wouk, Walter, 365 Wrong, Dennis, 257 464 Yamashita Tomoyuki, 328, 360 Yarbro, Stan, 237 Yugoslavia, 81 Zaire.


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

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

(China’s microchip manufacturers must have been laughing all the way to the bank when Reagan predicted that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.”) It just took a few months to add analytical luster to Reagan’s pronouncements and turn it into something of a coherent history. In 1990, the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank that, perhaps by the sheer virtue of its propitious location, never passes up an opportunity to praise the powers of modern technology, reached a strikingly similar conclusion. “The communist bloc failed,” it said in a timely published study, “not primarily or even fundamentally because of its centrally controlled economic policies or its excessive military burdens, but because its closed societies were too long denied the fruits of the information revolution.”

“The communist bloc failed,” it said in a timely published study, “not primarily or even fundamentally because of its centrally controlled economic policies or its excessive military burdens, but because its closed societies were too long denied the fruits of the information revolution.” This view has proved remarkably sticky. As late as 2002, Francis Fukuyama, himself a RAND Corporation alumnus, would write that “totalitarian rule depended on a regime’s ability to maintain a monopoly over information, and once modern information technology made that impossible, the regime’s power was undermined.” By 1995 true believers in the power of information to crush authoritarianism were treated to a book-length treatise.

See also Culture Popular Mechanics Populism Pornography Postman, Neil Pouraghayi, Saeedeh Power “Power of the Powerless” (Havel) Prague Pravda Price, Cedric Prior, Markus Privacy Propaganda and Chavez in China in Egypt in Iran and middle class and public discourse in Russia in South Korea susceptibility to See also Censorship; Spin Protection by obscurity Przeworski, Adam Psiphon Public discourse Public-opinion guidance Putin, Vladimir “Putin and His Ideology” (Chadayev) Putnam, Robert Racism Radio Radio broadcasting Radio Doctor (radio program) Radio Free Europe and CIA Radio Martí Raja News website RAND Corporation Reagan, Ronald Recognizr Red-texting Reductionism Religion RentAFriend.com Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Research funding of Revisionism Revolutionary Guards Reynolds, Glenn Rezaei, Alireza Rice, Condoleezza Ringelmann, Max Ringelmann Effect Rittel, Horst Roberts, Hal Robertson, Pat Romania Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

How else can you explain that so many of our Facebook pages include people we would never have even considered talking to in high school, and yet we help water their imaginary plants? Chapter 5 (1) The Prisoner's Dilemma was originally framed in the 1950s by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation, and was named several years later by Albert Tucker.Many researchers have informed and analyzed this game, most famously John Nash and then Robert Axelrod, who used it to help explain the evolution of cooperation. (2) I should probably explain about Alice and Bob. Cryptographers—and I started as a cryptographer—name the two actors in any security discussion Alice and Bob.

Criminals can form Allan Castle (1997), “Transnational Organized Crime and International Security,” Institute of International Relations, The University of British Columbia Working Paper No. 19. Phil Williams (2001), “Transnational Criminal Networks,” in John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, RAND Corporation, 61–97. Oded Löwenheim (2002), “Transnational Criminal Organizations and Security: The Case Against Inflating the Threat,” International Journal, 57:513–36. Criminals were simply Warwick Ashford (6 Oct 2010), “ISSE 2010: Police Are Playing Catch-Up as Criminals Embrace IT,” Computer Weekly.

certain brain regions Ryota Kanai, Bahador Bahrami, Rebecca Roylance, and Geraint Rees (2011), “Online Social Network Size Is Reflected in Human Brain Structure,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, published online before print. Chapter 5 Prisoner's Dilemma Merrill M. Flood (1952), “Some Experimental Games,” Research Memorandum RM 789–1, The RAND Corporation. Republished as: Merrill M. Flood (1958), “Some Experimental Games,” Management Science, 5:5–26. Albert W. Tucker (1980), “A Two-Person Dilemma,” UMAP Journal, 1:101–3. Albert W. Tucker (1983), “The Mathematics of Tucker: A Sampler,” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, 14:228–32. Many researchers Sylvia Nasar (2001), A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash, Simon & Schuster.


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Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

Sarah Waddington, “Plymouth’s Crazy Idea to Fly Blood Samples Between Hospitals—by Pigeon,” Plymouth Herald, February 10, 2018.   36. Editorial, “Improving Blood Safety Worldwide,” Lancet 370, no. 9585 (2007): 361.   37. Kara W. Swanson, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 57.   38. A recent comprehensive report by the RAND corporation into the US blood supply called it “complex” but also “robust.” Harvey Klein and colleagues think differently. The financial bullying might of huge hospital conglomerates, they wrote in 2017, is forcing blood collection centers to lower their prices to unsustainable levels. There is fierce competition and the reduction of margins to the point where research is being cut.

There is fierce competition and the reduction of margins to the point where research is being cut. Andrew W. Mulcahy, Kandice A. Kapinos, Brian Briscombe, et al., Toward a Sustainable Blood Supply in the United States: An Analysis of the Current System and Alternatives for the Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1575.html; Harvey G. Klein, J. Chris Hrouda, and Jay S. Epstein, “Crisis in the Sustainability of the U.S. Blood System,” New England Journal of Medicine 377, no. 15 (2017): 1485–88.   39. Sadaguru Pandit, “10 Million Indians Made to Donate Blood Reveals NACO Data,” Hindustan Times, July 12, 2017.   40. 

pigeons Plan India plasma during Battle of Mogadishu cost of donors fractionation fresh frozen Krever Report on proteins in sale of source storage of transfusions of, statistics on in trauma during World War II Plasma for Britain program plasma industry plasma protein therapeutics Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association (PPTA) Plasma Resources UK Plasmafaresis plastic surgery, leeches used in platelets Pliny the Elder pluripotent stem cells Plymouth Hospital PMDD (premenstrual dysmorphic disorder) PMS (premenstrual syndrome) polar bears polycythemia vera PolyHeme Pope Innocent VIII postpartum hemorrhage poverty PRBCs (packed red blood cells) pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) program pregnancy premenstrual dysmorphic disorder (PMDD) premenstrual syndrome (PMS) President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) Prince Regent (future George IV) Principles and Practice of Obstetricy (Blundell) prisoners’ access to menstrual hygiene Prisoners’ Blood Bank for Defense Procter & Gamble prostate-specific antigen (PSA) PSA (prostate-specific antigen) Psychrolousia, or The History of Cold Bathing (Floyer) public executions Pybus, Miss Quebec Quick, Jonathan Racaniello, Vincent race, early blood segregation and Rana Plaza factory building collapse in 2013 RAND corporation rape Rath, Matthias rats Read, Sara REBOA (resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta) red blood cells bone marrow’s production of cost of Filton’s production of official shelf life of packed (PRBCs) presurgical conservation of shape of in sickle-cell anemia stored vs. fresh in trauma Red Cross Red Market, The (Carney) Red Star (Bogdanov) rejuvenation, blood Rely tampons Research and Markets resuscitation.


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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

But getting to efficient use of smartphone lab tests and scans, along with virtual visits, is not a slam-dunk, by any means. The next step we need to get into is how to completely capture and archive all of these data, from womb to tomb. Chapter 7 My Records and Meds “Health information technology (HIT) could save $81–$162 billion or more annually while greatly reducing morbidity and mortality.” —THE RAND CORPORATION, 20051 “We’re creating a revolution. Some people are aghast.” ON GIVING PATIENTS ACCESS TO NOTES BY PHYSICIANS. —TOM DELBANCO, HARVARD2 We’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. We’ve got our labs, real-time wireless sensor data, genomic sequence information, and images. Our ability to generate big medical data about an individual has far outstripped any semblance of managing it, and we can’t even build the full GIS yet.

Appleby, “Hospitals Promote Screenings That Experts Say Many People Do Not Need,” Washington Post, May 13, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hospitals-promote-screenings-that-experts-say-most-people-should-not-receive/2013/05/13/aaecb272-9ae2-11e2-9bda-edd1a7fb557d_story.html. 39. S. Garber et al., “Redirecting Innovation in US Health Care,” The RAND Corporation, 2014, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR308.html. 40. R. Sihvonen et al., “Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy versus Sham Surgery for a Degenerative Meniscal Tear,” New England Journal of Medicine 369, no. 26 (2013): 2515–2524. 41. S. Eappen et al., “Relationship Between Occurrence of Surgical Complications and Hospital Finances,” Journal of the American Medical Association 309, no. 15 (2013): 1599–1606. 42.

.), 47–49, 285 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein), 38–42, 47–49 Privacy concerns, 219–235 Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 228–229 Project Artemis, 252 Project Masiluleke (South Africa), 261–262 Pronovost, Peter, 186 Prostate cancer screening, 118 Protective alleles, 102 Protein biology, 86 Proteome, 81–82, 86 Proteus, 133–134 Proton beam radiation, 146 Qualcomm, 286 Quality in healthcare, 156–157 QuantuMDs, 264, 265(fig.) Quest Diagnostics, 108 Radiation dosages, 28–29, 113–116, 115(table). See also Imaging; Scans Radiation Right campaign, 116 Ramamurthy, Lakshman, 65–66 RAND Corporation, 125(quote), 130–131 Reconstructive surgery after double mastectomy, 58–59 Records, medical Blue Button Initiative, 129–130 human phenome, 82–83 hype in health information technology, 130–132 OpenNotes project, 127–129 patient access to DNA data, 22 patient ownership, 125–126 See also entries beginning with Data Regulatory procedures, 288–289 Reinhardt, Uwe, 139(quote), 142 Religion, 13–14, 17–18, 50, 52 Relman, Arnold “Bud,” 176 Research, personal, 17 Respect, culture of, 20–21, 27–30 Revolution 2.0 (Ghonim), 13 Revolutions, social networks contributing to, 43–44 Rheumatoid arthritis, 144–145, 204 Rifkin, Jeremy, 49 Risk calculation Global Burden of Disease, 258–261 ionized radiation tests, 113–116 leading causes of disease and risk factors for death and disability, 260(table) predictive analysis, 249–250 TBI and gene variants, 94–95 traditional epidemiology, 70–71 RNA, 86, 98, 255–256 Roche, 215 Rosenberg, Tina, 139(quote) Rosenthal, Elisabeth, 140, 142, 148 Rubenstein, David, 37 Rush, Benjamin, 20 Ruthven, David, 189 Sabar, Ariel, 105(quote) Sage Bionetworks, 199–200 Sayfer, Steven, 190–191 Scans alternatives to radiation, 116 miniaturization of, 118–120 MOOMs, 204–205 patient access to test results, 120–121 portable devices for, 118–120 See also Imaging; Lab tests Schekman, Randy, 209–210 Schwamm, Lee, 167–168 Science, modern, 44–46 Seife, Charles, 71–72 Seigler, Mark, 20 Seinfeld (television program), 4 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 275 Sensor Project, 269 The Shallows (Carr), 40 Sharing Clinical Reports Project, 75 Shenkin, Budd, 127 Shortage of physicians, 173(fig.), 270–271 Side effects of drugs, 100–101 Sidereus Nuncius (Galilei), 44–45 The Signal and the Noise (Silver), 40 The Silent World of Doctor and Patient (Katz), 18–19 Silver, Nate, 40 Simon, Elena, 9, 10(fig.), 212 Siri, 164–165, 244 Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (Townsend), 223 Smart patients, 8–10 Smartphones attachment scopes, 122 biosensors, 83 boredom and, 48–49 compared to printing press, 40 conducting a full physical exam with, 121–123 data archiving, 48 declining cost of, 273(fig.)


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

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

After the emigration of many of the school’s members from fascist-wracked Europe in the 1930s, the Austrians became best-selling authors, respected political theorists, and economic policy experts in their adoptive homelands. They shaped post–World War II life through such institutions as the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), the RAND Corporation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Group of Thirty. They spearheaded the successful conservative counterattack against Keynesian economics in the 1970s and ushered in our current age’s faith in globalization, free markets, rule of law, entrepreneurship, and neoliberalism.

They also contributed to the formation of a number of transnational epistemic communities that advocated trade liberalization, floating exchange rates, state deregulation, and privatization. Austrians played instrumental roles in these communities by persuading institutional actors, state and nonstate, to follow their prescriptions in times of uncertainty and crisis. Through GATT, the Bellagio Group, the RAND Corporation, and others, Haberler, Machlup, and Morgenstern proved adept at behind-the-scenes policy interventions that shaped economic liberalization and Cold War reasoning in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1980s “Washington Consensus,” which coalesced in the halls of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and US Treasury, was articulated by a Machlup student, John Williamson.

Both men received requests from the state, even if von Neumann was the hotter commodity. In the coming years, he worked for the following governmental agencies: the Ballistic Research Laboratory, the National Defense Research Committee, the Navy’s Section for Mine Warfare, the Atomic Energy Commission, and, most famously, the Manhattan Project. He was also hired on by the RAND Corporation, the think tank of “defense intellectuals” at the heart of Cold War social scientific thought.55 Morgenstern too landed at the hub of US policy work. By the late 1940s, he conducted work for RAND, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, and the Office of Naval Research. He produced studies on logistics and operations research for the Navy.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

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

In the memo’s section on “Social Pathology,” he predicted that, due to “the types of personalities that slums produce,” American cities like New York would soon be facing a “genuinely serious fire problem.” He blamed the problem on arson, fires set by what he called antisocial blacks. This idea came from the RAND Corporation. (When Eisenhower warned America about the military-industrial complex, he might have been talking about RAND, the Cold War think tank that guided U.S. policy in Vietnam and created “rational choice theory,” the belief that humans are essentially individualistic and selfish, a key underpinning of the new ideology to come.)

., from Norris Vitcheck, “Confessions of a Blockbuster,” The Saturday Evening Post, July 14–21, 1962. 71“Between June and September of 1966,” from a poll taken by Louis Harris for Newsweek, found in CBS News special report, “Black Power/White Backlash,” 1966. 71Johnson quote as recalled by Bill Moyers in “What a Real President Was Like; To Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society Meant Hope and Dignity,” Washington Post, November 13, 1988. 72–73Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Middle Class,” New York, April 14, 1969. 74Nixon tapes from David E. Rosenbaum, “Nixon Tapes At Key Time Now Drawing Scant Interest,” New York Times, December 14, 2003. 74Ehrlichman on the War on Drugs, from Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s, April 2016. 75On RAND and rational choice, see Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). 75–76“Irredeemable rookeries” speech by Robert Moses, found in Max Page, Creative Destruction of Manhattan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), noted as typescript of speech by Robert Moses at the Commodore Hotel, November 14, 1956, Municipal Reference Library, vertical files, “NYC Slums.” 78Roger Starr, “Making New York Smaller,” New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1976. 78Rita Koenig, “Mr.

., 305 Power Broker, The (Caro), 66, 67, 377 Powerhouse Workshop, 350 Project First Step, 186–87 Psychoanalysis, 14, 207, 411 Public Speaking (movie), 111 Puerto Ricans, 69, 77–78, 311 Puritanism, 33–34, 57, 78, 358–59 Queens, 161, 373–87 “Queer,” 132–33 Quinn, Christine, 149, 165–66, 167 Race riots, 70–71, 343, 346 Racial segregation, 70, 71, 74 Racism, 61, 64–65, 66, 70 Rainbows & Triangles, 220 Rakoff, David, 3, 173 Ramones, 84–85 RAND Corporation, 75 Rangel, Charles, 77–78, 294 Rat Bohemia (Schulman), 31 Ratner, Bruce, 352, 353 Ravenite Social Club, 123 Rawhide, 219–20 Ray’s Candy, 27 Reagan, Ronald, 104, 110, 200, 250 Rebel Cities (Harvey), 322 Recchia, Domenic, 369 Red Bull, 83 Redlining, 63–65, 293 Red Square, 44–46, 54 Reed, Alvin, 305–6 Reed, Lou, 46 Regional Plan Association (RPA), 62–63, 66, 70 Related Companies, 244–46, 384–85 Rent control, 221, 283 Rent regulations, 418 Rent stabilization, 30–31, 111, 419 Republican National Convention (2004), 134 Residents in Distress (RID), 189–90 Restaurant Florent, 187, 190, 196–97 Restaurant health grades, 166–67 Revanche, 40–41 Reverend Billy, 84–85, 263, 338, 369 Reynolds, Bobby, 360 Rezoning, 39, 159–62, 417 Coney Island and, 367–68 East Village and, 24 Harlem and, 297–98, 313 High Line and, 236 Hudson Yards and, 244–45 Williamsburg and, 337 Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa, 296, 297 Ridgewood, 380–81 Rimkus, Ulli, 47–48, 50 Rise and Fall of New York City, The (Starr), 78 Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida), 323–25 Rivers, Larry, 86 Riverview Hotel, 254–55 Robert Moses and the Modern City (Jackson), 164 Roberts, Julia, 187–88 Robinson, Bobby, 299–300, 301–2 Rocco Ristorante, 146–47 Rodriguez, Shellyne, 322, 398 Roediger, David, 61 Rogosin, Lionel, 86 Rohatyn, Felix, 76, 77–78, 390 Rohatyn, Jeanne Greenberg, 390, 391 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 168 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 63 Roosevelt Avenue, 381–82 “Root shock,” 25 Rose, Joseph, 236 Rosenblatt, Muzzy, 82 Ross, Stephen, 245–46 Rothko, Mark, 86 Rubenstein, 402 Rubenstein, Keith, 390–92, 402 Rubin, Peter and Mark, 268 Rubinstein, Kenny, 269 Rubinstein, Morris, 269 Rudy’s Music Stop, 275 Russ & Daughters, 53 Ryan, Cara Gendel, 17 Sadik-Khan, Janette, 164, 169, 273–74 Sagalyn, Lynne, 262–63, 406–7 St.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

On the other hand, there was this feeling of bewilderment that the lives of so many men should add up to no more than two simple columns.”28 The late Robert Bellah, an influential sociologist and moral philosopher, points to flaws in rational choice theory, which originated at the RAND Corporation, found support from the Ford Foundation, and an enthusiastic practitioner in Robert McNamara, as the sources of McNamara’s failure. The theory, which assumes that social life can be explained as the outcome of rational choices by individual actors, found an early foothold in economics with Kenneth Arrow’s 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values, and it remains the dominant economic idea at the University of Chicago. But the theory didn’t come from economics departments. It originated at the RAND Corporation in response to the desire of policy makers to mathematically model the decisions the Soviet Union might make during the Cold War.

At that point, if you were an executive tasked with formulating and implementing strategy, you probably fell into one of two camps—those who viewed management as science or those who viewed management as art. If the former, then you probably leaned on the work of Igor Ansoff, whose 1965 book, Corporate Strategy, carried the subtitle “An Analytic Approach to Business Policy for Growth and Expansion”3 (with the difference between “growth” and “expansion” left unsaid). Ansoff had worked at the RAND Corporation before landing at Carnegie Mellon, and his systematic prescriptions were in keeping with the quantitative tilt of his employer. “If Chandler’s definition [of strategy] was baggy and capacious,” writes Walter Kiechel in The Lords of Strategy, “the notions introduced by Igor Ansoff . . . were filigreed to an overwrought fault.”4 Or worse: In laying out the framework for forecasting, Ansoff offhandedly assumed that most corporate forecasts would be within 20 percent of the eventual result.

McNamara’s tenure as secretary of defense can be considered in two phases as well. When he was acting as secretary of defense, he brought that rational approach to decision making to yet another organization badly in need of it. Budgets that had historically relied on patronage and parochialism were centralized. He hired Charles Hitch, chief economist at RAND Corporation, as comptroller, and tasked him with helping to build what came to be known as the Planning Programming Budgeting System, or PPBS, which was hailed by none other than Igor Ansoff as “an advanced version of the strategic planning system.”17 HBS’s Robert N. Anthony followed Hitch as comptroller, and between 1965 and 1968 worked on real, complex problems such as the question of how to reduce currency outflow in military procurement.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

As if the threat from individual hackers’ stealing credit cards and Mafia thugs’ breaking kneecaps weren’t bad enough, today traditional organized crime groups and highly talented hackers have united to combine forces, and the results for the general public and business are disastrous. While historically perhaps 80 percent of hackers were independent freelancers, today the opposite is true. According to a 2014 study by the Rand Corporation, a full 80 percent of hackers are now working with or as part of an organized crime group. The Rand findings remind me of the great scene from the 1980s film Ghostbusters in which Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Dan Aykroyd have armed themselves with “proton pack” weapons to defeat the ghosts who have invaded New York City.

They were able to marshal evidence by channeling time and energy to decipher data to produce results faster than any policing or governmental organization could have done alone. Crowdsourcing public safety delivers clear results and must become an integral component of our global security strategy in an exponentially changing world, especially one so short on full-time cyber-security personnel. The Rand Corporation has noted that the nationwide shortage of technical security professionals within the federal government is so critical that it is putting both our national and our homeland security at risk. The finding was echoed by Cisco’s 2014 Annual Security Report, which estimated that there was a talent scarcity of more than a million cyber-security professionals worldwide, expected to grow to two million by 2017.

,” Guardian, Sept. 21, 2011; Misha Glenny, “Inside the World of Cybercrime, EIBF 2012, Review,” EdinburghGuide.​com, Aug. 20, 2012; Felix Richter, “Twitter’s Ad Revenue Tipped to Double This Year,” Statista, Sept. 13, 2012; David Talbot, “The Perfect Scam,” Technology Review, June 21, 2011. 2 Crime is big business: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, “Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Organized Crimes,” Oct. 2011, 7. 3 In total: Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 12. 4 Capos, dons: Allison Davis, Patrick Di Justo, and Adam Rogers, “Crime, Organized,” Wired, Feb. 2011, 78; General OneFile, Web, May 22, 2014. 5 Hacking is no longer ruled: “Organised Crime in the Digital Age,” a joint study of Detica/BAE Systems and the John Grieve Centre for Policing at London Metropolitan University, March 2012. 6 According to a 2014 study: Lillian Ablon, Martin C. Libicki, and Andrea A. Golay, “Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data,” Rand Corporation, 4. 7 Several executives were kidnapped: Byron Acohido, “How Kidnappers, Assassins Utilize Smartphones, Google, and Facebook,” USAToday.​com, Feb. 18, 2011. 8 Sensing a market need: “Woman ‘Ran Text-a-Getaway’ Service,” BBC News, July 16, 2013. 9 In San Francisco: This was based on the author’s personal observations, and I have a photograph of the incident. 10 “It’s more discreet”: Dana Sauchelli and Bruce Golding, “Hookers Turning Airbnb Apartments into Brothels,” New York Post, April 14, 2014. 11 While organized crime groups: The information on the organization of modern cybercrime organizations came from a variety of sources, including personal experience and investigation, consultation with senior law enforcement officials working in the field of cyber crime, and online resources such as “Cybercriminals Today Mirror Legitimate Business Processes,” Fortinet 2013 Cybercrime Report; Trend Micro Threat Research, “A Cybercrime Hub,” Aug. 2009; Information Warfare Monitor and Shadowserver Foundation, Shadows in the Cloud, Joint Report, April 6, 2010; Patrick Thibodeau, “FBI Lists Top 10 Posts in Cybercriminal Operations,” Computerworld, March 23, 2010; Roderic Broadhurst et al., “Organizations and Cybercrime,” International Journal of Cyber Criminology, Oct. 11, 2013. 12 Active criminal affiliates: Dmitry Samosseiko, “The Partnerka” (paper presented at Virus Bulletin Conference, Sept. 2009); “The Business of Cybercrime,” Trend Micro White Paper, Jan. 2010. 13 In other words: Cisco, Cisco 2010 Annual Security Report, 9. 14 Actors in these online crime swarms: Broadhurst et al., “Organizations and Cybercrime.” 15 As noted previously: Dunn, “Global Cybercrime Dominated by 50 Core Groups.” 16 Some Crime, Inc. organizations: See Brian Krebs, “ ‘Citadel’ Trojan Touts Trouble-Ticket System,” Krebs on Security, Jan. 23, 2012. 17 One group of cyber thieves: Bob Sullivan, “160 Million Credit Cards Later, ‘Cutting Edge’ Hacking Ring Cracked,” NBC News, July 25, 2013; “Team of International Criminals Charged with Multi-million Dollar Hacking Ring,” NBC News, July 25, 2013. 18 Some digital criminal marketplaces: Thomas Holt, “Exploring the Social Organisation and Structure of Stolen Data Markets,” Global Crime 14, nos. 2–3 (2013); Thomas Holt, “Honor Among (Credit Card) Thieves?


pages: 76 words: 20,238

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

After putting statistical controls in place, aggregate health expenditures across the fifty states do not seem to predict health care outcomes. Nor, when we look across countries, does national life expectancy vary with medical care spending, once we control for income, education, diet, smoking, and use of pharmaceuticals. The famous RAND Corporation study of the 1970s gave thousands of Americans 100 percent free medical care, while the control group had to face insurance co-payments for care, as under normal circumstances. The group with free care consumed 25-30 percent more medical services. Yet, except for the very poorest group, the free health care didn’t make people any healthier.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

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

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

United States Elections Project. Stoffel, Brian. “The Average American Household’s Income: Where Do You Stand?” The Motley Fool. Green, Emma. “It’s Hard to Go to Church.” The Atlantic. “Twenty Percent of U.S. Households View Landline Telephones as an Important Communication Choice.” The Rand Corporation. Tuttle, Brad. “Amazon Has Upper-Income Americans Wrapped Around Its Finger.” Time. Hunters and Gatherers Hunting and gathering, humanity’s first and most successful adaptation, occupies more than 90 percent of human history.8 By comparison, civilization is little more than a recent blip.

United States Elections Project. Stoffel, Brian. “The Average American Household’s Income: Where Do You Stand?” The Motley Fool. Green, Emma. “It’s Hard to Go to Church.” The Atlantic. “Twenty Percent of U.S. Households View Landline Telephones as an Important Communication Choice.” The Rand Corporation. Tuttle, Brad. “Amazon Has Upper-Income Americans Wrapped Around Its Finger.” Time. Flash Sale Sites’ Industry Revenue Lindsey, Kelsey. “Why the Flash Sale Boom May Be Over—And What’s Next.” RetailDIVE. 2006–2016 Stock Price Growth Choudhury, Mawdud. “Brick & Mortar U.S. Retailer Market Value—2006 Vs Present Day.”


pages: 335 words: 82,528

A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou

drone strike, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Necker cube, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, private military company, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, telepresence, Yom Kippur War

Formica explained, with undisguised enthusiasm, in an e-mail: “Kill boxes enable us to do what we wanted to do for years . . . rapidly adjust the delineation of battlespace. . . . Now with automation technology and USAF [U.S. Air Force] employment of kill boxes, you really have a very flexible way of delineating battlespace both in time and on the ground.”19 In a memo addressed in 2005 to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, the president of the RAND Corporation advised him that “a non-linear system of ‘kill boxes’ should be adopted, as technology permits,” for counterinsurgency operations.20 He stressed the following essential point: “Kill boxes can be sized for open terrain or urban warfare and opened or closed quickly in response to a dynamic military situation.”21 This twofold principle of intermittence and scalar modulation for the kill box is of capital importance: it makes it possible to envisage extending such a model beyond the zones of declared conflict.

See also law enforcement political analysis, 15 political automata, fabrication of, 205–21 political economy, 181, 186, 189 political geography, 52–53, 54 political philosophy, history of, 177–84 political science, American, 186 political subjectivity, relinquishing of, 205–21 political vulnerabilization, 184 politics, 66 self-deception and, 240n14 of verticality, 53–54, 66–67 Porter, Gareth, 50–51 postcolonial violence, 94–95 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 103, 106–13 definition of, 110–11 Powell, Colin, 186 power, 229–30n5 aerial, 53–54 corporeality and, 218–19, 221, 268n1 projection of, 12–13, 230n6 pragmatic co-presence, 247–54n8 precision, 56–57, 140–49 of aerial weaponry, 62–63 collateral damage and, 140 precision-distinction thesis, 142–47 surveillance and, 143–45 Predator drones, 13, 14, 28–29, 99, 141–42, 214–15 electronic communications and, 41 genealogy of, 26–29 name of, 35 transformation into a weapon, 29 video feeds transmitted by, 75 Predator (Martin), 114 predictive calculation, 34 preemptive anticipation, 42–44 “preemptive manhunting,” 32 presence, definition of, 247–54n8 preservation of life, 127, 136, 138–39, 154–55, 180–81 military ethos and, 100–101, 131–33, 136–37 national, 194 sovereignty and, 182 by substitution, 187 press, 14, 107–8, 148 See also specific media outlets principle of unnecessary risk, 137 profiling, 42, 47, 51, 145 See also pattern-of-life analysis programming, 210–11, 212 projecting power, 12–13, 54, 77, 229–30n5, 230n6 prophylactic elimination, 34, 35 proportionality, 137–38, 162, 169, 198, 215, 216, 269–70n10, 273n26 protection obedience and, 178–79 political sovereignty and, 178–79 protection debt, 179 state–subject relations and, 178–79 protective sovereignty, 178–79, 183–84, 194, 268n5 protectorates, 178 protests, 142 See also antiwar movement proximity acuteness and, 262n10 killing and, 115–17, 116 optical, 255–56n22, 255n13 perceptual, 116–17 surveillance and, 116–17 tele-technologies and, 247–54n8 psychopathologies, 106–13 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 160–61, 163 pursuit, rights of, 53 radio-controlled planes, 85, 242–43n1 Radioplane Company, 25, 26 radio police automatons, 219, 220, 221 radios, 41 Rafael Armament Development Authority, 261n12 RAND Corporation, 55 rational choice, theory of, 186 RCA, 84–85 Reaper drones, 35, 41, 92, 92 reciprocity eradication of, 17 right to kill and, 163–64, 165 violence and, 196 warfare and, 161–62 reconnaissance, 28 Red Army Faction, 68 Red Brigades, 68 Reisner, Daniel, 167 remote control, 21, 23, 242–43n1 as philanthropic device, 23 remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), 27–28, 85, 96 See also radio-controlled planes remote warfare, 192, 230n6 Republic (Plato), 96 republican regimes, 183, 185 repugnance generate by killing, theory of, 115–16, 197, 246n19 responsibility.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Some historians trace the rise of professional experts to a meeting held six months after the end of the Civil War,3 when one hundred reformers in various fields met in the Massachusetts State House and created the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science to advise their local communities and states about fixing everything from education to urban poverty, all based on the latest scientific research. 4 By the early 1900s, experts wielding “scientific management” techniques pioneered by Frederick Wilson Taylor—immortalized as the man with a clipboard and a stopwatch, timing the movements of workers—were sweeping through field after field.5 Even the home was now subject to the work of experts; as Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder of home economics and the first woman to get an engineering degree from MIT, wrote: “The work of homemaking in this scientific age must be worked out on engineering principles and with the cooperation of trained men and trained women.”6 Experts as full-time professional knowers needed professional institutions to support them. The first of these, the Brookings Institution, was founded in 1916, to provide policy advice to the government. By the 1950s, the Defense Department was relying on the RAND Corporation to help figure out questions of global life and death, including how nuclear war might be waged “successfully” and thus what types of bombs to build. RAND (the name comes from “Research and Development”) gave us our modern image of the expert, and he looked like Herman Kahn. The egg-shaped Kahn made a career by (as the title of his best-selling book put it) Thinking the Unthinkable: how to win a nuclear war.

See also Books and book publishing Paper-based tools Parenting experts Patent Office, US PatientsLikeMe.com Pavement performance Peer-review journals Perception, facts and Permission-free knowledge Philosophy defining and quantifying knowledge information overload reality unresolved knowledge Pinker, Steven Planetary Skin initiative Plato PLoS One online journal Pogue, David Polio vaccine Politics Politifact.com Popper, Karl Population growth, Malthusian theory of Pornography Postmodernism Pragmatism PressThink.org Primary Insight Principles of Geology (Lyell) Prize4Life Protein folding ProteomeCommons.org Pseudo-science Public Library of Science (PLoS) Punchcard data Pyramid, knowledge Pyramid of organizational efficiency Quora Racial/ethnic identity Ramanujan, Srinivasa RAND Corporation Random Hacks of Kindness Rauscher, Francis Raymond, Eric Reagan, Ronald Reality Reason as the path to truth and knowledge critical debate on unresolved knowledge Reliability Repositories, open access Republic of Letters Republican Party Republic.com (Sunstein) Revolution in the Middle East Rheingold, Howard Richards, Ellen Swallow Riesman, David Robustness “The Rock” (Eliot) Rogers, William Rorty, Richard Rosen, Jay Roskam, Peter Rushkoff, Douglas Russia: Dogger Bank Incident Salk, Jonas Sanger, Larry Schmidt, Michael School shootings Science amateurs in crowdsourcing expertise failures in goals of hyperlinked inflation of scientific studies interdisciplinary approaches media relations Net-based inquiry open filtering journal articles open-notebook overgeneration of scientific facts philosophical and professional differences among scientists public and private realms scientific journals transformation of scientific knowledge Science at Creative Commons Science journal Scientific journals Scientific management Scientific method Self-interest: fact-based knowledge Semantic Web Seneca Sensory overload Sexual behavior The Shallows (Carr) Shapiro, Jesse Shared experiences Shilts, Randy Shirky, Clay Shoemaker, Carolyn Simplicity in scientific thought Simulation of physical interactions Slashdot.com Sloan Digital Sky Survey Smart mobs “Smarter planet” initiative Smith, Arfon Smith, Richard Soccer Social conformity Social networks crowdsourcing expertise Middle East revolutions pooling expertise scaling social filtering Social policy: social role of facts Social reform Dickens’s antipathy to fact-based knowledge global statistical support for Bentham’s ideas Social tools: information overload Society of Professional Journalists Socrates Software defaults Software development, contests for Sotomayor, Sonia Source transparency Space Shuttle disaster Spiro, Mary Sports Sprinkle, Annie Standpoint transparency Statistics emergence of Hunch.com Stopping points for knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) Stupidity, Net increasing Sub-networks Suel, Gurol Sunlight Foundation Sunstein, Cass Surowiecki, James Systems biology Tag cloud Tagging Tatalias, Jean Taylor, Frederick Wilson TechCamps Technodeterminism Technology easing information overload Technorati.com Television, homophily and Temptation of hyperlinks Think tanks Thoreau, Henry David The Tipping Point (Gladwell) Todd, Mac Toffler, Alvin TopCopder Topic-based expertise Torvalds, Linus Traditional knowledge Tranche Transparency hyperlinks contributing to objectivity and of the Net Open Government Initiative Transparency and Open Government project Triangular knowledge Trillin, Calvin Trust: reliability of information Trust-through-authority system Truth elements of knowledge reason as the path to value of networked knowledge Twitter Tyme, Mae Unnailing facts Updike, John USAID UsefulChem notebook Vaccinations Verizon Vietnam Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Wales, Jimmy Wallace, Alfred Russel Walter, Skip Washington Post Watson, James Welch, Jack Welfare The WELL (The Whole Earth’Lectronic Link) Whole Earth Catalog Wikipedia editorial policy LA Times wikitorial experiment policymaking Virginia Tech shootings Wikswo, John Wilbanks, John Wired magazine The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki) Wise crowds Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wolfram, Stephen WolframAlpha.com World Bank World Cup World War I Wurman, Richard Saul Wycliffe, John York, Jillian YourEncore Zappa, Frank Zeleny, Milan Zettabyte Zittrain, Jonathan Zuckerman, Ethan a I’m leaving this as an unsupported idea because it’s not the point of this book.


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Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Average weight has risen steadily, which means that many of the advances in fuel savings have been offset or reduced by additional safety equipment and crash protection. For model year 2012, U.S. cars averaged 3,482 pounds and light trucks averaged 4,779 pounds, as shown in the graph below, while for comparison, the original Ford Model T only weighed 1,200 pounds. Image Courtesy Rand Corporation As mentioned already, considering the sheer number of journeys and the variables involved, car travel is remarkably safe. Improved brakes, stability and survivability have contributed perhaps as much as they reasonably can, while the one remaining constant is the controller (human driver).

I keep saying they’re not coming; they are here now. Without federal instructions, “people are just going to keep putting stuff out on the road with no guidance on how do we do this the right way.” Comparing the opinion of domain experts, it’s clear that regulators will be receiving widely varying advice as they craft their legislation: Rand Corporation’s Center for Decision Making: It seems sensible that autonomous vehicles should be allowed on America’s roads when they are judged safer than the average human driver, allowing more lives to be saved and sooner while still ensuring they don’t create new risks. But, there is even an argument to be made that autonomous vehicles should be allowed even if they’re not as safe as average human drivers if developers can use early deployment as a way to rapidly improve the vehicles.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

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

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

For a related point, see Summers 2017. 33.   On research and development, see Davies et al. 2014, 22, and also the discussion in Cowen 2017. 34.   On this, see Fried and Wang 2017. Chapter 4: Is Work Fun?   1.   See Graeber 2018; Moran 2018.   2.   See Kahneman et al. 2004.   3.   Maestas et al. 2017, 40. This RAND Corporation study, by the way, produced much more favorable results on the quality of American jobs than the surrounding media write-ups might have led an observer to believe.   4.   For varying perspectives on these results, see Kuhn, Lalive, and Zweimueller 2007; Tausig 1999; Clark and Oswald 1994.

Lublin, Joann S. 2017. “Few Can Fill the CEO’s Job, Directors Say.” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2017. Maestas, Nicole, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Till von Wachter, and Jeffrey B. Wenger. 2017. “Working Conditions in the United States: Results of the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey.” RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA. Maksimovic, Vojislav, Gordon M. Phillips, and Liu Yang. 2017. “Do Public Firms Respond to Investment Opportunities More Than Private Firms? The Impact of Initial Firm Quality.” NBER Working Paper No. 24104. National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC. Manjoo, Farhad. 2017.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

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

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

It was that that injured the three girls, parents Walter and Effie Gregg, and their son Walter Jr. There were no deaths aside from a few chickens. The Greggs lived in a town called Mars Bluff. Today, sixty summers later, the crater is still visible. Albert Madansky was a young statistics PhD from the University of Chicago, recruited by the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica think tank contracting to the Pentagon. RAND wanted Madansky to tackle a problem that was easy to state but difficult to answer: What is the probability of a nuclear weapon detonating by accident? The Mars Bluff incident, occurring the year after Madansky began work at RAND, was a prime topic of discussion.

“Here’s How One of Google’s Top Scientists Thinks People Should Prepare for Machine Learning.” CNBC, April 29, 2017. cnb.cx/2HN0g4l. Hut, Piet, and Martin J. Rees. “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature 302 (1983): 508–509. Iklé, Fred Charles, G. J. Aronson, and Albert Madansky. “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation.” RM-2251. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1958. Jaynes, E. T. “Prior Probabilities.” IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, SSC-4 (1968): 227–241. Jenkins, Alejandro, and Gilad Perez. “Looking for Life in the Multiverse.” Scientific American, January 2010. Jones, Eric M. “‘Where Is Everybody?’: An Account of Fermi’s Question.”


pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

They passed the test.4 Presumably neither the Harlem syndicate nor its customers noticed these regularities in their lottery numbers. But had people like Newcomb, Benford, or Hill played their lottery, in principle they could have used Benford’s law to make favorable bets, earning a nice supplement to their scholar’s salary. In 1947, scientists at the Rand Corporation needed a large table of random digits for a more admirable purpose: to help find approximate solutions to certain mathematical equations employing a technique aptly named the Monte Carlo method. To generate the digits, they employed electronically generated noise, a kind of electronic roulette wheel.

Lee Berton, “He’s Got Their Number: Scholar Uses Math to Foil Financial Fraud,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1995. 5. Charles Sanders Peirce, Max Harold Fisch, and Christian J. W. Kloesel, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 427. 6. Rand Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (1955; repr., Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2001), pp. ix–x. See also Lola L. Lopes, “Doing the Impossible: A Note on Induction and the Experience of Randomness,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 8, no. 6 (November 1982): 626–36. 7.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In 1961, while a graduate student at MIT, he published the first paper on “packet switching,” the idea that data could be transmitted efficiently in small chunks rather than a continuous stream—one of the key notions behind the Internet. The idea was already in the air. A professor at the British National Physical Laboratory named Donald Davies had, unbeknownst to Kleinrock, been independently refining similar concepts, as had Paul Baran, a researcher at the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles. Baran’s work, begun in 1960 at the request of the US Air Force, was explicitly aimed at designing a network that could survive a nuclear attack. Davies, working in an academic setting, merely wanted to improve England’s communications system. By the mid-1960s—by which time Kleinrock was at UCLA, on his way toward tenure—their ideas were circulating among the small global community of computer scientists, hashed out at conferences and on office chalkboards.

See also Tata Communications New York City data storage in, 230 Equinix in, 164 and Europe-US telephone connection, 175 fiber highways in, 163–71, 172, 265–66 fiber-optic connections to, 26 Fitzgerald story about, 3 Google headquarters in, 163–64, 172 history of Internet and, 50 hubs in, 171–80, 181 as important network meeting point, 164 and Internet as series of tubes, 5 London traffic with, 180, 202, 208 111 Eighth Avenue (New York City), 163–64, 171, 266 peering and, 128 60 Hudson Street in, 171–74, 176 structure of Internet and, 27 32 Avenue of the Americas in, 171–80 as undersea cables port, 194, 199 New York University (NYU), 50 Newby, Hunter, 174 Ninth Avenue fiber highway (New York City), 164 Nipper, Arnold, 137–38, 140–43, 144–45, 239 North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG), 58, 66, 157 Austin meeting of, 119–23, 127, 128–35, 157 Northrop Grumman, 62, 123 NorthWestNet, 53 NSFNET, 59, 138 NTT, 125 O’Kane, Victoria, 165 One Wilshire (Los Angeles, California), 200–201 111 Eighth Avenue (New York City), 163–64, 171, 266 online videos, 119 Open Compute project (Facebook), 258 optical modules, 160 Orlowski, Frank, 133–34, 135, 145, 157 Osés, Mara Vanina, 7 Pacific Bell, 64, 84 Pacific DC Intertie, 228 Page, Larry, 69–70 PAIX, undersea cables, PAIX and, 78 Pakistan Telecom, 30 Paling, Jol, 208, 209, 210–15, 216, 267 Palo Alto, California Adelson-Troyer-Blum meeting in, 71–72, 73 See also Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) Adelson and, 72, 76–77, 88 Blum visit to, 71–72, 76–85 cable management at, 81–82 carriers and, 89 DEC and, 76, 87, 88 definition of Internet exchange and, 109 diversity at, 79 Equinix and, 76–77, 87 expansion of, 78, 86–87 importance of, 78 location of, 76 “network effect” at, 80–81 openness of Internet and, 117 peering and, 122, 127, 128 problems of, 85–86 Qatar Telecom and, 139 quantity of information passing through, 82–83 and rerouting traffic, 200–201 routers at, 79–80, 82–83, 266 security at, 95 Paris, France, structure of Internet and, 27 Passaic, New Jersey, Smithson tour of, 150–51, 152, 154 Patchett, Ken, 255–56, 257, 258–59, 260–62, 267 Pedro, John, 82 “peering” de-peering and, 123–24, 151 definition of, 118–19 division of groups for, 121–22 globalization of, 125–26 Internet exchanges and, 121–22, 126, 127, 129, 130 NANOG meeting and, 118–23, 128–30, 131–32 and “open peering policy,” 127 Qatar Telecom and, 140 Tier-1 domination of, 124–25 Witteman-Orloski meeting and, 133–35 PeeringDB (website), 126 Peter Faber (cable ship), 219, 221–22 Petrie, Anne, 83 Pipex, 184, 185, 186 “point of entry,” 178, 179 POP (point of presence), 59, 78, 84 Porthcurno (Cornwall, England), 202–16, 253, 267 Portugal, 191–92, 194, 217–26, 267 Postel, Jon, 31, 45 Prineville, Oregon: Facebook data center in, 250–62, 267 privacy issues, 258 Provo, Joe, 122 Provo, Ren, 122, 123 PSI, 56, 59, 60 Qatar, 197 Qatar Telecom, 79, 139–40 Quality Life Broadband (Q-Life), 236, 237, 238, 242, 246 Quincy, Washington, data centers in, 234–35, 250 RAND Corporation, 42 Reid, Brian, 74, 75, 76 Renesys, 123, 124–25, 151 Renton, Alan, 205–6 Research in Motion (RIM), 121 Resolute (cable ship), 218 Reyes, Felix, 77, 81 Roberts, Larry, 42–43, 51 routes/routers in Ashburn, 99–100 as basic building blocks of Internet, 158 Brocade, 157–58, 159–63, 188 dead-end, 31, 32 expansion of Internet and, 55 function of, 160 Internet as self-healing and, 200 IP addresses and, 29–30 at large Internet exchanges, 111 at MAE-East, 65–66, 75–76, 80 in New York City, 164–71 at PAIX, 79–80, 82–83, 266 peering and, 124–25, 127 and rerouting traffic, 200–201 “routing table” and, 30 Traceroute program and, 31–34 trust and, 30–31 “routing table,” 30, 125 Rudin Management, 174–75, 176 Rwanda, 110 Sabey, 235 Sacca, Chris, 237–38, 239 San Jose, California: peering and, 128 SAT-3 (undersea communications cables), 191–92, 197 satellites: Internet exchanges and, 110 Saudi Arabia, 197 Schoffstall, Marty, 60 SEACOM (undersea communications cables), 192, 197 Seales, Brian, 166–71 security/secrecy for cable landing stations, 202, 203 for data centers/storage, 93, 141, 237–40, 242–43, 254, 257 at DE-CIX, 140–41 at Dutch data centers, 152 at Equinix, 93, 141 at Google data center, 242–50, 254, 257 at Internet exchanges, 113–16 at LINX, 185–86 Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (“skiffs”), 62 Seoul, Korea: structure of Internet and, 27 service providers: peering and, 119 SESQUINET, 53 The Shadow Factory (Bamford), 63 Shorto, Russell, 146 Siemens Brothers, 206 Sigma-7 computer, 43 Silcock, Colin, 186, 187–89 Silicon Valley belief in limitless potential of technology in, 70 connection of networks in, 67 expansion of Internet and, 50 structure of Internet and, 27 wealth in, 70 See also Palo Alto, California; specific person or corporation Singapore, 128, 139, 194, 196, 199, 201 Singapore Telecommunications, 79 SIX (Seattle, Washington), 111 60 Hudson Street (New York City), 171–74, 176, 202, 215, 266 Smallwood, Christine, 107 Smithson, Robert, 150–51, 154 South Africa, 191–93, 197, 204, 219 South Asia, 196, 200 South Park (TV show), 107–8 Spain, 113 SPAN, 52 speed.


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War by Sebastian Junger

Demis Hassabis, Dunbar number, friendly fire, RAND corporation, satellite internet, Yom Kippur War

On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace. Warrior Science Publications, 2004. “Health Facilities Elude Kunar — Thanks to Insecurity.” Pajhwok Afghan News, February 18, 2006. Helmus, Todd C., and Russell W. Glenn. Steeling the Mind: Combat Stress Reactions and Their Implications for Urban Warfare. Rand Corporation, 2005. Henry, James P. “Psychological and Physiological Responses to Stress: The Right Hemisphere and the Hypothalamo-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, An Inquiry into Problems of Human Bonding.” Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, Supplementum, Vol. 640, 1997, pp. 10–25. Jones, Franklin D., Linette R. Sparacino, Joseph M.

Levav, Itzhak, MD, Haim Greenfeld, and Eli Baruch, MD. “Psychiatric Combat Reactions During the Yom Kippur War.” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 136, No. 5, May 1979. Marlowe, David H. “Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deployment with Special Emphasis on the Gulf War.” Rand Corporation, 2000. Rohde, David, and David E. Sanger. “How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad.” New York Times, August 12, 2007. Shah, Taimoor, and Carlotta Gall. “NATO and Afghan Troops Clash with Taliban in Strategic Area Near Kandahar.” New York Times, June 18, 2008. Shalit, Ben. The Psychology of Conflict and Combat.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

It implemented a form of packet-switching, wherein a message is broken into bits of data, distributed over optimal routes and reassembled at destination, and which is still used today in the foundational protocols of the internet. These systems were chosen, in part, for their military virtue. An alluring myth of the internet’s origins has it that it was essentially invented by Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, as a way for communications to survive nuclear war.11 The Arpanet system was actually designed separately, without Baran’s direct involvement. Nonetheless, it used remarkably similar ideas, and Baran was one of the major inventors of the distributed network and the packet-switching method. The underlying idea for a ‘distributed network’ of writing, published in a 1964 article, was that in the event of a nuclear strike, the communications system would best survive if it wasn’t centralized.12 This necessitated plenty of redundancy in the network.

Cade Metz, ‘Paul Baran, the link between nuclear war and the internet’, Wired, 4 September 2012; 12. The underlying idea for a ‘distributed network’ of writing . . . Paul Baran, ‘On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks’, United States Air Force Project RAND, RAND Corporation, August 1964. 13. As Sandy Baldwin puts it . . . Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature, Bloomsbury: New York, 2015, pp. 33–7. 14. It was desperate to outdo Britain and Germany . . . Antonio Gonzales and Emmanuelle Jouve, ‘Minitel: histoire du réseau télématique français’, Flux: Cahiers scientifiques internationaux Réseaux et territoires, 2002, Vol. 1, No. 47, pp. 84–9. 15.


Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

air freight, Live Aid, plutocrats, RAND corporation, telemarketer

Vanessalooked smart in a way John knew she was helpless to conceal.She had the laser-scanning eyes of the highest-paid personalassistants, the ones who single-handedly made Neanderthal teensploitation film producers seem classy and hip by scripting 46O the brief, urbane speeches they gave while donating comically large checks to well-researched and cutting-edge charities. Vanessa was quite obviously some freak of nature maroonedon the shores of the bell curve's right-most limits. "What do you do for a living, Vanessa?" John asked, stretching out his neck asif it would help lob his words around a bend in the wall. "I work at the Rand Corporation." This didn't surprise John. "No shit. Doing what?" " Think-tanking." "You sit around in beanbag chairs all day and think up mili-tary invasion strategies and ways to suppress the development ofelectric cars?" She pretended not to have heard that and came in and handed him his Coke. He took a sip and paused.

She attended The Rocky Horror PictureShow at midnight screenings for two years running, dressed as Susan Sarandon, which left her with a lifelong yen for midwest-ern twin-set outfits. She read sci-fi. She tried joining Mensa butwas turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted todiscuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms. Half a year before graduation, a dozen companies battled to employ Vanessa, but she chose the Rand Corporation becausethey were in Santa Monica, California, close to Hollywood andwhat could only be a surplus of advanced geniuses. She was notabove movies—they were the one genuinely novel art form of the twentieth century. Her work in California was pleasure, and at night she wentout into the coffee bars of Los Angeles, meeting dozens ofyoung men with goatees and multiple unfinished screenplays.


pages: 269 words: 83,959

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

Library of Congress country studies, Iran. 43 Shiites clash with the Christian South Lebanon Army, In the Path of Hizbullah, Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, page 93. 44 Death toll from 1983 American embassy blast, “U.S. Embassy in Lebanon Devastated by Bomb Blast; Dozens Killed, Pro-Iran Group Named,” Facts on File World News Digest, April 22, 1983. 44 The U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force was seen by many as supportive of Israel, Lebanon 1982–1984, Rand Corporation report. 44 Terry Anderson covered embassy attack, “U.S. Embassy in Beirut Bombed, 39 Dead,” Associated Press, April 19, 1983. 44 Ryan Crocker survived 1983 Beirut blast, G. W. Bush’s speech awarding Crocker Medal of Freedom, January 18, 2009. 45 Fifty-eight French paratroopers killed in 1983 barracks bombing, “France Remembers 58 Soldiers Killed in Drakkar, Beirut,” RFI, October 24, 2013. 45 Beirut marine barracks bombing the single deadliest day in U.S.

Slate, March 10, 2014. 78 Abbas Musawi and Sobhi al-Tufayli were secretaries-general of Hezbollah, A Privilege to Die, by Thanassis Cambanis, page 112. 80 TWA flight 847 hijacked by Islamic Jihad, “Terror Aboard Flight 847,” Time, June 24, 2001. 90 “Regarding Iran Contra,” Excerpts from the Tower Commission. 92 Fear of Soviet influence on Iran, “The Soviet Union and Iran,” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1983. 92 Shah of Iran deposed, replaced by Islamic regime, “Iran 1979: A Revolution That Shook the World,” Al Jazeera, February 11, 2014. 92 Fifty-two hostages released minutes after Reagan is sworn in, “Reagan Takes Oath as 40th President; Promises ‘An Era of National Renewal,’ Minutes Later, 52 Hostages in Iran Fly to Freedom After 444-Day Ordeal,” New York Times, January 21, 1991. 94 David Kimche obituary, Guardian, March 10, 2010. 94 Kimche-McFarlane meeting and initial Israel-U.S. deal regarding selling arms to Iran, Understanding the Iran-Contra Affair, Brown University. 94 Kimche suggested Ghorbanifar to McFarlane as go-between with Iran, Understanding the Iran-Contra Affair, Brown University. 95 McFarlane choses North as point man for the arms deals, The Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Lawrence Walsh, August 4, 1993. 95 McFarlane agrees to work with Ghorbanifar, “The Front,” American Prospect, March 20, 2005. 95 Reagan administration’s support of the Contras, “Regarding Iran Contra,” excerpts from the Tower Commission. 95 Unclear which faction in Iran had influence over the hostage-takers, Getting the Hostages Out: Who Turns the Key?, Rand Corporation report, May 1990. 95–96 North and McFarlane bring Bible to Iran, “McFarlane Took Cake and Bible to Teheran, Ex-CIA Man Says,” New York Times, January 11, 1987. 96 Ash-Shiraa breaks arms-for-hostages deals, “Iran-Contra: Who Leaked Ronald Reagan’s 1985–1986 Arms-for-Hostages Deals?,” National Security Archives, November 4, 2014. 96 Ash-Shiraa accused of being a mouthpiece for Syria, How the Iran-Contra Story Leaked, declassified CIA report, summer 1989. 96 Ash-Shiraa accused of being a Mossad asset, “Ari Ben-Menashe,” World Heritage Encyclopedia. 101 Abolhassan Banisadr believes in October Surprise narrative, “Bani-Sadr, in U.S., Renews Charges of 1980 Deal,” New York Times, May 7, 1991. 101 Yitzhak Shamir says October Surprise took place, “Shamir’s October Surprise Admission,” Consortium News. 101 Israel-Iran arms deal; Argentinian plane crash in Soviet Union, “$27 Million, Israel, Iran Arms Deals Told,” Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1981. 101–102 PBS interview, Nick Veliotes, declassified documents describing McFarlane’s attempts to channel weapons to Iran via Israel pre-Iran-Contra, How Neocons Messed up the Mideast, Consortium News, February 15, 2013. 103 “Captive CIA Agent’s Death Galvanized Hostage Search,” Washington Post, November 25, 1986. 104 Iran-Contra changed U.S. hostage negotiation policy, “The Illusion of a Hostage Policy,” New Yorker, February 3, 2015. 104 U.S. hostage policy of “quiet diplomacy” and silence in the press, “The Families of Hostages Are Told to Keep Quiet.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

WAR GHOST TOWNS Despite the recent proliferation of urban warfare training sites, senior Pentagon officials are convinced that these sites are completely inadequate to the task of training US forces to counter future urban insurgencies in fast-growing megacities. As a result, the US Congress commissioned the RAND Corporation, the nation’s long-time military think-tank, to explore other options. The resulting four-hundred-page report was published in 2006.36 The report starts off with the premise that ‘US armed forces have thus far been unable to adequately reproduce the challenges their soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen meet in the towns and cities of Iraq and Afghanistan’.37 First the RAND researchers evaluate the existing urban-warfare training sites in terms of whether they offer the most challenging architectural and infrastructural features encountered when military operations are undertaken within large cities of the global South.

‘These areas are likely to become fertile ground for the evolvement of radical Islamic movements’.4 LEARNING FROM JENIN Only a few weeks before the launch of Operation Defensive Shield, I attended a conference on ‘urban warfare’ organized by Soffer at Haifa University in Israel, in partnership with the influential RAND Corporation, a major think tank in the United States originally established to undertake military research.5 Populated by senior US Marine Corps, IDF, and British Army commanders and specialists in urban warfare, along with representatives from RAND, the conference was part of an ongoing series which offered the opportunity to exchange practical tips on fighting wars and counterinsurgency operations in cities.

In addition, he continues, ‘Caterpillar D9 armoured bulldozers complete with “mine plows” were employed to clear away fortified buildings, IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] and booby trap nests, thus allowing tank-infantry squads to manoeuvre through streets more easily’.7 By learning directly from these new urban wars, the US military has worked hard to improve its ability to pacify and control the cities deemed the main foci of its adversaries. Drawing on conferences like the one in Haifa, Evans notes that ‘significant theoretical analyses were completed by RAND Corporation scholars focusing on the technical and tactical peculiarities involved in conducting military operations inside cities’.8 The US effort to exemplify, and imitate, Israeli experience during Defensive Shield was already underway as the bulldozers clawed through the the Jenin camp. US military ‘observers’ were in fact already on-site, getting a first-hand perspective on Israeli doctrine in action.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

Just as Petraeus would allow former insurgents to keep their arms and patrol their neighborhoods, after the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam had “embraced auxiliary tribalism by allowing sheikhs to create their own private armies equipped with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and allegedly even howitzers,” noted Austin Long, a RAND Corporation expert on counterinsurgency. But, Long noted, the U.S. policy faced an additional difficulty: It was opposed by the Baghdad government, while Saddam’s earlier move had been implemented by Baghdad. Making peace with some of one’s foes made sense when one’s allies were sometimes secret enemies.

But if they were labeled truthfully, they would have been renamed Camp Accommodation and Camp Stability, as those were the new goals of the American effort. The danger of making policy on the fly and not vetting it through scrutiny and debate is that it may win short-term advances without recognizing long-term costs. As Long, the counterinsurgency expert at the RAND Corporation put it, “The tribal strategy is a means to achieve one strategic end, fighting al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but it is antithetical to another, the creation of a stable, unified, and democratic Iraq.” It was no coincidence, added Marc Lynch, a Middle Eastern expert at George Washington University, that after the United States began cutting deals with local militias, both the Sunni and Shiite communities began “fragmenting at a remarkable rate.”

Odierno’s relationship with optimism of personality of on rumor of JAM deal shooting of surge and timetables and Petraeus, Holly Petraeus, Sixtus Phillips, Andrews Poirier, David Poland Pomante, Vincent Pool, Jeffrey S. Porter, Patrick Powell, Colin Powell, James Press, Elliott “Producing Victory,” Project for the New American Century Qatar Quayle, Chad Quds Force Raeford Drop Zone Raghavan, Sudarsan Rahman, Abel Rainey, James Ramadi, Iraq RAND Corporation rapid decisive operations Rapp, Bill Rasheed, Mamoun Sami Rayburn, Joel Reagan, Ronald Reconstruction Redacted (film) Reed, Jack Reese, Timothy Reid, Harry Remington, Frederic Republican Guard Republicans “revolt of the generals,” Ribat, Khadem al- Rice, Condoleezza Riggs, John Risha, Sittar albu- Rodriguez, Robert Rohrabacher, Dana Rome Roosevelt, Franklin D.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Over the last two decades, China’s military expenditures have grown sixfold. In the latest comparative numbers, it is $240 billion, compared to America’s $634 billion. The third and fourth spenders are far behind—Saudi Arabia and Russia—each at around $65 billion. China’s military has, in the words of a RAND Corporation assessment, “transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable modern military.” It has “narrowed the gap” with the United States. Crucially, it has the “advantage of proximity in most plausible conflict scenarios, and geographical advantage will likely neutralize many U.S. military strengths.”

Nicholas Eberstadt, “With Great Demographics Comes Great Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019; Nicholas Eberstadt, “China’s Demographic Outlook to 2040 and Its Implications,” American Enterprise Institute, January 2019. 9. “Xi Wants High-Tech Fighting Force,” China Daily, May 1, 2018; “Military expenditure by country,” SIPRI, 2019; “The U.S.-China Military Scorecard,” RAND Corporation, 2015; Elbridge Colby, “How to Win America’s Next War,” Foreign Policy, May 5, 2019 (“wide variety”); Jane’s, “China’s Advanced Weapons Systems,” May 12, 2018. That report quotes a Chinese work, The Science of Military Strategy: “The war we need to prepare for . . . is a large-scale, and highly intensive local war from the sea” (p. 8). 10.

See also carbon emissions; greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) polysilicon, 397 Pompeo, Mike, 59, 168, 187 population growth, 4, 297, 368, 378, 413–14 populist politics, 43, 44–45, 423 Potential Gas Committee, 12 Power of Siberia pipeline, 117, 125, 126, 158 Pradhan, Dharmendra, 284, 342, 409–10 propane, 410 Public Investment Fund (PIF), 309 Putin, Vladimir, 70–71, 75–76, 125 and Arctic gas reserves, 112, 114 on gas negotiations, 83 and impact of shale revolution on U.S. foreign policy, 61 and opposition to Russian gas exports, 107 and price war among petroleum producers, 315, 318–20 relationship with Saudis, 311 and Russia-Ukraine conflict, 82–83, 94–96 and Russian gas supplies to Europe, 85 and Russian interests in Central Asia, 124–25 and Russia’s energy transition challenges, xv and Russia’s “pivot to the east,” 115–19 and Syrian civil war, 246–47 and tensions with Ukraine, 91–93 and U.S. politics, 103 Qatar, 34, 37–38, 114, 240, 278, 306–7 Quds Force, 228, 230–31, 234, 247–48, 253, 268, 289 Quest, The (Yergin), xix Qutb, Sayyid, 260–64 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 51 railroads, 20, 48, 49, 179, 184, 187–88 Raimi, Daniel, 28 Ramírez, Rafael, 275 RAND Corporation, 133 Ras Tanura oil terminal, 241, 287 Reagan, Ronald, 53–54, 88, 172 recycling, 416 Red Sea, 251, 303 Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, 317 refugee crises, 245, 247–48, 283 REN, 398, 399 Renault-Nissan, 332–33 renewable energy, 55, 323, 330, 394–402 Republic of China, 139 Republican Guard (Iraq), 216 Republican Party (U.S.), xvii, 55 Rice, Condoleezza, 83 Richardson, Bill, 121 Richthoften, Ferdinand von, 178 ride-hailing services and taxis, 343, 347, 358–65, 368, 370–71, 373 “Road to Rejuvenation, The” (exhibit), 166 Roman Empire, 178 Rose Revolution, 82 Rosen, Harold, 327 Rosneft, 76, 104, 118, 159, 275, 314 RosUkrEnergo, 83 Rothschild, Lionel, 199 Rouhani, Hassan, 225, 226, 227 Rousseff, Dilma, 44 Royal Geographical Society, 120 Royal Shakespeare Company, 387 Rudd, Kevin, 169 Russia (Russian Federation), 69–75, 79, 92–93 Arctic gas reserves, 97–98 and Central Asia, 120–26 and China’s Belt and Road initiative, 182, 188–89 and China’s development of oil resources, 158 and China’s rise, 172 and development of Arctic resources, 110–14 development of gas resources, 70–77 and election interference, 70, 78, 81, 103–4 “energy superpower,” 70–71 and energy transition challenges, xv–xvi and Gazprom, 80–82 and global impact of coronavirus pandemic, 312–13 and global oil market, 426 and historical context of Middle East conflicts, 196 impact of shale revolution on, 56–57 natural gas supplies to Europe, 78, 80–83, 84–89, 102, 104–8, 106, 113 oil and state power, 99–101 and OPEC-Plus deal, 321–23 “pivot to the east” strategy, 114, 115–19 and price war among petroleum producers, 317, 318–21 Russian-Georgian War, 91 sanctions on, 95–98, 99–101 and Syrian civil war, 246–47 and Ukraine conflict, 80, 95–98, 96 and U.S. energy production, 63, 65–66 and U.S.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

The book’s title is a reference to Alvin Toffler’s stodgy 1970 work of futurology, Future Shock. While Toffler has proved pretty well universally wrong when it comes to the real world, his ideas were much followed at the time and proved a great inspiration for fiction writers. In this case the concept is built on the Delphi method, originated by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. In the original Delphi process a series of individuals were given a decision to make, or questions to answer. After a first pass at answering, the results were fed back to the whole panel, who then had the opportunity to revise their answers. There seemed some evidence that the result of this procedure was to home in on a better solution than would have been achieved by just taking the original opinions of the decision makers.

See energy predictions challenge with chaos theory and rocket belt Wells’ warfare The Prestige Prey (Crichton) Priest, Christopher probes Project Daedalus Project Orion Project Ozma projectile weapons Prokhorov, Alexander prosthetics psychohistory pulsars pure energy beings quantum computers quantum entanglement communication with Dirac transmitter and encryption with quantum particles quantum teleportation quantum tunneling The Quincunx of Time (Blish) radio signals alien contact and first intergalactic interpreting SETI and “Wow! Signal” in radioactivity rail gun RAND Corporation ray guns rays refractive index relativity Einstein’s Galileo’s replicants retina scans Robby (fictional character) Roboroach “Robot Suit HAL” robots. See also nanotechnology 1950s androids distinction from bee-like functionality for humanoid in movies precursors to task-oriented rocket belts development of first flight with military funding of practical use of SF predictions of rocketry Roddenberry, Gene on cloaking device phaser creation of Romero, John Romulans (fictional characters) R.U.R.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

President Bill Clinton selected as his drug czar Lee Brown, who had a background in law enforcement, sociology, and criminology and told his staff to rethink some basic assumptions. The first one was the militarized approach being used in Latin America, aimed at increasing the cost of drugs. Brown’s people began passing around a study by a private think tank, the RAND Corporation, that came to some hopeful conclusions: An overwhelming proportion of drug use is done by a small but dedicated group of users. Therefore, getting that small group to reduce its use—even to a small degree—can reap big dividends. RAND estimated that the United States, for instance, could decrease cocaine use by 1 percent either by spending $34 million on drug-treatment programs or by spending $783 million going after drugs at the source.

Crack Cocaine Sales” ( Washington Post) Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) Progressive Insurance Prohibition Prohibition Party Proposition 215 (California) Proposition P (San Francisco) psilocybin (mushrooms) psychedelic drugs. See also Ecstasy; LSD (acid); psychedelic mushrooms psychedelic mushrooms “psychonauts,” See also “research chemicals” Pure Food and Drug Act quaaludes race, crack and Raich, Angel Rainbow Gathering Ramsey, Donald Randall, Robert RAND Corporation Ranke, Otto Rathbun, Mary Jane “Brownie Mary,” Rau, Kenneth rave culture Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Contras and D.A.R.E. and Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act of 2003 Reese, Alun “religious right,” “research chemicals,” See also Ecstasy Research Triangle Institute Reuter, Peter Rhode Island Rhythm Society Rice, Lewis, Jr.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

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

Newhouse, ‘Consumer-directed health plans and the RAND Health Insurance Experiment’, Health Affairs, vol. 23, no. 6, 2004, pp. 107–13; Robert H. Brook, Emmett B. Keeler, Kathleen N. Lohr, et al., The Health Insurance Experiment: A Classic RAND Study Speaks to the Current Health Care Reform Debate, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RB-9174-HHS, 2006. 17Amy Finkelstein, Sarah Taubman, Bill Wright, et al., ‘The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the first year’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 127, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1057–1106. 18The US Vietnam draft had taken place in earlier years, but 1969 was the first year that the birthdate lottery was used.

Fryer, ‘Teacher incentives and student achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools’, Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 373–407. 58J.A. Marsh, M.G. Springer, D.F. McCaffrey, et al., ‘A Big Apple for educators: New York City’s experiment with schoolwide performance bonuses’, Final Evaluation Report, Fund for Public Schools, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2011; Roland G. Fryer, ‘Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools’, Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 373–407. 59For a review of this literature, see Andrew Leigh, ‘The economics and politics of teacher merit pay’, CESifo Economic Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–33. 60Alan B.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. "I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It's more like I'm running 'test scenarios' in my head at night - like RAND Corporation military simulations." Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping. * * * E-mail from Abe: Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s favorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-over grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flavor (marine or otherwise) of their own?

"Don't ask me to explain this eight-jobs-in-a-lifetime reality we now inhabit. I could barely deal with the one-job-in-a-lifetime world," Dad said. The sun was golden - birds swung in the sky. Cars purred at a stoplight. Dad looked so relaxed and happy. "I always assumed that history was created by think tanks, the DOE and the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California. I assumed that history was something that happened to other people - out there. I never thought history was something my kid built in the basement. It's a shock." I told him about the new word I'd learned, deletia, and Dad laughed. "That's me!" We were soon down at El Camino Real.


pages: 673 words: 88,905

Ignition by John D. Clark

George Santayana, RAND corporation, uranium enrichment

And so everybody even remotely connected with the business made his own survey of every conceivable fuel and oxidizer, and tried to decide which ones to choose. Lemmon, of JPL, presented the results of such a comprehensive survey to the Navy in the spring of 1945, and a half a dozen more, by North American Aviation, Reaction Motors, the Rand Corporation, M. W. Kellogg Co., and others, appeared in the next few years. Each survey listed the characteristics of every propellant, or prospective propellant, that the compiler could think of, and presented the results of dozens of tedious performance calculations. To the surprise of nobody with any chemical sophistication at all, everybody came to just about the same conclusions.

See Hybrid propellants; Monopropellant(s); and specific compound Propyl nitrate, 121–122, 123 Propyne, 32 Pyridinium nitrate, WFNA plus, 125, 126–127, 129 Pyrimidines as additives, 23. See also specific compound R Ram rockets, 30 described, 30 ethylene oxide fuel, 122 jelled fuel for, 166 pentaborane-hydrazine system for, 116–118 Rand Corporation, 21 Range, Grete, 13 Rapp, Lou, 25–26, 30, 95, 147, 148 Rau, Eric, 53 Reaction Motors, Inc. (RMI) research, 21, 23, 32, 35, 24n, 179 boranes, 111, 112–114–115, 116 borohydrides, 117 chlorine trifluoride, 68, 69 heat flux, 96 hybrid propellants, 161, 164, 166, 170–171 hydrazines, 117 hydrogen peroxide, 120–121 ignition delay, 25 JATO, 17 liquid oxygen, 94, 97 monopropellants, 120–121, 132, 133, 150, 153 space storable systems, 78 X-15, 95 Red fuming nitric acid (RFNA), 15–16 additive experiments, 22–23 amines and, 34 ammonia and, 23 aniline and, 16, 17, 22 boron carbide and, 170 changes in, on holding, 41–42 corrosive quality, 41 dangers of, 42 decompression pressure control, 52 defined, 6, 54–55 disadvantages, 41–42 freezing point control, 52, 54 furfuryl alcohol and, 22 improvements in handling, 50 inhibited: rocket grades, 108; Russian use, 107, 108 introduction of, 6 JATO and, 16, 17 military specifications for, 54–55 mixed acid as alternative to, 42–43 MMH-perchloryl fluoride system and, 73 polyethylene suspended in, 170 research on composition of, 17 sample holder in loss prevention, 48 titanium and, 54 UDMH and, 174 water content determination, 48n Redstone missile, 94 Reinhardt, Tom, 68, 72, 87 RFNA.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Inaccurate models, high costs, and the reinforcement of hierarchical power structures ultimately led many cities to give up urban modeling developed out of the military in the 1970s.89 The critical-planning theorist John Forester (not to be confused with Jay Forrester) argued that little consideration was given to the fact that data interpretations were heavily biased as a result of bias from those generating and collecting the information.90 The construction of models was often flawed because of the lack of appropriate data to develop them, the use of biased information, and the fact of not testing whether the data results fit people's experiences. A telling example of this is the 1970s-era model developed by the RAND Corporation for the New York City Fire Department to determine the efficiency of its network of firehouses.91 Basing the model almost solely on response-time data, the analysis led to recommending the removal of several fire stations in the South Bronx. The data model did not consider additional data factors such as gridlock, politics, multiple simultaneous fires (and therefore the need for back-up units), and the socioeconomic status of the neighborhoods in question.

See Data privacy Pruitt-Igoe housing project 34 Psychological City project 135 Public good(s) data and xviii, 187–210 non-excludable and non-rivalrous 193–194 Public health 10 data analysis and 10–13 urban populations 10 Public insights, data and 219–220 Public Lab 69 Balloon and Kite Mapping tool kits 71 balloon mapping kit 70, 71 project in Louisiana 85 Public participation 45–46, 183–185 Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) 45–46 Qualitative analytics, social reformers and 39–42 Qualitative vs. quantitative data 41 Race racial profiling 177–178 (see also Stop-and-frisk policy) redistricting and 5 redlining and xiii, 34, 220 zoning and 31–34 Radiation detection, in Japan 75, 76 Rainforest Connection 77 RAND Corporation 43–45 Raw data 51–89 “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (Gitelman) xii Reapportionment Act of 1929, 8 Red Cross 55, 80, 82, 203 Redistricting 5–6, 7, 8 Redlining xiii, 34, 220 Regulation xix, 194, 198–199, 221 of autonomous vehicles (AVs) 195–196 of data 188 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (Chadwick) 13 map 11 Requiem for Large Scale Models (Lee) 45 Responsible Data (organization) 199 Responsive City, The (Goldsmith and Crawford) 47 The Revolution Will Not Be Funded 58 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 47 “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Howe) 73 Roads, data on 66, 144, 146 Rockefeller Foundation 147 Rogstadius, Jakob 132 Romans 1 Roter, Rebecca, sensors of 68 Royal Housing Commission 17 Royal Statistical Society 10 Russell Sage Foundation 30 Safecast project 73–74, 75, 85–86 SAGE 43 Saiz, Albert 98 Sanborn Fire Insurance 16 map of Boston 14, 15 typical key to Sanborn map 16 Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Company.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

But the policy took hold, and China developed a related second system called the Golden Shield that allowed the government to inspect any data being received or sent, and to block domain names within China.17 The US government was beginning to notice the fledgling and fast-growing Chinese tech firms, and worried that China’s technological modernization could pose a threat to American military interests and national security. In 2005, the US Air Force commissioned the RAND Corporation, the prominent Cold War–era think tank, to write the first comprehensive report on the future of Chinese military capabilities. The report would come to define the conversation about Chinese technology, and whether or not it could bolster authoritarianism and make military conflict more likely.

The full pledge can be read in English at China Daily, “Public Pledge of Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China [sic] Internet Industry” (中国互联网行业自律公约), March 26, 2002, http://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/201812/26/WS5c23261f498eb4f01ff253d2/public-pledge-of-self-regulation-and-professional-ethics-for-china-internet-industry.html. 17. Economy, The Third Revolution, ch. 3, “ChinaNet,” 63–65. 18. Evan S. Medeiros, Roger Cliff, Keith Crane, and James C. Mulvenon, “A New Direction for China’s Defense Industry,” 205, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2005, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG334.html. 19. Chinese Academy of Sciences, “Issues in Building a National Innovation System,” High Technology Development Report (高技术发展报告), Beijing, 2005, http://www.bdp.cas.cn/zlyjjwqgl/ptcg/201608/t20160830_4572983.html. 20. James Palmer, “Nobody Knows Anything About China,” Foreign Policy, March 21, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/21/nobody-knows-anything-about-china/. 21.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

It’s like driving a car with no windows and, once every hour or so, getting beamed a photo of the outside environment. You’d never arrive at your destination, and given the risks, you’d be crazy to try. “The first thing I would say is you just need to be aware that whatever the plan you have is, it’s going to be wrong,” said Andy Hackbarth, a former RAND Corporation researcher who also helped design measurement systems for Medicare and Medicaid. I had asked him what advice he’d give to people who were designing systems to make the world better. “The only way you’re going to know it’s wrong is by having these feedback mechanisms and these measurement systems in place.”

.: crime in, 162–66 falling branches in, 175–76 lawsuit data patterns in, 175, 184 New York City Police Department (NYPD), 162–66, 168 New Yorker, 83, 84n New York Times, 32, 48, 142 New York University (NYU), 133 Nike, 204 Nimoy, Leonard, 207–8, 225–26 9/11 attacks, 142, 213 911 calls, 83, 137–40 normalization, 30–31, 32 Northwell Health, 137–40 Norway, 13–14 nuclear weapons, 225, 227 Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), 194–99, 237–38 nurses, 60–62, 63 nursing homes, 138, 139 lifting and transferring patients in, 193–94 Okerstrom, Mark, 4–5, 63 Olds, David, 194–95 O’Neill, Ryan, 1–3 Onie, Rebecca, 11 On the Media, 31 open-office plans, 177–80, 185 ownership, 38, 39–55, 70 Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet, 66 ozone layer, 65–70 P3, 22 paired metrics, 168, 203 parental leave, 13 Parker, Janet, 16n parking place, 232, 233 parks, 110–11, 112 tree pruning in, 175–76 Parto do Princípio, 35–36 patience and impatience, 234–35 Pavlin, Julie, 191–92 pediatricians, and automobile safety, 44–47 Pediatrics, 44, 46, 47, 48 peripheral vision, 30 Perla, Rocco, 11 Permanente Medical Group, 124 pest control, household, 199 phishing emails, 220–22 phobias, 30–31, 32 Pickering, Roscoe, 46–47 Pill Model, 237–39 Pina, Frank, 156 plastic bags, 185–88 police, 5–6, 8, 122n, 154 car accidents and, 6, 16 data and, 122n, 162–63 domestic violence and, 83, 86–88 New York City Police Department, 162–66, 168 Nurse-Family Partnership and, 196 polio vaccine, 45 Pollack Harold, 116, 117, 121, 123 Ponder, Paige, 25, 27–28, 88 Poppy + Rose, 193 poverty, 59, 97, 106 see also food assistance; homelessness Pratt, Lisa, 228 pre-gaming, 168–69 prevention, see upstream actions Princeton University, 43–44 proactive efforts, see upstream actions problem(s): addressing the wrong ones, 32–33 bandwidth and, 58–60 big and little, 58–59 blindness to, 21–38, 42, 70, 76, 128, 147, 232 designating something as, 32 early warning of, 135–51 longevity of, 233 ownership of, 38, 39–55, 70 slack and, 63, 67 Project ASSIST, 234 Project Parto Adequado, 37 prophet’s dilemma, 226 proximity, 133, 236 psychological standing, 43–44 quantity—and quality-based measures, 168 rabbits, on Macquarie Island, 171–74 Rad, Bex, 104 radiologists, 29–30 Ramirez-Di Vittorio, Anthony (Tony D), 117–20, 122, 249 RAND Corporation, 12, 180 randomized control trial (RCT), 121, 237 rape, 164–66 date rape on campus, 42–43 Ratner, Rebecca, 43 rats and mice, on Macquarie Island, 171–74, 176 reaction, see downstream actions Reagan, Ronald, 70 Reply All, 163–64 restoration, 10, 153 Reyes, Sarah, 112 Reykjavík, Iceland, 75–81, 125, 231, 239 Ridenour, Brandon, 200–201 Ringelestein, Don, 221–23 ripple effects, 169, 174, 197 a rising tide lifts all boats, 154, 161, 162, 168 Rocchetti, Carmela, 128–33 Rockford, Ill., 90–96, 108, 236, 239 ROI (return on investment), 127 Romania, 81 ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation), 139 Rowland, F.


pages: 259 words: 87,875

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou

airport security, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fixed income, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea

After Romaine agreed to join up, Purcell persuaded his boss to let Romaine work as a narcotics investigator with him and Saporito, who continued to work undercover, in what quickly became a three-man anti-hippie police squad. With support from his new employer, Romaine attended a two-week course on link analysis—a law enforcement tool used to study complex criminal organizations—taught by the Rand Corporation, the same company that had advised the Pentagon on how to wage the Vietnam War since 1964. After his classes ended, Romaine immediately set to work building a profile of the local drug-smuggling network Purcell had always suspected was operating out of Dodge City. “Bob and I sat down and spent time together discussing the files I had,” Purcell says.

Christmas Happening and hashish smuggling and marijuana smuggling and Moody Blues and Los Angeles Times LSD acid tests and in Afghanistan in Algiers Almeida’s death and bad trips with Brotherhood’s legacy and Christmas Happening and communal use of and crusade against Brotherhood dealing and distribution of Dodge City and ego death from exposing children to finances of Griggs and in Haight-Ashbury hallucinations from healing powers of Hodgson’s documentary on as illegal Laguna Beach and Leary-Griggs Cal State appearance and Learys’ arrest and as legal manufacturing of in Maui Millbrook commune and as mind expanding Moody Blues and Newport Pop Festival and political impact of purity of religious experiences associated with research and experimentation with smuggling of stealing of tricking people into taking it using hashish with see also Orange Sunshine Lurigancho (Padilla) Lynd, Glenn arrests of Brotherhood’s incorporation and and crusade against Brotherhood death of Dodge City and finances of Griggs’s death and Griggs’s relationship with group marriage society idea and hashish smuggling and Idyllwild ranch and in Laguna Beach in leaving Brotherhood LSD and marijuana and Lynd, Janet and crusade against Brotherhood hashish smuggling and Idyllwild ranch and mother’s infidelity and Mystic Arts World and Newport Pop Festival and Lynd, Marilyn McAdams, Brian Manson, Charles Orange Sunshine and marijuana in Algiers aroma of Christmas Happening and and crusade against Brotherhood dealing and supplying of Dodge City and Elysian Park Human Be-In and exposing children to finances of growing of Laguna Beach and Leary and Maui and smuggling and Maui Alpert in Brotherhood in Griggs in hashish in Hendrix’s film and concert in hoodlums in law enforcement in marijuana and sailing between Mexico and UFOs sighted in Maui News, The Maui Wowie May, Ed Maysles, Albert and David Merry Pranksters mescaline Dodge City and in Maui Metzner, Ralph: LSD research and experiments of The Psychedelic Experience Mexico Ashbrook’s resort in marijuana dealing and marijuana smuggling and psilocybin and sailing between Maui and Miles, Buddy Millbrook commune hashish at Leary and LSD and Miller, Elliot Miller, Joe Mitchell, Mitch Modjeska Canyon Brotherhood in Church in communal LSD use at Disciples of Griggs in Hodgson’s documentary and Molokai Joe Monterey Pop Festival Moody, Kevin Moody Blues More Than Human (Sturgeon) Morgan, Jack Mundell, Chuck arrests of Brotherhood named by Gale’s relationship with Griggs’s relationship with LSD used by marijuana and in Maui in Modjeska Canyon spirituality of surfing of Munoz, Jeff Mystic Arts World construction of finances of fire at hashish smuggling and Leary and management of marijuana smuggling and Newport Pop Festival and offerings of opening of Wright and Nepal Ness, Eliot Newport Pop Festival New York City hashish smuggling and LSD smuggling and marijuana dealing and New York Times Nixon, Richard Nuuhiwa, David OC Weekly Ogden, Bill Oliphant, George Operation Brotherhood of Eternal Love (Operation BEL) opium Orange Sunshine Altamont Music Festival and Christmas Happening and dealing and distributing of Dodge City and finances of Griggs and law enforcement and manufacturing of naming of Otto, Jimmy Padilla, Edward Aafje and adolescence of amphetamines dealt and used by arrests of Ashbrook’s relationship with brawling of Brotherhood’s naming and Brotherhood’s proposed island utopia and cocaine and Dodge City and Elysian Park Human Be-In and finances of Gale’s relationship with Griggs’s death and Griggs’s relationship with heritage of Idyllwild ranch and in Laguna Beach leadership of Leary’s prison escape and LSD used by marijuana and in Maui in Modjeska Canyon Mystic Arts World and physical appearance of prison escape of psilocybin and in Silverado Canyon spirituality and surfing of Tahquitz Canyon and Pahlavi, Shah Reza Paris, Gary Payne, Edgar PCP Peru cocaine smuggling and surfing in peyote Pitt, Carrie: Andrist’s relationship with Dodge City and Polanski, Roman Pooley, Michael Potts, Leslie: hashish and Hendrix’s relationship with LSD used by marijuana and in Maui physical appearance of Rainbow Bridge and Alpert, Richard (Ram Dass) surfing and UFOs sighted by Pratt, Jill Pratt, Stanford psilocybin Psychedelic Experience, The (Leary, Metzner, and Alpert) Psychedelic Prayers (Leary) Pulp Fiction Purcell, Neil arrests of Christmas Happening and and crusade against Brotherhood Dodge City and Gale’s death and in Maui Mystic Arts World and Orange Sunshine and Tokhi brothers’ visit and Rainbow Bridge Rainbow Surf boards Ramsey, Robert and crusade against Brotherhood Randall, Mike arrest of Griggs’s death and Leary’s prison escape and Moody Blues and Mystic Arts World and Newport Pop Festival and Orange Sunshine and Rand Corporation Reagan, Ronald Redding, Noel Reed, Curtis Revolver Richard, Keith Risley, Art: and exposing children to LSD Griggs’s relationship with in Laguna Beach Stanley’s relationship with Tokhi brothers’ visit and Robinson, George Robinson, Robbie “Rolling and Tumbling,” Rolling Stone Rolling Stones Romaine, Bob arrests of and crusade against Brotherhood Dodge City and hashish smuggling and in Maui and shooting of Amaranthus Sachs, Gunther San Bernardino Sun-Telegram Sand, Nick: and crusade against Brotherhood LSD manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories San Francisco, Calif.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

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

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

As part of that, I want to step back and look at how we not only came to pursue these sorts of manipulative technologies, but why we so readily believe in them and trust the guidance they offer. The truth is that in our history we’ve come under the direct supervision of guidance systems before. And in the earliest iterations of them, they came to us in the guise of lifesaving technology. Between the end of World War II and the 1980s, organizations like the RAND Corporation, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (where I spent a year as a fellow oblivious to this part of its history) attracted bright young thinkers from universities across the country who spent their time on the most pressing mission of the era: how to avoid nuclear war.

Wide-eyed, sleep-deprived Solomonoff went on to propose the first notions of “algorithmic probability” that could be used for predictions, and created the theoretical framework for using Bayesian statistics to deal with uncertainty, which makes him the ancestor of everything from modern weather prediction to AI that can spit out a reasonable-sounding term paper from a one-sentence prompt. RAND Corporation’s Allen Newell went on to publish the first doctoral dissertation in AI, “Information Processing: A New Technique for the Behavioral Sciences.” Prior to the Dartmouth summer, he and Herbert Simon (an economist and cognitive psychologist and seemingly the only Dartmouth attendee who wasn’t a computer scientist) had already built Logic Theorist, the first AI program, and afterward they used military money to build the General Problem Solver in 1957, a program that simulated the rules of logic a human might follow.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

It means sharing Intelligence, altering agriculture and energy policies, opening up the health and education sectors to global investment. It means opening up retail. It means an unequal partnership in which India is being held close in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance. In the list of ORF’s “institutional partners” you will also find the RAND Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution (whose stated mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system”).


pages: 1,330 words: 372,940

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, Great Grain Robbery, haute couture, Herman Kahn, index card, Khyber Pass, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, oil shock, out of africa, Plato's cave, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Socratic dialogue, Ted Sorensen, Yom Kippur War

In fact, the passion of his attempts to win over his intellectual adversaries indicated a genuine warmth as well as a gnawing insecurity.11 It was a mark of Kissinger’s insecurity that he was more fascinated by his enemies than he was by his friends, at times becoming obsessed with them. When William Kaufmann, an arms control expert at the Rand Corporation, wrote a devastating review of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger pleaded with Professor Tom Schelling to arrange a visit to Rand. “Henry was desperate to convert them,” Schelling recalled. At other times, he would become paranoid about his enemies. When he was part of an arms control group visiting Bonn a few years later, Kissinger felt that Schelling and the Rand people were snubbing him.

How, Kissinger later asked a U.S. adviser, could he thus claim the village was largely pacified? “The VC wouldn’t dare enter this village,” replied the adviser. “The people pay their taxes by mail.” Kissinger’s skepticism was thus reinforced, though perhaps not enough.29 Kissinger remained dubious about American tactics. In a briefing for experts at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, he criticized the Johnson administration for tying its policy to the survival of President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government, a mistake that Kissinger would later make himself. At the Harvard Business School, participating in a seminar with the quaint conceit of “Vietnam as a management problem,” Kissinger was asked what he thought of the “enclave theory” that the U.S. should concentrate on establishing a few very secure strongholds throughout South Vietnam.

As the Hanoi Communist Party newspaper put it: “The military and political aspects of the issue are inseparable because the underlying cause of the Vietnam War is the American imposition of a stooge administration on the South Vietnamese people.”7 DANIEL ELLSBERG AND NSSM-1 Shortly after his appointment, Kissinger called his old colleague and occasional critic Henry Rowen, president of the Rand Corporation, a Santa Monica think tank that specialized in military studies for the government. Kissinger had attended many seminars about Vietnam at Rand, and he knew the people there to be tough-minded skeptics about U.S. policy. What, Kissinger would ask, were the alternatives? Now he wanted to hire a team of Rand analysts to explore these alternatives and analyze the range of options.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

Mai did well in school, won a scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., spent three years there, and returned to Vietnam with an American fiancé, Army Sergeant David Elliott. In 1964, Robert McNamara—genuinely puzzled by the stubbornness of the communists in the face of American power—had commissioned the RAND Corporation to do a study of defectors and enemy prisoners, seeking to know “Who are the Viet Cong? And what makes them tick?” The Elliotts signed on with RAND, and Mai began interviewing subjects. She remembered that she’d been “brought up to believe that the communists were people who destroyed the family, destroyed religion, had no allegiance to our country but only to international communism.”

The NLF may have failed to achieve its primary objectives, but its fighters were still in the streets, still seeking revenge on the Saigon regime, still hoping the people of the city could be persuaded to rise up in their support. Duong Van Mai Elliott and her husband, David, had been asleep in the RAND Corporation villa on Pasteur Street near the Presidential Palace when the assault on the embassy began. “We heard gunfire, and our first reaction was ‘Must be another coup d’état,’ ” she recalled. “Then we heard that the Viet Cong had attacked Saigon and were still attacking. It came as a total shock because we always thought Saigon was safe, the safest place in all of South Vietnam.”

The article, by Neil Sheehan, was the first installment of what came to be called the “Pentagon Papers”—seven thousand pages of highly classified documents and historical narrative, compiled secretly at the orders of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had hoped that a study of the decision-making process that had led the United States to become so deeply involved in Vietnam would help future policymakers avoid similar errors. Two copies of the report had been stored at the Washington headquarters of the RAND Corporation, for which Daniel Ellsberg, one of the study’s thirty-six authors, worked as an analyst. Ellsberg had once supported the war; he’d served in the Pentagon and spent two years working for the State Department in Vietnam. But he had come to see it as profoundly immoral and hoped that if Americans understood how administration after administration had misled them about what was being done in their name, they might help bring it to an end.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

Putnam, George Holmgren, Lawrence Harrison, David Hale, Wellington K. K. Chan, Kongdan Oh, Richard Rosecrance, Bruce Porter, Mark Cordover, Jonathan Pollack, Michael Swaine, Aaron Friedberg, Tamara Hareven, and Michael Mochizuki. Abram Shulsky, as usual, contributed greatly to the book’s conceptualization. Once again, I am grateful to James Thomson and the RAND Corporation, which tolerated my presence as I was writing this book. I owe a long-standing debt of gratitude to my literary agents, Esther Newberg and Heather Schroder, who made both this and the volume that preceded it possible. Much of the material covered in this book would never have come to my attention but for the hard work of my research assistants, Denise Quigley, Tenzing Donyo, and especially Chris Swenson, who was of invaluable assistance through all phases of this study.

Although there are revisionists in Germany who deny the Holocaust ever happened, they are regarded as part of a crackpot fringe; in Japan, by contrast, respectable politicians like Shintaro Ishihara and academics like Soiichi Watanabe can still deny that the Nanking Massacre was an atrocity. 21Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), p. 31. 22This is based on average annual hours of 1,604 for Germany and 2,197 for Japan. Data taken from David Finegold, K. Brendley, R. Lempert et. al, The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for its Sustainable Recovery (Santa Monica, Ca.: RAND Corporation MR-479/1-OSTP, 1994), p. 23. CHAPTER 22. THE HIGH-TRUST WORKPLACE 1Allan Nevins, with Frank E. Hill, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (New York: Scribner’s, 1954), p. 517. 2Nevins (1954), p. 553. 3James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 31. 4David A.

Fallows, James, Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). -----, More Like Us: Making America Great Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). Feingold, David, Brendley, K, Lempert, R., et. al, The Decline of the US Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for its Sustainable Recovery (Santa Monica, Ca.: RAND Corporation MR-479/1-OSTP, 1994). Feuerwerker, Albert, China’s Early Industrialization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). -----, The Chinese Economy ca. 1870-1911 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1969). -----, “The State and the Economy in Late Imperial China,” Theory and Society 13 (1984): 297-326.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

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

I would like to pay special thanks to Irving Kristol, David Epstein, Alvin Bernstein, Henry Higuera, Yoshihisa Komori, Yoshio Fukuyama, and George Holmgren, all of whom took the time to read and comment on the manuscript. In addition, I would like to thank the many people—some of them known to me and many others not—who commented usefully on various aspects of the present thesis as it was presented in a variety of seminars and lectures in this country and abroad. James Thomson, president of the RAND Corporation, was kind enough to provide me office space while drafting this book. Gary and Linda Armstrong took time out from writing their dissertations to help me in the collection of research materials, and provided valuable advice on a number of topics in the course of writing. Rosalie Fonoroff helped in the proofreading.

By the early 1990s, the reform process itself had weakened the Soviet economy dramatically and made it less competitive militarily. For an account of the Soviet military’s views on the need for economic reform, see Jeremy Azrael, The Soviet Civilian Leadership and the Military High Command, 1976-1986 (Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, 1987), pp. 15-21. 11 Many of these points are made in V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers (New York: Knopf, 1981). 12 Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., “Science, Technology, and the Western Miracle,” Scientific American 263, no.5 (November 1990): 42-54; on per capita income in the eighteenth century, see David S.

Avineri, Shlomo. 1968. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Avineri, Shlomo. 1972. Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Azrael, Jeremy. 1987. The Soviet Civilian Leadership and the High Command, 1976-1986. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. Azrael, Jeremy. 1966. Managerial Power and Soviet Policy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Babst, Dean V. 1972. “A Force for Peace.” Industrial Research 14 (April): 55-58. Baer, Werner. 1989. The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development, third edition. Praeger, New York.


pages: 565 words: 160,402

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley

currency manipulation / currency intervention, defense in depth, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, land reform, operational security, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea

The Unchangeable War. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, November 1970. Khuyen, Lieutenant General Dong Van, ARVN. The RVNAF. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980. ———. RVNAF Logistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980. Komer, R. W. Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: The Impact of Institutional Constraints on (JS/GVN Performance in the Vietnam War. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, February 1971. ———. Organization and Management of the New Model Pacification Program, 1966–1969. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 7 May 1970. Larsen, Lieutenant General Stanley R., and Brigadier General James Lawton Collins, Jr.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

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

H-1B never required that they be the best and brightest in the world. It only required a bachelor’s degree. —BRUCE MORRISON, former congressman, 2011 We find neither an inadequate supply of STEM [scientific, technical, engineering, mathematical] workers to supply the nation’s current needs, nor indications of shortages in the foreseeable future. —RAND CORPORATION STUDY, 2004 IN AMERICA, one of the most controversial causes of job loss in the high-tech industry involves not offshoring but “onshoring”—importing college-educated foreigners to come work in the United States and replace Americans—a strategy favored by such major U.S. companies as AIG, Disney, IBM, Microsoft, and Pfizer.

The Washington Post, October 21, 1995. 2 “These are not Einsteins” Bruce Morrison, interview, January 24, 2011. 3 “We find neither an inadequate supply” William Butz, Terrence K. Kelly, David M. Adamson, et al., “Will the Scientific and Technology Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government?” Rand Corporation, 2004, http://​www.​rand.​org. 4 To recruit hot new talent “American-Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals in U.S. Competitiveness,” National Venture Capital Association, 2006, http://​www.​nvca.​org. 5 “It makes no sense to” “Bill Gates to Congress: Let Us Hire More Foreigners,” CNET News, March 12, 2006, http://​news.​cnet.​com. 6 No ironclad protections for Americans Morrison, interview, January 24, 2011. 7 Senior AIG executives summoned 250 Linda Kilcrease, “Problems with the H-1B Visa Expansion and T-Visas,” web post, January 8, 2008, accessed January 17, 2011. http://​www.​zazona.​comLibrary/​BrainSavers/​Problems_​Kilcrease.​htm, and Kilcrease, letter to editor, “H-1B Visa: A Bad Idea,” Cnet, 2009, accessed April 21, 2012. 8 “After we were seated” Douglas Crouse, “Competition from Abroad,” The Daily Record, Morris County, New Jersey, May 2, 2000. http://​www.​programmers​guild.​org/​archives/​lib/​abuse/​drm20000502aig.​htm. 9 Americans were being replaced by H-1B Kilcrease, “Problems with the H-1B Visa Expansion.” 10 Did not bring in any special skills William Branigan, “White Collar Visas: Back Door for Cheap Labor,” The Washington Post, October 21, 1995. 11 “This profitable company boasted Kilcrease, “Problems with the H-1B Visa Expansion.” 12 One-third of its 46,000-member workforce “Quota Quickly Filled on Visas for High-Tech Guest Workers,” The New York Times, April 5, 2007. 13 Foreign worker tide kept rising “Flaws in Guest Worker Programs Add to US Unemployment Misery,” International Business Times News, November 21, 2010. 14 Or multinational temp agencies Ron Hira and Anil Hira, Outsourcing America: The True Cost of Shipping Jobs Overseas and What Can Be Done About It, 2nd. ed.

Building America’s Future Educational Fund. “Falling Apart and Falling Behind: Transportation Infrastructure Report 2011.” http://​www.​bafuture.​org. Butz, William, Terrence K. Kelly, David M. Adamson, et al. “Will the Scientific and Technology Workforce Meet the Requirements of the Federal Government?” Rand Corporation, 2004. Case, Karl E., and Robert J. Shiller. “Is There a Housing Bubble?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, no. 2 (2003): 299–342. Case, Karl E., John M. Quigley, and Robert J. Shiller. “Wealth Effects Revisited 1978–2009.” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, February 2011.


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Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

It was exactly the attitude that had infuriated him in Parker, and his refusal to be pinned down undermined any attempts to investigate the subject seriously. Many were skeptical, and when a fan asked Campbell whether the Hieronymus Machine was a hoax, like Asimov’s articles about thiotimoline, the editor seemed horrified by the implication. There were inquiries from Bell Aircraft and the RAND Corporation, and Claude Shannon offered to test it, although the timing never worked out. Campbell soon moved on to other causes, and Hieronymus himself felt that the editor had set back acceptance of his work by a century. The symbolic machine, he said, functioned because the ink conducted lines of force, but when it came to serious research, it wasn’t worth “a tinker’s damn.”

“The articles we run” JWC, “The Problem of Psionics,” ASF, June 1956, 5. the Campbell Machine JWC, “Unprovable Speculation,” ASF, February 1957, 54–70. “I am not compelled to defend my hunches” Ibid., 70. whether the Hieronymus Machine was a hoax Robin Johnson, in Bangsund, JWC: An Australian Tribute, 10. Bell Aircraft and the RAND Corporation JWC to Galen Hieronymus, February 4, 1957. Claude Shannon offered to test it JWC to G. Harry Stine, July 31, 1957. “a tinker’s damn” Hieronymus, The Story of Eloptic Energy, 123–24. Bell Labs, the Harvard Computer Lab, and MIT “I’m welcome at Bell Labs, the G.E. labs, DuPont, Upjohn, Lederle, Brookhaven, MIT, etc.”

., 354 “Pigs Is Pigs” (Butler), 372 “Pilgrimage” (Asimov), 133 Pioneer Instrument Company, 66 “Piracy Preferred” (Campbell), 32 Planet Man, The (radio show), 475n PM (newspaper), 209 Podkayne of Mars (Heinlein), 340 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5 Pohl, Frederik Asimov and, 100, 104–5, 108, 140–41, 161, 166, 167, 218, 220, 223, 282, 284, 342, 343, 348, 350, 406 Campbell and Astounding, 80–81, 95, 115, 245, 278 dianetics and, 278, 282–83, 284 editing and agent work, 114, 136, 282, 343, 355, 387 Futurians and, 100, 102, 103, 104–5, 108, 109, 134, 181 Hubbard and, 131–32 Voyage Beyond Apollo cruise, 381–83 Polanski, Roman, 350, 482n Popular Science, 199–200 Porter, Katherine Anne, 381 “Positive Power of Posterior Pinching, The,” 347 Pournelle, Jerry, 385, 388 Pratt, Fletcher, 116, 128, 131, 141, 155, 156, 162, 186, 201–2 Princeton University, 202 Probability Zero, 148, 182 psionics, 303–7, 316, 317, 319–20, 324, 329, 355–56, 367 Psycho (Bloch), 281 psychoanalysis, 261, 272–73, 279 psychohistory, 8, 139–40, 142, 362, 400 Puerto Rico, 46, 130 pulp magazines, 6, 47, 49, 61, 75–77, 121, 125, 247–48 Puppet Masters, The (Heinlein), 281, 284 Purcell, Don, 293, 328–29 Purple Heart, 205 Quảng Ðúc, Thích, 2 Queens Science Fiction League, 104, 105, 117–18, 238 racism, 12–13, 360–65, 366–67 Ralston, Henry, 225 Rand, Ayn, 359 Randazzo, Jasper, 376–77, 379 RAND Corporation, 319 Randi, James, 391 “reactive mind,” 250, 259, 263 Reagan, Ronald, 388–89, 406 “Reason” (Asimov), 137 “Rebellion” (Campbell), 64 Red Cross, 46, 154, 172 Red Gods Call, The (Scoggins), 60 “Red Queen’s Race, The” (Asimov), 222 “Requiem” (Heinlein), 114, 115 “Rescue Party” (Clarke), 244 Revolt in the Stars (Hubbard), 394, 395 Reynolds, Mack, 487–88n Rhine, Joseph B., 55, 56 Rhodes, Cecil, 333 Rhodesia, 333 Rhodes Scholarship, 40 Rice, Jane, 366 Riley, Arthur E., 193–95, 197 Riley, Frank, 473n “Roads Must Roll, The” (Heinlein), 115 “Robbie” (Asimov), 95, 136 Robertson, Ian, 376 Robot series (Asimov), 2, 95, 136–37, 167, 208, 219, 220, 282, 283, 343, 400 Rocket Ship Galileo (Heinlein), 227 Rocketship X-M (movie), 255, 336 Rocket to the Morgue (Boucher), 181–82 Rocklynne, Ross, 96, 279 Roddenberry, Gene, 5, 370–74, 399 Rogers, Don, 252–53, 270 Rogers, Hubert, 158, 159, 284 Rolling Stones, The (Heinlein), 372 Romney, Mitt, 395–96 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 338 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 57, 132, 200–201, 205–6 Roper, USS, 41–42 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 192 Rothman, Milton A., 95–96, 366 Rubinson, Jack, 99–100, 102, 103, 107 Russell, Eric Frank, 87–88, 145, 279, 304 Russian Revolution, 48 Sagan, Carl, 11–12, 383, 401 Sagan, Linda, 383 Saint Hill Manor, 332 St.


Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

Moreover, those statistics would not reveal when an accident took place in the immediate period after a driver had disengaged autopilot, precisely because of fears of an imminent collision. Nor, crucially, would they record the number of times drivers had disengaged the autopilot to prevent an accident. The RAND Corporation calculated that to show that self-driving cars were as safe as human drivers 69 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere would require 275 million fatality-free miles, and even that might be an underestimate. Contrary to the arguments set out by the proponents of autonomous cars, human drivers are actually pretty good.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

This allowed the military to better understand not only what its future capabilities would be, but also those of the enemy. This was critical because, being the dawn of the atomic age, there were enormous uncertainties about our future, including whether or not we would actually survive to have one. Project RAND eventually transformed into the RAND Corporation, one of the first global policy think tanks. As the space race ramped up, interest in foresight grew, particularly in government and the military. In time, corporations began showing interest too, as was famously demonstrated by Royal Dutch Shell’s application of scenarios in response to the 1973 oil crisis.

In this case, the answers to the types of questions the AI was developed to address. Chapter 9 1. Grossman, D. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Back Bay Books. 1996. 2. Center for Military Health Policy Research, Rajeev Ramchand, and Inc ebrary. The War Within: Preventing Suicide in the U.S. Military. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2011. 3. DARPA. Sanchez, J. “Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS).” 4. Tucker, P. “The Military Is Building Brain Chips to Treat PTSD.” Defense One. May 28, 2014. 5. Temporal resolution refers to precision of the measurement with respect to time, just as spatial resolution is precision with respect to space, such as the number of pixels in an image 6.


pages: 339 words: 99,674

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

He was the gregarious center of gravity of a tight-knit group of longtime friends in Santa Monica, the Peter Pan character in a crowd reminiscent of the cast of Friends, a short, stocky, and bald-headed slacker and computer geek who loved to work from home on his laptop, a gamer addicted to World of Warcraft, a liberal who expressed distaste for George Bush during long talks around the UCLA campus or in coffee shops near the ocean. But he was also a behavioral science researcher who had cultivated close ties to the CIA and Pentagon while working as an analyst at the RAND Corporation and later at the Defense Group, a defense and intelligence contracting firm. He had a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, and his research focused on finding new ways of determining when someone was lying—“deception detection” research. He would regularly disappear from his Santa Monica apartment to fly to Washington for meetings with officials from the CIA, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and National Security Agency.

Others that were distributed should not have been. In 2011, one Illinois fusion center warned darkly that Russian hackers had tapped into the computer system of a water district in Springfield. In fact, a repairman had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while on vacation in Russia. Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation, one of the nation’s most thoughtful terrorism analysts, points out that in the years since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been remarkably free of terrorism, despite the heightened levels of fear and anxiety. “In terms of domestic terrorism, this has been the most tranquil decade since the early 1960s,” says Jenkins.


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The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

“During the time”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88. Biological surveillance: The foundational text of network battle thinking is: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001). For a discussion of the biological issues, see Eugene Thacker, “Living Dead Networks,” The Fibreculture Journal 4 (2005). Hannibal’s smashing attacks: A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890), iv. One hacker: David Raymond et al., “A Control Measure Framework to Limit Collateral Damage and Propagation of Cyber Weapons,” in Karlis Podins, Jan Stinissen, and Markus Maybaum, eds., 5th International Conference in Cyber Conflict: Proceedings 2013 (Tallinn, Estonia: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence Publications, 2013).

“Everything is a gate”: Felix “FX” Lindner and Sandro Gaycken, “Back to Basics: Beyond Network Hygiene,” in Best Practices in Computer Network Defense: Incident Detection and Response, ed. Melissa E. Hathaway (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: IOS Press, 2014), 55–56. Chapter 10. HARD GATEKEEPING “The United States faces no existential threat”: See James Dobbins et al., Choices for America in a Turbulent World (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015), xiv. For a discussion of the nature of security and values, see Arnold Wolfers, “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol,” Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 1952): 485. “Every new age”: Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Just Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2006), 45.


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Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

In particular, he recommends that planners look for ways to integrate what he calls strategic uncertainty—uncertainty about the future of the business you’re in—into the planning process itself. Raynor’s solution, in fact, is a variant of a much older planning technique called scenario planning, which was developed by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation in the 1950s as an aid for cold war military strategists. The basic idea of scenario planning is to create what strategy consultant Charles Perrottet calls “detailed, speculative, well thought out narratives of ‘future history.’ ” Critically, however, scenario planners attempt to sketch out a wide range of these hypothetical futures, where the main aim is not so much to decide which of these scenarios is most likely as to challenge possibly unstated assumptions that underpin existing strategies.18 In the early 1970s, for example, the economist and strategist Pierre Wack led a team at Royal Dutch/Shell that used scenario planning to test senior management’s assumptions about the future success of oil exploration efforts, the political stability of the Middle East, and the emergence of alternative energy technologies.

. ———. 2010. “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand.” New York Times Magazine (May 23): 32–47. Brooker, Katrina. 2010. “Citi’s Creator, Alone with His Regrets” New York Times, Jan. 2. Brown, Bernice B. 1968. “Delphi Process: A Methodology Used for the Elicitation of Opinions of Experts.” Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Michael Schrage. 2009. “The New, Faster Face of Innovation.” MIT Sloan Management Review, August. Buchanan, James. 1989. “Rational Choice Models in the Social Sciences.” In Explorations into Constitutional Economics, ed. R. D. Tollison and V. J. Vanberg. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.


Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

The three pillars of my identity were: • The New Yorker-- deep sophisticated journalism far above what most people got to see. • The Museum of Modern Art. (I think I paid eleven dollars for my annual membership when I was fifteen, and that even got me an extra Museum card “for my spouse”--- which I gave to a young lady I knew.) • The Rand Corporation, which I had heard about from Leo Rosten. I was deeply worried about nuclear war, and that is where they made the policy; I felt I might contribute. (I only found out decades later that due to their own snobbery, Rand only hired economists and physicists.) The Soviet Union now had thermonuclear weapons, and both sides were continuing to prepare for the unthinkable nuclear war.

I had heard the songs of a vocalist named Little Richard, who supposedly sang in English, my native tongue, and I could not decipher a single syllable. I had no doubt that voice recognition would someday be practical, but I did not know when and was not about to hold my breath. I made one friend at that conference, a linguist named Martin Kay, who was at the Rand Corporation. We talked about the problem of character-sets for different languages. (Eventually I sent Martin Kay a full photocopy of Dr. Seuss' book On Beyond Zebra, wherein the good doctor proposed such new alphabetical characters as Yuzz, Fuddle and Quan.) Sherry Amott’s puppets (~1964) I had a student at Vassar named Sherry Amott.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The core group of experts met again at the lab the following month to continue developing the financial war game. In addition to the APL hosts and our sponsors from the Department of Defense, there were representatives from other cabinet-level departments, including Commerce and Energy; several major universities, including the Naval War College; think tanks, including the Peterson Institute and RAND Corporation; other physics labs, including Los Alamos; and senior military officers from the staff of the Joint Chiefs. At this point I noticed the absence of representatives with any actual capital markets experience. I was the only one in the room with a lengthy career on Wall Street that included time at investment banks, hedge funds and exchanges.

This’ll be great to mix things up with the generals and intelligence people. Can’t wait.” And that was that. Steve was assigned to the Russia cell, of course. O.D. was assigned to the gray cell, representing the hedge funds and Swiss banks—another appropriate assignment. I was put in the China cell, along with a well-known Harvard academic, a highly cerebral RAND Corporation analyst and two other area experts. The financial war was just a few weeks away and it was time to lay some traps—something the military calls “conditioning the battle space.” I knew that Russia would begin the game with significantly less national power than the United States or even China.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Licklider had earned his reputation as a thought leader in the still-young computer science world, having written a work called Man-Computer Symbiosis and publishing a series of memos for what he jokingly described as an “intergalactic network” of connected computers: perhaps ten or twelve in all, attached to a variety of disk drives, remote consoles, and teletype machines. Ultimately, that network came to consist of a small group of computing centers 248 T he I ntergalactic N etwor k located at several leading research centers, including MIT, CarnegieMellon, the University of Utah, the Rand Corporation, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. While working with the SRI team, Licklider championed the work of a researcher named Douglas Engelbart, who spent much of the 1960s working on this early proto-hypertext tool known as the oN-Line System (which I will discuss further later).

Popular Internet lore has it that the original Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) designers were trying to build a network capable of withstanding nuclear war, but in fact they simply wanted to build a better network (the ­nuclear war fable stems from the conflation of the ARPANET project with an unrelated RAND Corporation study during this period).5 Researchers began stitching together a network of four major computing centers equipped with Interface Message Processors (IMPs), designed by a group of researchers working under contract at the technology consulting firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman. 251 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D In 1973, Vinton G.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Even if there were millions of possible actors, actions, and connections, there were only two real superpowers—the Soviet Union and the United States. Military leaders figured that game theory, based on the mathematics of poker, should be able to model this activity and give us simple enough rules for engagement. And so the RAND Corporation was hired to conduct experiments (like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which we looked at earlier), determine probable outcomes, and then program computers to respond appropriately in any number of individual circumstances. Led by the as yet undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic John Nash (the mathematician portrayed in the movie A Beautiful Mind), they adopted a principle called MAD, or mutually assured destruction, which held that if the use of any nuclear device could effectively guarantee the complete and utter annihilation of both sides in the conflict, then neither side would opt to use them.

See also timescales Prisoner’s Dilemma, 193, 194, 220, 222, 248 privacy, 158, 169, 204 production, 81, 127, 161–62, 165 productivity, 81, 82, 95, 98, 106, 111, 117, 143 programmers, 85, 87, 96–97, 98, 128, 231–32 programs, 84, 87, 93, 98, 101–2, 107, 113–14, 263 progress, 86, 253–54. See also change Prometheus, 190 public, sophistication of, 45 public relations, 205, 207, 214, 217, 223 publishing, 97 Pulp Fiction (movie), 30–31 Quetzalcoatl (Mayan god), 253 railroad industry, 82 RAM, 5, 140, 140n, 181–89 Ramo, Joshua, 236–37 RAND Corporation, 220–21, 225 The Real World (TV show), 35–36 reality: apocalypto and, 262, 264; chronobiology and, 88; digiphrenia and, 113; fractalnoia and, 216–17; games and, 60; narrative collapse and, 50, 66; overwinding and, 165, 169; temporal, 165. See also reality television reality television, 2, 35–43, 66, 136, 149–50 “The Relationship Economy” (Michalski), 238–39 religion, 8, 28, 76–77, 78–79, 101, 212, 260–62, 263–64 remote control: for television, 21; warfare by, 7, 120–22 Rifkin, Jeremy, 78–79 Rinne, April, 238 Ritalin, 92, 124 Rizzo, Albert “Skip,” 65–66 Roberts, Kevin, 211 Robertson, Joel, 102–3, 104 Romero, George, 249 RPG (role-playing game), 60–61, 62–63 runners, 101–2 Rushkoff, Douglas: car accident of, 65–66; father’s clock and, 83–84; first exposure to computers of, 230–31; Michalski meeting with, 237–38; TripTik experience of, 109; writing of book by, 264–65 Santa Fe Institute, 227, 228 schedules, digiphrenia and, 84, 85, 93–109 screech, fractalnoia and, 208, 210 SEALS, Navy, 136 Second Life, apocalypto and, 263 Second Life (online virtual world), 258 self: digital/virtual, 69–76, 88; representation of, 96.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

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

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

These threats elevated the academic fields of computer science, game theory, and behavioral and cognitive science within US defense policy. Where so much hangs on one individual decision (as it does where nuclear weapons are concerned), the question of what is a “rational” course of action needs answering with the best mechanical and mathematical equipment available. The RAND Corporation think tank achieved notoriety for its various simulations of nuclear war, developed in an effort to identify the optimal strategy if the day ever arrived. “Virtual reality” was born as a way of testing out different military strategies, because there was no opportunity for real-world trial and error.

., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

Game theory examines situations where multiple players in a game make decisions based on what the other players will do, like an academic version of poker. It is used to model social situations in which decision makers interact with other agents, and often assumes individuals will act only in their own self-interest. A game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a simple, well-known game used to illustrate this point. Developed in the 1950s by the RAND corporation (a global policy think tank which advises the U.S. armed forces, among other things), the game goes like this: two suspects, Prisoner A and Prisoner B, are caught with stolen goods and arrested under suspicion of burglary. But the police don’t have enough evidence to convict either prisoner unless one, or both of them, confesses.

Page 25 “Worldwide sales of Fairtrade products rise by a third as Fairtrade sales in the UK reach £200m,” press release from Fairtrade.org, June 28, 2006. www.fair trade.org.uk/pr280606.htm. Green Car Congress, “January 2006 US Hybrid Sales Almost Double from Prior Year,” Greencarcongress.com, February 23, 2006. www.greencarcongress.com/ 2006/02/january_2006_us.html. Page 26 Lynn A. Karoly and Constantijn W. A. Panis, The 21st Century at Work (Monograph, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2004). Page 27 Tamara Schweitzer, “U.S. Workers Hate Their Jobs More Than Ever,” Inc.com, March 6, 2007. www.inc.com/criticalnews/articles/200703/work_Printer_Friendly .html. 248 | Notes For a great overview of why we are being driven by creativity above all else, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

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

Each year, corruption costs Mexico between 2 and 10 per cent of its GDP.2 There had to be more he could do. So, when colleagues approached him about scenario planning for the future of Mexico, Fernandez didn’t quite know what that would entail, but he was definitely up for it. *** Scenario planning was pioneered after the Second World War by the Rand Corporation and the American military. As a process, it grew out of an understanding of complexity and the recognition that it is never possible to identify all the forces at work that will define the future. This makes traditional planning dangerous: it will always contain too many assumptions to be reliable and risks offering certainty where none exists.

Archibald, 53 Moorcraft, Penny, 289–90, 291 morality, 14, 20, 26, 62, 95, 139, 159, 177, 222, 223, 265, 280, 286, 312, 317 Morning Star, 200 Morrison, Toni, 42, 194 motivation, 36, 41, 118, 126, 164, 216–18, 252, 255 Moyes, Richard, 308–9 Mozart, Amadeus, 71 MRI scanning, 43, 136, 210 Mulally, Alan, 253 Mullis, Kay, 83 multiple schlerosis (MS), 82, 89 Munch, Edvard, 15, 274 Munich Agreement (1938), 53 MUSE, 70, 72–3 Mussolini, Benito, 71 Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), 73–5, 80, 97 Myers, Isabel, 73, 74 Narragansett Pier, 13 narrative, fallacy of, 47 National Assembly of Wales, 309 National Economic Council (US), 28 National Health Service (NHS), 259 National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (US), 260 National Rifle Association (NRA), 268 National Union of Miners (NUM), 270 natural disasters, 4, 15 Natural History Unit (NHU), 109 NBC, 111 neighbourhood care, 125 neighbourhood schools, 133 neighbours/neighbourhood, 2, 5, 6, 41, 94–5, 125, 133, 279, 312 Neruda, Pablo, 151 Nessi, Marzio, 213–17, 227 neuroticism, 92 neutrino detectors, 204 New Hampshire University, 114 New Lens scenarios, 156–7 New York Stock Exchange, 260 New York Times (NYT), 208 newgenics, 98 Newton, Isaac, 19 Next, 117 Ngo Dinh Diem, 54 NGOs, 56, 166 NHS, 259 Nine West, 117 Nipah, 298, 302 N95, 246 Nobel Prize, 24, 69, 70, 89, 98, 207, 216, 219 Nokia, 246–7, 249–51 nomenklatura, 121 Nordmarka, 190 normal line, 19, 23 Norris, Peter, 254 not-knowing, 62, 67, 100, 102, 108, 172, 177, 191, 193, 201, 205, 242, 268, 295, 314 noucentisme, 225 novel methodology, 30 NRA, 268 nuclear warfare, 205–6, 299, 308 nursery history, 59 Obama, Barack, 56 Obamacare, 128 Obrador, Andrés Manuel López, 173 OECD, 30 oil industry, 154–8 Old Vic Theatre, 276 ‘Olivia’ anecdote, 271–4, 295 Olympic Games, 227 O’Mahony, Yulia, 118–19, 120–1 O’Neil, Cathy, 5, 78 OPEC, 155 openness, 92 operating systems, 246–7 optimism, 8–9, 22, 161, 187, 229, 264, 286, 317 oracles, 2, 28 organic agriculture, 113 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), see OECD Organizational Health Index (OHI), 247 Orwell, George, 226 Ostrich, 166 OurLivesOurVote, 268 outcome, 62–3 overload, 44 overreach, 234 Oxford Martin School, 29, 30 Oxford University, 95, 215 OXXO, 151 pandemics, 57–9, 298, 300 (see also epidemic) paradox, 156–7 parenting, 70–3 Paris Accord, 116, 159 Parkinson’s disease, 82 Parks, Rosa, 56 passive investment funds, 27, 29 passive observation, 26, 40, 103, 269, 314 passivity, 96, 102 Patagonia, 200 Patau’s syndrome, 89 patented machine learning, 70 Paterson, Katie, 180, 185–6, 190, 191–2, 194 pathogens, 297 Patrick, Peter, 144, 147 PayLess, 117 Peace Prize, 219 penicillin, 84 Pentland, Alex, 101 Pentland’s well-ordered moor, 103 perfectionism, 9, 80, 100, 126, 138, 285, 318 personality, 65, 73–6, 80, 91–2 personality tests, 76 Persons, Warren, 16, 20–1, 23, 26, 31, 41 PET scanning, 210 Petretti, Silvia, 263, 267, 321 philosophers, 177 photovoltaics, 160 Picasso, Pablo, 15, 178, 197, 226 Pinnington, Elizabeth, 169 ‘Pits and Perverts’ benefit ball, 264 ‘plastic straw’ moments, 315 Plomin, Robert, 91–3, 94–6 Plummer, Daryl, 34–6 poetry, 151, 190, 194, 196, 278 Pol Pot, 287 Polaroid, 248 political discontent, 4 polling, 75 pollution, 2, 14, 111, 282 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 83 Popper, Karl, 51, 61, 232 Porter, Michael, 115 Post Office Tower, London, 226 Pound, Ezra, 194 Power Rangers, 68 Prague Spring, 55 precision education, 96 predetermination, 7, 46, 50, 153, 174, 178 prediction, 4, 6, 13–103, 120, 166, 183, 199, 219, 258, 280, 298, 301, 313, 321 pro-creation tickets, 97 probability, 37–41, 87, 89, 93, 155–6, 161, 247 procreative benevolence, 98 Profectus, 304 profiling, 5, 20, 33, 69, 73–89, 100–2, 297 progress, 2–3, 8, 15, 51, 70, 83–4, 98, 114, 175, 182, 269, 274, 280, 303, 309, 317 propaganda, 1, 9, 26, 31, 32, 40–1, 62, 100, 286 prophets, 5, 39, 285 prospection, 1–2 Prosperity Paradox, 156 protease inhibitors, 265–7 protest, history of, 59 protoDUNE, 204, 216 Proust, Marcel, 176 pseudo-science, 21, 195 psychographic profiling, 76, 84 psychological profiling, 5 public trust, 221, 234 punditry, 5, 7, 16, 18, 20, 27–30, 35–6 Pygmalion effect, 76 Rabbit, Peter, 15 RadioShack, 117 Rand Corporation, 152 Rand Kardex Company, 18 Ranney, Ambrose, 14 rationing, 93, 96 Reader, Sally, 291 Reagan, Ronald, 28, 260 Rees, Martin, 317–18 referenda, 39, 140–7 Reid, Richard, 85 rejection, 7, 26, 37, 78, 102, 132, 144, 155–6, 196, 223, 226, 277, 313 religion, 2, 4, 20, 139, 224, 238, 239, 278, 285, 295, 307 religious strife, 4 Rembrandt, 277 Renner, Michael J., 94 Reos Partners, 167, 322 Repository for Germinal Choice, 98 revolution, 15, 55, 60, 91, 122, 125, 163, 184, 193 Rift Valley fever, 302–3 Rilke, René, 185 Ring, David, 128, 130–1, 133–5, 137 Roche, 79 Rockport, 117 Rohe, Mies van der, 226 Rosenzweig, Mark R., 94 ‘Rosina’ anecdote, 173 RTÉ, 145 Rubbia, Carlo, 207, 216 rules-bound games, 107–8 Rumi, 296 Russell, Bertrand, 97 Russia Today (RT), 111 Sagrada Família, 224–8, 232 St Margaret’s Hospice, 289–94, 321 St Patrick’s Cathedral, 260 Samaritans, 119 same-sex marriage, 140 Sanford Underground Research Facility, 204 Sanger Centre, 219–21, 224, 231, 232 Santayana, George, 51 Saquinavir, 266 Sargent, Singer, 15 SARS, 298 Saunders, Cicely, 289 scenario planning, 155–75 Schatz, Albert, 15 schizophrenia, 92, 93, 96 Schoenberg, Arnold, 197 Schrödinger, Erwin, 206 Schubert, Franz, 277 scientific management, 120, 199 Scotland, independence sort by, 39 Seagram Building, 226 Sears, 117 Second World War, 54, 73, 80, 99, 147, 152, 162, 164, 273–4, 279 seedbanks, 306, 316 segregation, 33, 97, 129 self-discipline, 19, 230 self-interest, 23, 29, 36, 174 Sencer, David, 58–9 sensitive humility, 192 Shafak, Elif, 191 Shakespeare, William, 31, 108–9, 184, 195, 198, 275–6 shamanism, 2 Sharper Image, 247 Sheffield Health Geeks, 118 Shell Oil Corporation, 154–66 passim short-termism, 78, 308 sickle-cell anaemia, 89 Siilasmaa, Risto, 248–50 ‘Silence = Death’ campaign, 265 Silicon Valley, 33, 129, 246, 285 Skidelsky, Robert, 25 Sky, 111 ‘sleeping beauties’, 82 sleight of hand, 3 Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, 296 social connection, 103 social efficiency, 101 ‘social rubbish’, 97 social turmoil, 4 soft data, 156, 159, 168 ‘something for everyone’, 76 soothsaying, 2 Sophocles, 177 Spence, Basil, 226 Spiritual Association of the Devotees of Saint Joseph, 224 SSC, 209 stability, 17–18, 22, 56, 113, 154, 158, 282 Standard Life (SL), 251 Stanford, 273 statistics, 16, 20, 23, 40, 74, 82, 92, 136, 139, 178 stereotyping, 79–80, 93, 95, 151 sterilisation, 97 Stonyfield, 113–14, 115 Strauss, Levi, 274 Stravinsky, Igor, 15 streptomycin, 15 Suez Crisis, 53 Sugrañes, Domènec, 225 Suharto, Tommy, 254 Sulston, John, 219 Sumpter, Donald, 195 super-collider projects, 185, 204–32 super-forecasting, 37, 38, 41, 63 SUperSYmmetry (SUSY), 216 surrender, 7, 36, 96, 102, 103, 202, 242, 319 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 309 SUSY, 216 Svalbard, 306–7, 316 swine flu, 57, 58 Symbian, 247 Syngenta, 160 Szabłowski, Witold, 121 Tambo, Oliver, 258 Tate, 186 taxation, 28 taxi drivers/driving, 42–6, 63, 181, 314 TB, 14–15, 19, 41 Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), 257–8, 268 terrorism, 15, 36, 85–6, 173, 305 test-tube baby, first-ever, 222 Tetlock, Philip, 5, 27–8, 36–7, 40 Texas University, 129, 163 Thamotheram, Raj, 279, 294 Thatcher, Margaret, 209 Thiel, Peter, 286 Third Law of Motion, 19 THT, 257–8, 268 Thunberg, Greta, 269, 317 Tóibín, Colm, 179 Toys “R” Us, 248 track record, 5, 28, 41 trade wars, 4 Transcend, 283 transformation programmes, 116, 166, 199 transhumanism, 280, 283–7 Trump, Donald, 4, 28, 39, 40, 170, 176 trust, 2, 9, 17, 19, 28, 41, 54, 70, 103, 108, 112, 140, 151, 163–5, 172, 182–7, 201, 211, 221–2, 234, 244, 249, 252, 255, 266, 270, 302, 304–7, 316, 318 tuberculosis, see TB 21/7, 85 23andMe, 95 Twitter, 4 tyranny, 7, 63, 121–2 Umbert, Esteve, 229–30 Unified Planning Machine, 154 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 312 United Nations (UN), 309, 313 unknowns, density of, 17 urban crowding, 14 US Congress, 1, 24, 58, 264 utopia, 6, 103, 312, 313 vaccines, 14, 57–8, 297–304, 298–304 Venter, Craig, 219 Vera Drake, 185, 192 Vidal, Francesc de Paula Quintana i, 227 Vietnam War, 53–4 Vision for Slovenia, 162–5 volatility, 3, 4, 17–18, 147, 155, 157, 224, 237 W boson, 207, 216 Wack, Pierre, 154, 155–6, 159, 168 Waksman, Selman, 15 Wall Street, 20 Walmart, 151 war on cancer, 82 Warnock Commission, 222, 223, 234 Warnock, Mary, 222–3, 316 Washington Mutual, 248 wasteful exuberance, 20 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 97 wellbeing, 118, 156, 164, 309, 312 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015) (Wales), 309, 310, 311, 313 Wellcome Sanger Institute, 219, 224, 231 Wellcome Trust, 85 Wells, H.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

This is real-life damage BDS is inflicting on the people who are on the front lines, trying to coexist, provide for their families, and live a normal and peaceful life. It’s hard to put an accurate dollar amount on the cost of the boycott movement, however by all accounts it is high and painful. In 2015, RAND Corporation published research in which it created a projected calculation of the cost of various scenarios of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It estimated that the growth of this so-called nonviolent resistance (BDS doesn’t denounce violence, actually) will cost the Palestinian economy approximately $2 billion annually.8 In each and every scenario for a two-state solution, both nations’ GDP grows when the Palestinian economy grows.

“of Arabia,” 38–40, 47–49, 171 in British Army, 41 Faisal and, 41, 42, 43–44 Negev Desert mapped out by, 40, 41 League of Nations, 45, 104, 184, 265 Lebanon, 107, 112, 129, 134, 204, 206 Legum, Colin, 274 Lehi, 99, 109, 110–11, 303 Levy, Rami, 208–9 LGBTQ+ rights: in Iran, 165, 270 in Israel, 175, 262, 264 Sharia law and, 177–78, 183, 200 Liberia, 18, 275 Libya, 29, 40, 113, 130, 204 Likud Party, Israeli, 85, 155–56, 176, 233–34 Lindsay, James, 121 Madrid Conference (1991), 132 Mamluks, 33, 35, 39, 86 Mandatory Palestine, see British Mandate of Palestine Mapai Party, Israeli, 98, 108–9 Maraka, Aziz, 217–18 Marciano, Saadia, 233 Martin, Trayvon, 219 Marxism, Marxists, 52 Masada fortress, 31, 170 MASHAV (Agency for International Development Cooperation), 251 Masri, Bashar, 190–92 Mattathias, 30 Meir, Golda, 75, 136, 172, 233, 251, 273–74 Memorial Day, US, 144 Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism, 143 Merneptah Stele, 28 Middle East, 37–49, 45–46 Arab-Israeli conflict in, see Arab-Israeli conflict colonialism in, 39, 40, 42–43, 103 see also specific countries Mifleget Poalei Eretz Israel, see Mapai Party, Israeli Milchan, Arnon, 7 millennials, Israel as perceived by, 197, 264 Ministry of Defense, Israeli, 130 Mishor Adumim, 209 Mizrahi Jews, 232–34, 239 Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Prince, 147 Mor, Sharon, 17 Mordechai, Yoav, 15 Morocco, 40, 113, 129, 130, 136, 229 Morris, Benny, 105, 111–12, 189–90 moshavot (agricultural villages), 73, 82, 88, 303 Mossad, 159 Mughrabi, Dalal, 174 Muhammad, Prophet, 32, 139, 178 Muslim Brotherhood, 107, 177–78, 214, 298 My Talks with Arab Leaders (Ben-Gurion), 106 Nablus, 188, 190 nakba, 114–15, 160, 171 Nakba (the Disaster), 113–16, 201 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 128 Nawaz, Maajid, 278–79, 280 Nazis, 93–94, 171 final solution of, 67, 94, 104 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian king, 29 Negev desert, 27, 40, 41, 108, 210 Negroponte, John, 271 Nero, Emperor of Rome, 243–44 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 136, 138, 162 New Testament, 28, 295 Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia, 58 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, 51–52 Nigeria, 17, 273, 275, 290–91 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 59–60 North Korea, 265, 268, 270 Obanjo (Ga-Dangme healer), 289 Yael Tishby’s gift from, 291 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 198, 216 Office of Industry and Trade, in the Yishuv, 83 Okampo, Smadar, 250 Old Testament, 19, 27, 28, 99, 139, 295 Omar, Ilhan, 198, 216 Operation Peace for Galilee, 131 Operation Pillar of Defense, 16 Oslo Accords (1993–98), 132–33, 156, 158, 181 collapse of, 156–60, 298 Ottoman Empire, Palestine province of, 33, 43, 45, 87, 98, 126, 184 Arab residents of, 105 first Zionists in, 88, 103 Jewish emigrants to, 103, 105 Pakistan, 280 Pale of Settlement, 57–58 Palestina EY, 33, 184 Palestine civil war (1947–48), 107 Palestine Exploration Fund, 40 Palestine Legal, 215 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 115, 127, 132, 134, 171, 186 Hamas war on, 179, 181 Oslo Accords and, 132–33 terrorist attacks by, 131 see also Arafat, Yasser Palestine region, 34, 87, 295 Arab residents of, 95, 104, 170–72 as dry and infertile, 87–88, 90 first kibbutzim in, 88–89 Jewish residents of, 172 land purchased by Zionists in, 88 named Syria Palaestina by the Romans, 169, 295 Palestine statehood historically absent in, 34–35, 90, 170, 295 see also British Mandate of Palestine; Israel, land of; Ottoman Empire, Palestine province of Palestinian Authority, 132, 158, 181, 186, 187–88, 193, 208, 211, 286, 298 Palestinian identity, 169–72, 183, 193 Palestinian National Council conference, 171 Palestinian people, 34, 62, 115 in Gaza, 169, 177–84, 193, 200, 203, 285, 299 in Israel, see Israel, State of, Arab citizens of PLO as first official representative of, 132; see also Palestine Liberation Organization self-governance as goal of, 62 in West Bank, 160–62, 169, 184–89, 193, 203, 285, 297 Palestinian refugees, 110, 112, 116–21, 200, 201, 297 and right of return issue, 89, 137–38, 141, 200 Palestinian state, 117, 137, 153, 158, 203, 213, 303 Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), 43–45 Peres, Shimon, 132, 134, 147, 158, 190 Persian Empire, 29 Petach Tikva, 82, 88 Philistines (biblical), 170, 296 Poland, Jews persecuted in, 94 Poppaea Sabina, Empress of Rome, 243 Poriya Medical Center, 250 Princip, Gavrilo, 41 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 58–59, 287 Pundik, Nahum (Herbert), 273, 274 Quran, 28, 139, 165–66, 178, 295 Rabin, Yitzhak, 132, 134, 156, 157, 158, 191 assassination of, 133, 157, 242 racism, 57 in Israel, 176, 284, 299 among Jews, 231–33 see also antisemitism Radical (Nawaz), 278 Raff, Gideon, 255, 256 Ramallah, 159, 187, 188, 191, 292 Ramat Aviv Gimmel (TV show), 5–6, 7, 8 RAND Corporation, 210 Rawabi, 187, 191–92, 259–60, 261 Raz, Elchanan, 142 Red Sea, 40, 42, 85 religion, 141, 248 freedom of, in Israel, 101, 166, 262, 264 as underpinning Middle East conflict, 139, 163–66 see also Christianity, Christians; Islam, Muslims; Judaism Remember My Name (documentary), 224 Revisionist Zionist movement, 85, 99, 161–62 Richard the Lionheart, 33 Rishon Le’Zion, 82, 88 Roman Empire, land of Israel ruled by, 24, 31, 35, 169, 242–48, 295, 296 Romanov dynasty, 51–52 Rome and Jerusalem (Hess), 59 Rosh Pina, 82 Rosh Tzurim settlement, 155 Russia, 51–52, 53, 54, 57–58, 270 Sabra identity, 234–35 Sadat, Anwar, 131–31, 140, 141, 147 Saladin (An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf), 33 Salim, Sultan, 33 Salman Bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Prince, 147 Saud, House of, 45 Saudi Arabia, 33, 45, 103, 107, 129, 130, 134, 204, 270 Schanzer, Jonathan, 212, 214–15, 216, 221 Schler, Lynn, 289–90 School for Peace, 253 Schorr family, in move to British Mandate of Palestine, 93–94 Second Intifada (2000–2005), 134, 157, 186 Second Lebanon War (2006), 134–35 Second Zionist Congress, 73 Sela, Eyal, 250 Senor, Dan, 254, 256 Sephardi Shas party, Israeli, 237 settlements, 12, 149–66 in Gaza, 181 in West Bank, 154–55, 157, 160–61, 187, 297 Seward, Desmond, 247 Shahawan, Islam, 181 Shaked, Ayelet, 151, 161–62 Shalgi, Rami, 124, 131, 141, 143 Sharansky, Natan, 205 Sharet, Moshe, 106 Sharia law, 177–78, 193, 201, 206, 214, 270, 278, 298 Sharon, Ariel, 131, 134, 162, 181 Shira (author’s cousin), 76 Shoshan, Estie, 240 Sinai Peninsula, 42, 129–30, 131, 162, 285, 297, 298 Sinai War (1956), 128 Singer, Saul, 254, 256 Six Day War (1967), 128–29, 131, 150, 152, 154, 162, 178, 184, 297 Smooha, Sammy, 176 Soda Stream, 209–10 Solomon, King, 28, 29 South Africa, apartheid in, 173–74, 198, 284 Soviet Union, State of Israel recognized by, 103 Spring of Nations, 59 Start-Up Nation (Senor and Singer), 254–55 State Department, US, 118, 205 Storrs, Ronald, 47 Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), 213 Sudan, 40, 103, 107, 129, 136 Suez Canal, 40–41, 95, 128 suicide bombers, 183, 186, 206 Supreme Court, Israeli, 173, 174, 187 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 43, 45–46, 103 Syria, 40, 44, 45, 204 chemical weapons used by, 270 civil war in, 249–50 in Israeli War of Independence, 103, 107 in Six Day War, 128–29, 297 in Yom Kippur War, 130, 297 Tekoa settlement, 164 Tel Aviv, 82, 109, 216, 218 author’s upbringing in, 3–4, 19, 88, 289 Iraqi Scud missiles fired at, 132 terrorist attacks in, 133, 137, 159, 180, 182 Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 4 Tel Aviv University, 173, 205–6 Temple Mount, 134 terrorism, terrorists, 115, 133, 134, 156, 159, 180, 182 by Jewish settlers, 156–57 suicide bombers, 183, 186, 206 see also Fatah; Hezbollah Thomas, Lowell, 46–47 Lawrence and, 47–48 Tiran Straits, 128 Tisch, Nachum, see Tishby, Nachum Tishby, Alexander, 83 Tishby, Ari, 287, 293 Tishby, Daniel, 3, 8, 18, 83 Tishby, Dina, 83, 142 Tishby, Iris, 83 Tishby, Nachum, 82–85, 89, 94, 189, 232 capitalist ideals of, 83–84, 85 as founder of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, 4, 83 Tishby, Noa, 3–4, 7–8, 18, 37–38, 48, 66–67, 124–25, 144–46, 223–24, 264 advocacy and activism of, 14–15, 17–18, 21 entertainment industry career of, 4–7, 143 first experience of anti-Semitism of, 67–68 Gulf War experience of, 132 IDF service of, 3, 4–5, 149–51, 223 in move to Los Angeles, 8–9, 224 as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, 17, 218 Sabra identity of, 235 summers spent in Degania by, 75–77, 123–24 Tel Aviv childhood of, 3–4, 19, 88, 289 as unofficial ambassador, 15–18 Tishby, Rafael, 83 Tishby, Saul, 83 Tishby, Tomoosh, 83 Tishby, Yael Yavor Artzi, 81, 124, 141–43, 273 in Ghana, 274–75 Obanjo’s gift to, 291 social justice activism of, 292 Tishby, Zila Wein, 83, 85 Titus, Emperor of Rome, Second Temple destroyed by, 31, 246–47, 248 Tlaib, Rashida, 198, 216 Toubi, Tawfik, 174 Tracy (author’s friend), 16 Transjordan, creation of, 33, 45, 184, 304 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, 279 Triple Entente, 39 Truman, Harry, 102 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 53 Trump Peace Plan (2019), 135–36 Tunisia, 40, 113, 129 Twain, Mark, 87 Twitter, 13, 14 typhus, 72, 87 ultra-Orthodox Jews, see Charedim United Arab Emirates, Israeli peace deal with, 136, 146, 162, 210 United Israelite Monarchy, 27, 29 United Nations, 95, 181, 265, 267–68 Arabs granted a state by, see United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of, 121 Committee on the Status of Women of, 268–69 Eban’s address to, 115–16 High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of, 117 Human Rights Council of, 121, 269 Israeli delegation to, 4, 18, 265 Jews granted a state by, see United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Resolution 242 (Land for Peace) of, 129, 139, 297 Resolution 302(IV) of, 116 United Nations General Assembly, 96, 270 resolutions against Israel of, 268, 277 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (Resolution 181), 12, 33, 65, 95–97, 99, 104, 108, 110, 116, 139, 201, 203, 266, 296 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), 116–21 refugee status considered heritable by, 117, 137, 200, 206, 297 United States, 46, 74, 132, 181, 215 Jewish population in, 279 Jewish refuge idea in, 59–60 State of Israel recognized by, 102 UNRWA and, 119 UN vetoes of, 271 Vance, Cyrus, 285 Venezuela, 270 Vespasian, Emperor of Rome, 31, 244–46 Visit to Eretz Israel, A (Ables), 84 Walker, Alice, 216 War of Attrition (1927–70), 129–30, 142 War of Independence, Israeli (1948–49), 103, 104, 107–8, 127–28, 153, 184, 296 Arabs displaced in, 137, 110–13, 200, 203, 296; see also Palestinian refugees border lines established after, 108, 128, 152, 184–85, 186–87, 296 Deir Yassin massacre in, 110–11 Waters, Roger, BDS and, 198, 199, 200, 216–18 Weiss, Bari, 277, 281 Weizmann, Chaim, 44, 85 West Bank, 132, 184–89, 284 border wall in, 157, 159, 186–87, 188 and First Intifada, 131, 186 Israeli occupation of, 131, 152, 185 Jewish population in, 160 Jewish settlements in, 154–55, 157, 160–61, 187, 188, 297 Jordanian disengaged from, 185–86 Palestinian population in, 160, 185, 193 post-War of Independence control of, 108 and Second Intifada, 134, 157, 186 in Six Day War, 129, 150, 152, 297 white supremacists, 279 Wilson, Woodrow, 46 With Lawrence in Arabia (Thomas documentary), 47–48 Women’s Farm, 78 Women’s March, 220 women’s rights: in Israel, 262 Sharia law and, 177, 183, 200 Woolley, Leonard, 39 Workers of Zion, 98 World Health Organization, 269–70 World War I, 22, 39, 40, 41, 171 World War II, 33, 104, 171 see also Holocaust World Zionist Organization, 97, 98 Yaeli (author’s friend), 67, 68, 175 Yakobson, Zohar, 229–30 Yamit settlement, 162 Yankelevich, Omer, 240 Yassin, Ahmed, 164–65, 178–80 Yavor, Hanan, 81, 189, 272–76 as Israel’s first ambassador to West African countries, 4, 17–18, 273–76, 287, 290–91 Meir on, 273–74 as member of Israeli delegation to UN, 4, 18, 265, 287 Yavor, Hilda Schorr, 93–94, 142, 273 Yavor, Noam, 273 Yazbak, Heba, 174, 175, 269 Yazidi women, 252–53, 261 Yehia, Samer Haj, 175 Yemen, 40, 113, 204, 265 Yishuv (pre-state Zionist groups), 83, 84, 88, 93, 94, 98–99, 104, 105, 106, 111, 126, 189 Yizkor (Ben-Gurion and Ben Zvi), 98 Yom Kippur War (1973), 130, 140, 297 Yosef, Ovadia, 239 Young Worker Party, 98 Zealots, 243, 245 Zichron Ya’akov, 82 Zimmerman, George, 219 Zion, as second name for Jerusalem, 60 Zionist movement, Zionists, 20, 57–69, 267 African and black communities and, 220, 266–67 Herzl and, 60–66, 98, 265 origin of, 60, 296 see also anti-Zionism Ziv Medical Center, 250 Zoabi, Haneen, 174, 175, 269 Zureiq, Constantin, 114, 171 Free Press An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2021 by Noa Tishby All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.


Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey

Social Capital FRANCIS FUKUYAMA THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES Delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford May 12, 14, and 15, 1997 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University and director of the Institute’s International Transactions Program. Educated at Cornell, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has been a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, where he is currently a consultant, as well as a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations; the editor, with Andrez Korbonski, of T h e Soviet Union and the Third W o r l d : T h e Last Three Decades (1987) ; and book review editor at Foreign A f a i r s .


Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability With Solutions by Frederick Mosteller

Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, stochastic process

(b) A friend of yours has available many black and many white balls, and he puts black and white balls into the urn to suit himself. You choose "black" or "white." A ball is drawn randomly from this urn. Write down the maximum amount you are willing to pay to play this game. The game will be played just once. Problems without Structure (11 and 12) Olaf Helmer and John Williams of The RAND Corporation have called my attention to a class of problems that they call "problems without structure," which nevertheless seem to have probabilistic features, though not in the usual sense. 11. Silent Cooperation Two strangers are separately asked to choose one of the positive whole numbers and advised that if they both choose the same number, they both get a prize.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

Central to his vision was the idea that if computers were truly to enhance human thinking, ways had to be found to communicate with them and between them. The earliest glimmerings of the possibilities of networked computers had been identified. Licklider stepped down after two years at ARPA, but his ideas gathered momentum thanks not only to his successor, Bob Taylor, but to Paul Baran’s packet-switching ideas at Rand Corporation, and to many others. In August 1968, the tender went out to build the first prototype implementation – to be called the Arpanet – which a few years later became the seedling of the internet we know today. The contract to build it went to a small consulting firm with a reputation for brilliance and informality, Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN), founded by Licklider’s old Harvard colleague, Leo Beranek.


pages: 118 words: 35,663

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Navy, the navy hired him as a consultant and asked him to use mathematical techniques to help design the optimal naval taskforce—how many aircraft carriers, battleships, and so on. He invented a new method, called integer programming, to help solve the problem. Initially, he did this work with pencil and paper, then, with a mechanical calculating machine. Finally, he was invited by the Rand Corporation, a think tank in California, to use their large-scale computer, one of only a few that existed at the time.6 Ralph created a program that could compute an optimal design given a specific set of choices. But today we’re faced with immensely complicated problems that contain so many possibilities that it would take a long time, even with a powerful computer, to explore all of them using Ralph’s deterministic techniques.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

These advances in technology and destructive force were not ends in themselves. They were guided by new nuclear war fighting doctrines developed first at RAND Corporation, and later expanded at Harvard University and other elite schools. The doctrine, called Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, was the product of game theory in which participants based their actions on expected reactions of other participants who, in turn, acted based on expected reactions of the initial actor, and so on recursively until a behavioral equilibrium was reached. What RAND Corporation discovered is that winning a nuclear arms race was destabilizing and likely to result in nuclear war.


pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

The Independence Foundation, a group that itself drew funding from the CIA, sponsored the Woods Hole conference. The project was headquartered at MIT, which had already effectively become a research arm of the federal government. The project’s top men had spent years working at government-sponsored research agencies, such as Lincoln Lab, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the RAND Corporation. An implicit objective was to employ the technology that Intrex developed to help the United States thwart the Soviet menace; from this perspective, libraries were important insofar as they could help scientists build new and better weapons more quickly. The keynote speaker who launched the Intrex conference that August was, appropriately, the godfather of what today we call Big Science.

Ashcroft, 122–23 and free culture movement, 3–4 as penalty vs. opportunity, 115 and public access, 185–87 purpose of, 112 and social value, 4, 135 Public Knowledge, 230 public.resource.org, 185 Publishers’ Weekly, 53, 56, 58, 59 publishing: of academic research, 175–77, 178 as “best-seller system,” 65 commercial viability of, 13, 25–26, 39, 121, 175 “courtesy of the trade,” 54–56, 65 electronic, 120 and invention of movable type, 18 of non-US books, 39, 41, 46–47 percentage of authors’ royalties to, 41 protectionist laws, 120 serials pricing crisis in, 175 of unauthorized editions, 42–43, 53, 56 white-shoe East Coast, 54–55 Putnam, George Haven, 53–55, 56, 57 and free public libraries, 70 and international copyright, 53, 59, 60, 64 Memories of a Publisher, 54 Putnam, George Palmer, 45 Putnam, Herbert: as Boston head librarian, 67, 70 and copyright law revisions, 72–73, 75–76 death of, 78 as librarian of Congress, 70–71, 77–78 on public libraries, 80, 100 Putnam, John, 71 Putnam’s, 52 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 217 Radway, Janice A., 69 Ramsay, David, 25, 34 Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, 107 RAND Corporation, 82 Raw Nerve, 251–53, 255 ask others for help, 252–53, 257 believe you can change, 251–52 confront reality, 254 lean into the pain, 252, 257 on systemic failure, 265 take a step back, 252 reading: cheap books, 52, 55–56, 58, 59, 61 dime novels, 52, 55 e-books, 99, 107, 117 escapism in, 52 literacy rates, 25, 26–27, 39, 44, 48 penny press, 48 value of, 48–49 recorded sound, 69, 71, 74, 77 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 134, 152–53 Reddit, 156–61, 164, 223 development of, 149–51 and Internet Censorship Day, 240, 241 sale of, 2, 156, 158, 170 Swartz’s departure from, 159–61, 171, 248 Reed Elsevier, 175, 178–79, 180, 239 Reformation, 99 Rehnquist, William, 138 Rein, Lisa, 123, 130, 139, 141, 269 Remember Aaron Swartz, 261 Rensselaer, Stephen van, 35 resource.org, 187 Reville, Nicholas, 152 robotic harvesting, 198–99 Romuald (monk), 169 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 78, 82, 208 Roosevelt, Theodore, 70, 75 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 151 Rules, The, breakers of, 14 Rush, Benjamin, 33 Russell, Bertrand, 254 Ryshke, Robert, 127 Sadler, Bess, 181 Santana, Carlos, 111 Scalia, Antonin, 121 Scheiber, Noam, 201 Schoen, Seth, 8, 138–39, 144, 148 Schonfeld, Roger, JSTOR, 195, 196 Schoolyard Subversion (blog), 126 Schulman, John, 85 Schultze, Stephen, 189 Schwartz, John, 191 Schweber, S.


pages: 326 words: 29,543

The Docks by Bill Sharpsteen

affirmative action, anti-communist, big-box store, collective bargaining, Google Earth, independent contractor, intermodal, inventory management, jitney, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, new economy, Panamax, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, women in the workforce

This reinforces the image I have of the Coast Guard being centered more on rescuing hapless boaters than on their primary mission here, which is ╯ ╯ 232â•… /â•… Security to repel any nefarious types hell-bent on blowing up parts of the port, among other possible evil deeds. Among those deeds, a deliberate explosion seems to be the most common scenario feared by the imaginative people who work in disaster speculation, or what might be called preparing for all possibilities. A 2006 Rand Corporation study describes a lamentably viable means of smuggling weapons into the country via a container—and then turns up the heat, hypothesizing a situation in which “terrorists conceal a 10-Â�kiloton bomb in a shipping container and ship it to the Port of Long Beach. Unloaded onto a pier, it explodes shortly thereafter.”

See also Clean Truck Program Port of Los Angeles Community Advisory Committee, 70, 72, 87, 90 Port of San Francisco, 4 port pilots, pay of, 6 port police, marine, 239 Port Revel, 11 Ports America terminal, 221 Potter, Fredrick, 177 Prince Rupert, Canada, 261 Privette, Bill, 268, 275 Promenade waterfront plan, 85, 91 “prospecting,” 95 Public Policy Institute of California, 235 Punta Colonet, Mexico, 260 Pusan, South Korea, 9 Queens Gate, 26 Quinn, William J., 110, 114 Rajkovacz, Joe, 168, 171, 181 Rand Corporation, 232 Random Lengths, 84, 206 Red Squad, 105 Riggers and Stevedores Union, 99 Rill, Doug, 269, 272 Rios, Louis, 213 Rivera, Carlos, 45 Robertson, J.â•›R ., 122 Rogers, Captain Ron, 5, 10, 13, 15 Ryan, Joseph P., 108, 109 SAFE boats, 240 Salcido, Ray, 106 Samra, Balwinder, 254, 262; background, 255 San Francisco Daily News, 112 San Pedro and Peninsula Homeowner’s Coalition, 62, 68, 87 San Pedro Coordinated Plan Subcommittee, 64 San Pedro Magazine, 63 “Saving Lives” initiative, 82 Schmidt, Henry, 122 Schneier, Bruce, 238 Schomaker, John, 108 Sea-Land Service, 36, 130 “Seventh Heaven,” 105 shape-up, 102 Shibley, George, 213 ship chandler, 47 “shirt time,” 192 shoreside electrical power, 34, 50, 69, 81 Sierra Club, 174, 177 slings, 96 Smith Act, 121 Snyder, Christina, 179 “Song for Bridges” (Almanac Singers), 121 South Coast Air Quality Management District, 71 Southern Counties Express, 170, 172 Southern Pacific Railroad, 3 Spanish missionaries, 3 Sperry, Howard, 114 Spinosa, Jim, 82, 125, 136; on Dave Arian, 199; on TWIC cards, 249; 2002 contract talks, 138; on union busting, 201 SSA Marine, 223 S.S.


The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House by Nada Bakos

Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, fear of failure, feminist movement, meta-analysis, operational security, performance metric, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, WikiLeaks, work culture

I was gradually becoming disconnected from my family and friends; my recurring anxiety and panic attacks rendered me unable to function normally. I began speaking to a therapist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve learned since then that many people who were at the CIA share a similar struggle. A landmark study conducted by the RAND Corporation in 2008 found that nearly one in five Iraq War veterans suffers from PTSD. In 2012, the Department of Veterans Affairs quietly released a more damning figure: nearly 30 percent of the 834,463 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans it had treated at VA hospitals since 2001 have been diagnosed with PTSD.

“how forthcoming he was”: Select Committee on Intelligence, “Committee Study.” 9. a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations: “CFR and HBO Screening of the New HBO Documentary Manhunt,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 16, 2013, http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-leaders/cfr-hbo-screening-new-hbo-documentary-manhunt/p35447. 10. a story I’d read on Rudaw: Wladimir van Wilgenburg, “Kurds of Iraq Played Major Role in Finding bin Laden,” Rudaw, September 5, 2011, http://www.rudaw.net/english/kurds/3665.html. 11. divulged more useful information at a black site: Eyder Peralta, “‘Torture Report’: Did Harsh Interrogations Help Find Osama Bin Laden?” National Public Radio, December 9, 2014. 12. nearly one in five Iraq veterans suffers from PTSD: Terri Tanielian and Lisa H. Jaycox, eds., “Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery,” RAND Corporation, April 17, 2008. 13. have been diagnosed with PTSD: Jamie Reno, “Nearly 30% of Vets Treated by V.A. Have PTSD,” Daily Beast, October 21, 2012. 14. only 35 percent: Kristina Wong, “Study: Most Troops Don’t Seek Military Help with PTSD,” Washington Times, May 8, 2012. 15. Abu Ayyub al-Masri: Eben Kaplan, “Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Zarqawi’s Mysterious Successor (aka Abu Ayub al-Masri),” Council on Foreign Relations, June 13, 2006, http://www.cfr.org/iraq/abu-hamza-al-muhajir-zarqawis-mysterious-successor-aka-abu-ayub-al-masri/p10894. 16. an Egyptian cohort of Zarqawi’s: Ibid. 17. trained in al Qaida terrorist camps in Afghanistan: Ibid. 18. a bit of bomb-making experience: Dexter Filkins, “U.S.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Zolli and Healy, Resilience, 5. “Efficiency is doing” . . . See Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). “It Takes a Network” . . . J. Arquilla and D.Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation Publishing, 1996), 82. PART II FROM MANY, ONE fifty greatest players . . . National Basketball Association, “The NBA’s 50 Greatest Players,” http://www.nba.com/history/50greatest.html. “It was like” . . . Quote from Patrick Ewing in GQ piece reflecting on the “Dream Team” victory twenty years later, including interviews with the players.

Schroeder, Matthew Calbraith Perry, 257, note 44, and Yosaburo¯ Takekoshi, The Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan, volume 3 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 285–86. “Perry, halfway around the globe” . . . Carl Builder, Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1989), 18–19. plant gardens . . . William F. Strobridge, Regulars in the Redwoods: The U.S. Army in Northern California 1852–1861 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1994), 31. hold junior officers accountable . . . Strobridge, Regulars in the Redwoods, chapter 1. “HEADQUARTERS ARMIES OF THE U.S.” . . .


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

A 25-cent bet on a Las Vegas roulette table could be a factor in the greatest decision ever to confront mankind. That would be the unimaginably catastrophic decision to plunge the world into nuclear war. Some place, at some time, as long as a human being is able to poise his finger over a nuclear button, that is a possibility. The journalist doubtless got that cold-war spin from Edwards, a RAND Corporation consultant and advisor to governmental agencies. Edwards talked up the Las Vegas game as “one of the few decision-making experiments ever conducted.” Never was it mentioned in the article that this particular game was devised not by Edwards but by two of his former students. Sarah Lichtenstein had heard that Edwards had an “angel.”

., 53 Psychological Bulletin, 54, 55, 86 psychophysics, 8–9, 26–27, 29–36, 39– 40, 53, 146; definition of, 31; experiments in, 26–27, 35, 40; of jury awards, 276–79; luxury trade and, 155; magnitude scales of, 194; of money, 42–45 origins of, 29–32; of pain, 136; perceptual illusion demonstrations of, 36–37, 84–85; power curve rule in, 32–33; prospect theory and, 98; of rebates, 178 Psychophysics (Stevens), 34 Puffs tissues, 5 Puto, Christopher, 151–53, 156 Quarterly Journal of Economics, The, 138 Quattrone, George, 12–13 Quilted Northern toilet paper, 5 racial discrimination, 245, 283; in car sales, 241–44 Rand, Ayn, 108 RAND Corporation, 71 Rapp, Gregg, 162–64 rationality: bounded, 52; cult of, 77–78 Ravikovich, Dahlia, 82 Reagan, Ronald, 56, 256 real estate market, 196–206, 211; alcohol and deal-making in, 219; anchoring in, 196–201, 203–205; bargaining in, 115; bubbles in, 101, 264; charm prices in, 186; framing of gains and losses in, 107; incentives in, 176; money illusion in, 229 rebates, 176–78 reference points, 98, 101, 132 reference pricing, 204–206 Remington Rand, Inc., 224 Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, 223 restaurants, 143–45, 159–64; charm pricing by, 186, 190 Revionics, Inc., 6, 148 RFID tags, 150 Richelieu, Duc de, 219 Riding, Alan, 266–67 Ritov, Ilana, 209–10 Ritty, James, 186 Riviera Casino (Las Vegas), 49 Robb Report, 156 Roberts, Gilbert, 283 Robertson, Leslie, 27 Rockefeller, J.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

• • • • • • • • Spacewar, as it turned out, was the lasting legacy of the pioneers of MIT hacking. In the next couple of years many of the TX-0 and PDP-1 joyriders departed the Institute. Saunders would take a job in industry at Santa Monica (where he would later write a Spacewar for the PDP-7 he used at work). Bob Wagner went off to the Rand Corporation. Peter Deutsch went to Berkeley, to begin his freshman year of college. Kotok took a part-time job that developed into an important designing position at DEC (though he managed to hang around TMRC and the PDP-1 for years afterward). In a development that was to have considerable impact on spreading MIT-style hackerism outside of Cambridge, John McCarthy left the Institute to begin a new artificial intelligence lab on the West Coast, at Stanford University.

He got the program actually playing chess in one week. The program was debugged, given features, and generally juiced up over the next few months. (Greenblatt was eventually offered an MIT degree if he would write a thesis about his chess program; he never got around to it.) Circulating around MIT around 1965 was a notorious Rand Corporation memo called "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence.” Its author, an academic named Herbert Dreyfus, lambasted the field and its practitioners. To hackers, his criticism was particularly noxious, since the computer was their implicit model of behavior, at least in their theories of information, fairness, and action.

Wizards social aspects, The Wizard and the Princess Programming languages, The Wizard and the Princess programming languages, Afterword: 2010 Project MAC, Spacewar, Greenblatt and Gosper, Greenblatt and Gosper, Winners and Losers, Afterword: 2010 Project One, Revolt in 2100 Propaganda of the Deed, The Homebrew Computer Club Q Quinn, Mike, Every Man a God R Radio Amateur’s Handbook, Revolt in 2100 Radio Electronics, Every Man a God, Every Man a God Radio Frequency (RP) Modulators, Woz Radio Shack, Secrets Rand Corporation, Greenblatt and Gosper Raster Blaster game, Summer Camp Red Death, Greenblatt and Gosper Registers, Greenblatt and Gosper Reiling, Bob, Woz Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), The Tech Model Railroad Club, Spacewar Resource One, Revolt in 2100 Revolt in 2100 (Heinlein), Revolt in 2100, Revolt in 2100, Revolt in 2100 Rich and Rich Synergistic Enterprises, Wizard vs.


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

Another way of defining complete information is in terms of common knowledge: each player knows that each player knows that... each player knows all other players, their strategies, and the corresponding payoffs for each player. Typical examples include the rock-paperscissors game and the prisoner's dilemma. There is no need to describe the former but the latter is sufficiently complex to deserve some explanation. We owe the logical structure of the prisoner's dilemma to the Cold War. In 1950, RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development, a non-profit think tank initially formed to provide research and analysis to the US armed forces) was interested in game theory because of its possible applications to global nuclear strategy. Merrill Flood (born 1912) and Melvin Dresher (19111992) were both working at RAND and they devised a gametheoretic model of cooperation and conflict, which later Albert Tucker (1905-1995) reshaped and christened as the `prisoner's dilemma'.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

.: Erlbaum Associates Publishers. New York Times. 1994. “Clinton Wages a Quiet but Energetic War Against Poverty.” March 30. Oakes, Jeannie. 1990. Multiplying Inequalities: The Effects of Race, Social Class, and Ability Grouping on Access to Science and Mathematics Education. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation. O’Connor, Alice. 1992. “Race and Class in Chicago Sociology, 1920–1990.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 8, Chicago. O’Hare, William, Tania Mann, Kathryn Porter, and Robert Greenstein. 1990. Real-Life Poverty in America: Where the American Public Would Set the Poverty Line.

“Employment and Earnings of Low-Income Blacks Who Move to Middle-Class Suburbs.” In The Urban Underclass, edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson, pp. 342–56. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Rotberg, Iris C., and James J. Harvey. 1993. Federal Policy Options for Improving the Education of Low-Income Students. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation. Ruggles, Patricia. 1990. “The Poverty Line—Too Low for the 1990s.” New York Times, April 26. Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty. 1993. Persistent Poverty in Rural America. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Rusk, David. 1993. Cities Without Suburbs. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Their methodology says that the societal value of life is greater: (i) the higher the lifetime income (ii) the less illness people have (iii) the closer in age people are to the onset of illness As I read this: the lives of older, richer, healthier people are more valuable than the lives of poorer, younger, sicker people. If I believe that, what am I doing caring about poor, sick, Indian children? Their lives are worthless. And if you believe it, do not waste a moment more on this book. I was invited to a meeting at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica California with a group of economists to discuss valuation of life. The starting text was the Murphy–Topel paper. I went next. I began by saying that I had had lunch with an Indian historian recently and I told him that the news from Chicago was that he did not value his life – he was willing to pay far fewer dollars for another year of life than an American.

., here Lewis, Michael, here Lexington, Kentucky, here libertarians, here, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here among Australian aboriginals, here disability-free, here, here and education, here, here, here, here in former communist states, here and mental health, here and national income, here US compared with Cuba, here Lithuania, here, here, here Liverpool, here, here, here ‘living wage’, here loans, low-interest, here lobbying, here Los Angeles, here ‘lump of labour’ hypothesis, here Lundberg, Ole, here lung cancer, here, here lung disease, here, here, here, here luxury travel, here Macao, here, here McDonald’s, here McMunn, Anne, here Macoumbi, Pascoual, here Madrid, indignados protests, here, here Maimonides, here malaria, here, here, here, here, here Malawi, here male adult mortality, here, here Mali, here, here Malmö, here, here Malta, here Manchester, here, here, here Maoris, here, here, here, here Marmot Review, see Fair Society, Healthy Lives marriage, here Marx, Karl, here maternal mortality, here, here, here maternity leave, paid, here Matsumoto, Scott, here Meaney, Michael, here Medicaid, here Mediterranean diet, here Mengele, Joseph, here mental health, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and access to green space, here and adverse childhood experience, here and austerity, here and fear of crime, here and job insecurity, here and unemployment, here meritocracy, here Mexico, here, here, here, here, here education and cash transfers, here, here Millennium Birth Cohort Study, here, here Minimum Income for Healthy Living, here, here, here Mitchell, Richard, here Modern Times, here Morris, Jerry, here, here Moser, Kath, here Mozambique, infant mortality, here Mullainathan, Sendhil, here Murphy, Kevin, here, here Muscatelli, Anton, here Mustard, Fraser, here Mwana Mwende project, here Nathanson, Vivienne, here Native Americans, here Navarro, Vicente, here NEETs, here, here neoliberalism, here, here, here, here, here Nepal, here, here Neruda, Pablo, here Netherlands, here, here New Guinea, here, here NEWS group, here, here Nietzsche, Friedrich, here, here Niger, here nitrogen dioxide, here, here non-human primates, here Nordic countries and commission report, here and social protection, here, here, here, here, here see also individual countries Norway, here, here, here, here, here, here life expectancy and education, here, here Nottingham, here Nozick, Robert, here obesity, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here in children, here, here and diabetes, here and disincentives, here food corporations and, here genetic and environmental factors in, here and migrant studies, here and rational choice theory, here social gradient in, here, here, here, here in women, here, here Office of Budget Responsibility, here Olympic Games, here opera, here Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), here, here, here, here, here, here, here organisational justice, here Orwell, George, here Osler, Sir William, here Panorama, here Papua New Guinea, here ‘paradox of thrift’, here Paraguay, here, here, here parenting, here, here, here, here and work–life balance, here pay, low, here pensions, here, here, here, here Perkins, Charlie, here Peru, here, here, here physical activity and cognitive function, here green space and, here Pickett, Kate, here Pierson, Paul, here, here Piketty, Thomas, here, here, here, here Pinker, Steven, here Pinochet, General Augusto, here PISA scores, here, here, here, here, here Poland, here, here, here, here Popham, Frank, here Porgy and Bess, here poverty, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and aboriginal populations, here, here absolute and relative, here, here child poverty, here, here, here, here, here and choice, here and early childhood development, here, here effect on cognitive function, here and urban unrest, here and work, here Power, Chris, here pregnancy, here preventive health care, here ‘proportionate universalism’, here puberty, and smoking here public transport, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ramazzini, Bernardino, here RAND Corporation, here, here, here rational choice theory, here, here, here rats, and brain development, here Rawls, John, here, here Reid, Donald, here Reinhart, Carmen, here, here reproduction, control over, here retirement, here reverse causation, here Reykjavik Zoo, here Rio de Janeiro, here, here Rogoff, Kenneth, here, here Rolling Stones, here Romania, here Romney, Mitt, here Rose, Geoffrey, here Roth, Philip, here Royal College of Physicians, here Royal Swedish Academy of Science, here Russia, here, here, here and alcohol use, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here Sachs, Jeffrey, here, here St Andrews, here San Diego, here Sandel, Michael, here, here Sapolsky, Robert, here Scottish Health Survey, here Seattle, here Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), here, here, here, here Sen, Amartya, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Jean Drèze, here, here, here, here serotonin, here sexuality, here, here see also reproduction, control over sexually transmitted infections, here, here Shafir, Eldar, here Shakespeare, William, here, here, here, here Shanghai, here Shaw, George Bernard, here, here Shepherd, Jonathan, here shootings, here Siegrist, Johannes, here Sierra Leone, here, here, here Singapore, here, here Slovakia, here Slovenia, here, here smallpox vaccinations, here Smith, Adam, here Smith, Jim, here smoking, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here declining rates of, here, here and education, here and public policy, here social gradient in, here, here and tobacco companies, here and unemployment, here Snowdon, Christopher, here social cohesion, here, here, here, here, here, here, here social mobility, here, here social protection, here ‘social rights’, here Social Science and Medicine, here Soundarya Cleaning Cooperative, here South Korea, here, here, here, here Spain, here, here, here Spectator, here sports sponsorship, here Sri Lanka, here Stafford, Mai, here Steptoe, Andrew, here Stiglitz, Joseph, here, here, here, here, here stroke, here, here, here structural adjustments, here, here Stuckler, David, here suicide, here, here, here, here, here and aboriginal populations, here, here and Indian cotton farmers, here and unemployment, here, here suicide, attempted, here Sulabh International, here Sun, here Sure Start programme, here Surinam, here Sutton, Willie, here Swansea, here Sweden, here, here, here, here, here, here, here life expectancy and education, here, here male adult mortality, here, here Swedish Commission on Equity in Health, here Syme, Leonard, here, here, here Taiwan, here, here Tanzania, here taxation, here Thailand, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Theorell, Tores, here tobacco companies, here Topel Robert, here Tottenham riots, here Tower Hamlets, here, here Townsend, Peter, here trade unions, here, here, here, here traffic calming measures, here Tressell, Robert, here ‘Triangle that Moves the Mountain’, here, here trickle-down economics, here, here Truman, Harry S., here tuberculosis, here, here, here, here Tunisia, here Turandot, here, here Turkey, here, here Uganda, here, here unemployment, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and mental health, here and suicide, here, here youth unemployment, here, here, here, here UNICEF, here, here United Kingdom alcohol consumption, here capital:income ratio, here and child well-being, here cost of childcare, here and economic recovery, here, here education system, here, here disability-free life expectancy, here founding of welfare state, here health-care system, here income inequalities, here, here literacy levels, here male adult mortality, here PISA score, here politics and economics, here and poverty in work, here, here poverty levels, here, here prison population, here social attitudes, here and social interventions, here social mobility, here ‘strivers and scroungers’ rhetoric, here, here and taxation, here unemployment, here use of tables for meals, here United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), here, here, here, here United States of America air pollution, here, here alcohol consumption, here capital:income ratio, here child poverty, here and child well-being, here cotton subsidies, here and economic recovery, here education system, here, here, here female life expectancy, here and gang violence, here health-care system, here, here income inequalities, here, here, here, here international comparisons, here, here, here lack of paid maternity leave, here life expectancy and education, here male adult mortality, here, here, here maternal mortality, here, here obesity levels, here, here, here, here PISA score, here politics and economics, here and poverty in work, here poverty levels, here prison population, here race and disadvantage, here, here, here, here, here social disadvantage and health, here social mobility, here suicide rate, here and taxation, here US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, here US Department of Justice, here US Federal Reserve Bank, here US National Academy of Science (NAS), here, here, here, here University of Sydney, here urban planning, here Uruguay, here, here, here, here utilitarianism, here, here, here Vågerö, Denny, here valuation of life, here Victoria Longitudinal Study, here Vietnam, here, here violence, here domestic (intimate partner), here, here, here Virchow, Rudolf, here vulture funds, here, here Wales, youth unemployment in, here walking speed, here Washington Consensus, here, here, here welfare spending, here West Arnhem College, here Westminster, life expectancy in, here Whitehall Studies, here, here, here, here, here, here, here wife-beating, here Wilde, Oscar, here, here Wilkinson, Richard, here willingness-to-pay methodology, here, here Wolfe, Tom, here, here women and alcohol use, here and cash-transfer schemes, here A Note on the Author Born in England and educated in Australia, Sir Michael Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

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

Parenthetically, only a cynic might imagine that the date was chosen to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the “supreme international crime” they were defending the world against terror—which increased sharply as a result of the invasion as anticipated, sevenfold according to an analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using data of the government-linked RAND Corporation.21 Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to show that the Iraqi government had greatly accelerated spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that purpose. Good news indeed—until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth what Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 percent decline from the preceding year.22 More good news is the decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are simply fewer people to kill in the cleansed areas.

For such reasons, the most respected and sober U.S. strategic analysts warned early on that the Bush administration’s military programs and its aggressive stance carry “an appreciable risk of ultimate doom.”12 BMD is also understood on all sides to be a first-strike weapon, perhaps capable of nullifying a retaliatory strike and thus undermining deterrent capacity. The quasi-governmental RAND Corporation describes BMD as “not simply a shield but an enabler of U.S. action.” Across a broad part of the political spectrum, military analysts write that “missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global dominance.” BMD is “about preserving America’s ability to wield power abroad.


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Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Nick Eberstadt, "China: How Much Success," New York Review of Books, May 3, 1979, pp. 40–41. 12. John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy (1848), 9th ed. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1886), vol. II, p. 332 (Book IV, Chap. VI). CHAPTER 6 1. Leonard Billet, The Free Market Approach to Educational Reform, Rand Paper P-6141 (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1978), pp. 27–28. 2. From The Good Society, as quoted by Wallis in An Over-Governed Society, p. viii. 3. Quoted by E. G. West, "The Political Economy of American Public School Legislation," Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 10 (October 1967), pp. 101–28, quotation from p. 106. 4. Ibid., p. 108. 5.

Clark, "Alternative Public School Systems," in the special issue on Equal Educational Opportunity of the Harvard Educational Review, vol. 38, no. 1 (Winter 1968), pp. 100–113; passage cited from pp. 110–11. 23. Daniel Weiler, A Public School Voucher Demonstration: The First Year at Alum Rock, Rand Report No. 1495 (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1974). 24. Henry M. Levin, "Aspects of a Voucher Plan for Higher Education," Occasional Paper 72–7, School of Education, Stanford University, July 1972, p. 16. 25. Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay? (McGraw-Hill, June 1973), pp. 2–3. 26.


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21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Gabler, ‘Safety Benefits of Forward Collision Warning, Brake Assist, and Autonomous Braking Systems in Rear-End Collisions’, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 13:4 (2012), 1546–55; James M. Anderson et al., Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2014), esp. 13–15; Daniel J. Fagnant and Kara Kockelman, ‘Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles: Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Recommendations’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 77 (2015), 167–81; Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff and Iyad Rahwan, ‘Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars?’

Gabler, ‘Safety Benefits of Forward Collision Warning, Brake Assist, and Autonomous Braking Systems in Rear-End Collisions’, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 13:4 (2012), 1546–55; James M. Anderson et al., Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2014), esp. 13–15; Daniel J. Fagnant and Kara Kockelman, ‘Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles: Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Recommendations’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 77 (2015), 167–81. 20 Tim Adams, ‘Job Hunting Is a Matter of Big Data, Not How You Perform at an Interview’, Guardian, 10 May 2014. 21 For an extremely insightful discussion, see Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).


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What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

After he received his PhD in economics that year, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a professor in 1958. Solow spent his academic career at this leading economics faculty, though he was also visiting professor at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1960s. Solow was active in public policy from the start. After obtaining his PhD, he took on consulting assignments for the RAND Corporation in 1952. During his time working with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1962–68, Solow helped draft the Keynesian-influenced economic policies that were the hallmark of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. In 1965–69, he served on President Johnson’s Committee on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, and then on President Richard Nixon’s Commission on Income Maintenance from 1969–70.

joint-stock companies Jones, Homer Journal of Economic Perspectives Journal of Political Economy JPMorgan Juncker Plan Kahn, Richard Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard and the backlash against globalization and the Bloomsbury Group and Bretton Woods System and budget deficits counter-cyclical policies and crowding out on depression/recession The Economic Consequences of the Peace fiscal activism and Friedman The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and government spending on government’s role in economy and Hayek and investors Keynesian revolution legacy life and times of and Marshall and Niemeyer and paradox of thrift at Paris Peace Conference Prices and Production and public investment and Robbins Robinson and Keynes/Keynesian economics and Schumpeter and ‘socializing investment’ A Tract on Monetary Reform and the Treasury A Treatise on Money wealth Keynes, John Neville Khrushchev, Nikita Knight, Frank Kodak Korea North South Krugman, Paul Krupp Kuznets, Simon labour force growth labour productivity and work incentive laissez-faire landowners Lassalle, Ferdinand Latin America currency crisis (1981–82) see also specific countries League of Nations Lehman Brothers Lenin, Vladimir Leontief, Wassily Lewis, Arthur Lewis, Barbara (‘Bobby’) Life Extension Institute Linda for Congress BBC documentary London London School of Economics and Political Science London Stock Exchange Long Depression (1880s) Lopokova, Lydia Louis XIV LSE see London School of Economics and Political Science Lucas, Jr, Robert Ma, Jack (Ma Yun) Maastricht Treaty macroprudential policy see also central banks; financial stability Malaysia Malthus, Thomas Manchester Mandela, Nelson manufacturing additive (3D printing) automation in China and deindustrialization GDP contribution in UK German high-tech and industrialization see also industrialization Japan ‘manu-services’ ‘March of the Makers’ mass-manufactured goods and national statistics reshoring rolling back deindustrialization process and Smith trade patterns changed by advanced manufacturing US Mao Zedong Maoism ‘March of the Makers’ marginal utility analysis marginalism market forces/economy ‘Big Bang’ (1986) competition see competition and economic equilibrium see economic equilibrium emerging economies see emerging economies Hayek and the supremacy of market forces ‘invisible hand’ and laissez-faire and Marx 4 self-righting markets supply and demand see supply and demand Marshall, Alfred on approach to economics and the backlash against globalization and the Cambridge School and decentralization Economics of Industry and education’s role in reducing inequality and inequality and Keynes and laissez-faire legacy life and times of marginal utility analysis and Marx and poverty Principles of Economics and utility theory Marshall, Mary, née Paley Marx, Heinrich Marx, Henriette, née Pressburg Marx, Jenny, née von Westphalen Marx, Karl and agriculture and the backlash against globalization Capital and capitalism and China and class Communist Manifesto (with Engels) communist theories A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy doctoral thesis The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Engels journalism life and times of and Marshall and rate of profit and Ricardo and Russia on service sector workers surplus value theory and the Young Hegelians Marx, Laura Marx, Louise Marxism and the Austrian School and unemployment see also Marx, Karl Mason, Edward mathematical economics Mauritius May, Theresa Meade, James median income Menger, Carl mercantilist policies see also Corn Laws Merkel, Angela Mexico middle class China and economic growth and economic inequality and European revolutionaries income and industrialization and Keynes and Heinrich Marx as proportion of world population and Schumpeter social resentment US Mill, James Mill, John Stuart On Liberty Principles of Political Economy Minsky, Hyman Mises, Ludwig von Mitchell, Wesley mobile phones/smartphones monetarism see also Friedman, Milton monetary policy and Friedman tools see also quantitative easing (QE) see also central banks monopolies and Marx natural and Robinson and Schumpeter and Smith and Sraffa monopsony Mont Pelerin Society Morgenthau, Henry mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mortgage lending and the 2008 financial crisis sub-prime Myanmar Myrdal, Gunnar Napoleon I Napoleon III Napoleonic Wars national/official statistics China UK US national debt Austria and central banks China and creditors and debt forgiveness and deficits euro area and foreign exchange reserves and investment Japan major economies owed to foreigners and quantitative easing and Ricardian equivalent UK US Vietnam National Health Service (UK) National Infrastructure Commission (UK) Navigation Acts neoclassical economics convergence hypothesis ‘neoclassical synthesis’ New Neoclassical Synthesis see also Fisher, Irving; Marshall, Alfred; Solow, Robert Neoclassical Synthesis see also Samuelson, Paul New Classicists see also Lucas, Jr, Robert New Deal New Institutional Economics see also North, Douglass New Keynesians see also Stiglitz, Joseph New Neoclassical Synthesis New Rhineland News (Cologne) New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy (London) new trade theory New York Herald New York Times New York Tribune Newcomb, Simon Newsweek Niemeyer, Sir Otto Nissan Nixon, Richard Nokia non-tariff barriers (NTBs) Nordhaus, William North, Douglass and the backlash against globalization and development challenges doctoral thesis The Economic Growth of the United States from 1790 to 1860 and institutions Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance life and times of Nobel Prize path dependence theory and Smith North, Elizabeth, née Case North Korea Northern Rock Oak Ridge National Laboratory Obama, Barack Occupy movement oil industry Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Osborne, George Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Oxford University Balliol College Paine, Thomas Paley, Mary Paris Peace Conference path dependence theory see also North, Douglass Peel Banking Act Philips, Lion Philips (electronics company) physical capital Physiocrats Pigou, Arthur Cecil Piketty, Thomas pin-making Pinochet, Augusto Ponzi finance populism Portugal poverty aid and development see economic development challenges eradication/reduction frictional and Marshall and Marx and median income people lifted from in South Africa productivity and agriculture ‘benign neglect’ of Britain’s productivity puzzle and computers and economic growth and education and factor reallocation and Germany and Hayek incentives and industry/industrial revolution and innovation and investment Japan and jobs labour see labour productivity and land low and Marshall moving into higher sectors of and pricing raising and Schumpeter and secular stagnation slow economic and productivity growth and the future and specialization and technology total factor productivity and trade and wages Prohibition protectionism agricultural see also Corn Laws Navigation Acts public-private partnerships public investment and Keynes public spending general government spending see government spending public investment see public investment squeeze see also austerity Puerto Rico quantitative easing (QE) Quantity Theory of Money see also Friedman, Milton; monetarism; Equation of Exchange Rand, Ayn RAND Corporation rate of profit rational expectations theory Reagan, Ronald recession/depression debt-deflation theory of depression Great Depression see Great Depression (1930s) Great Recession (2009) Greece ‘hangover theory’ of Hayek on and Keynes Long Depression (1880s) second recession (1937–38: recession within the Depression) in UK 1970s redistribution Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Reich, Robert reindustrialization Reisinger, Anna Josefina Remington Rand rent-seeking research and development (R&D) investment China Research in Motion (RIM) retail trade Rhineland News Ricardian equivalence Ricardo, David and the backlash against globalization and class comparative advantage theory and the Corn Laws Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock The High Price of Bullion international trade theory as a landlord life and times of as a loan contractor and Marx On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and Schumpeter and Smith wealth Ricardo, Priscilla Robbins, Lionel Robinson, Austin Robinson, James Robinson, Joan The Accumulation of Capital and the AEA and the backlash against globalization and communism Economic Philosophy The Economics of Imperfect Competition Essays in the Theory of Employment and imperfect competition Introduction to the Theory of Employment and Keynes and Keynesian economics life and times of and monopolies monopsony theory and Schumpeter and unemployment wage determination theory robotics Rodrik, Dani Rolls-Royce Roosevelt, Franklin D New Deal Russia 1905 Revolution and Lenin and Marx Samsung Samuelson, Paul and the backlash against globalization Economics factor-price equalization theorem Nobel Prize savings for capital investment and inflation and Keynes and the ‘paradox of thrift’ Say, Jean-Baptiste Schmoller, Gustav von Schumpeter, Anna, née Reisinger Schumpeter, Gladys, née Seaver Schumpeter, Joseph and the backlash against globalization as banker/investor Business Cycles and capitalism Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ‘creative destruction’, innovation and ‘The Crisis of the Tax State’ and the Econometric Society economics and entrepreneurs on Fisher and Hayek History of Economic Analysis and Keynes legacy life and times of The Nature and Content of Theoretical Economics and perfect competition and Ricardo and Robinson Theory of Economic Development wealth Schumpeter, Romaine Elizabeth, née Boody Schumpeter Group of Seven Wise Men Schwartz, Anna Jacobson Schwarzenegger, Arnold Scottish Enlightenment Seaver, Gladys Ricarde see Schumpeter, Gladys secular stagnation self-interest services sector China and deindustrialization financial services see financial services global trade in services human capital investment invisibility of liberalization ‘manu-services’ and Marx move away from and national statistics output measurement productivity and innovation and Smith Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) UK US shadow banking Shiller, Robert silver Singapore Skidelsky, Robert skill-biased technical change skills shortage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) smartphones/mobile phones Smith, Adam and the backlash against globalization as Commissioner of Customs for Scotland economic freedom on ‘invisible hand’ of market forces and laissez-faire economics legacy life and times of and manufacturing and Marx and North and Physiocracy on rate of profit and rebalancing the economy and Ricardo and the services sector and state intervention The Theory of Moral Sentiments The Wealth of Nations social capital social networks social services socialism communist see communism vs welfare state capitalism Solow, Barbara (‘Bobby’), née Lewis Solow, Robert and the backlash against globalization with Council of Economic Advisers doctoral thesis economic growth model ‘How Economic Ideas Turn to Mush’ John Bates Clark Medal and Keynesian economics life and times of Nobel Prize Presidential Medal of Freedom and technological progress Sony Sorrell, Sir Martin South Africa South Korea Soviet Union and China Cold War collapse of see also Russia Spain specialization spontaneous order Sraffa, Piero stagflation Stanley Black & Decker state government regulation intervention in the economy laissez-faire STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workers sterling Stigler, George Stiglitz, Joseph stocks and Fisher and interest rates US railroad Strachey, Lytton Strahan, William Strong, Benjamin Sturzenegger, Federico Summers, Lawrence supply and demand see also market forces/economy: ‘invisible hand’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Taiwan Tanzania tariffs taxation and austerity devolved powers of flat for government deficit spending before Great Depression and inequality and investment Japan and Marshall negative income tax to pay off national debt Pigouvian tax progressive and Reagan redistribution through Schumpeter on Smith on Taylor, John Taylor, Overton H.


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Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

On January 6, 1967, in a front-page story, the Wall Street Journal announced: “The most ambitious US space endeavor in the years ahead will be the campaign to land men on neighboring Mars. Most experts estimate the task can be accomplished by 1985.” The very next month, in its debut issue, The Futurist magazine announced that according to long-range forecasts by the RAND Corporation, a pioneer think-tank, there was a 60 percent probability that a manned lunar base would exist by 1986. In The Book of Predictions, published in 1980, the rocket pioneer Robert C. Truax forecast that fifty thousand people would be living and working in space by the year 2000. When that benchmark year arrived, people were indeed living and working in space.

., 196 Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, 59–60, 146 President’s Commission on Higher Education, 125 Prince (singer), 203 Principia (Newton), 113 Project Prometheus, 169–70 propulsion: alternate fuels for, 157–59 antimatter drive and, 170–71 chemical fuel for, 163 electricity and, 165 in-space, 170 ion-thruster engine and, 164–65, 170 nuclear power and, 159, 168–69 rocket equation and, 153–54, 157 and slowing down, 155–56 solar sails and, 159, 165–67, 170 third law of motion and, 153, 158 xenon gas and, 164–65 Proxima Centauri, 195–96 Ptolemy, Claudius, 34, 65 pulsars, 29 Qatar, 5 quasars, 91 R-7 rocket, 126 racism, 66–67 radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), 168–69 radio telescopes, 91 radio waves, 28–29, 30, 31, 39, 90–91 radium, 96 RAND Corporation, 218 Ranger 7 spacecraft, 70 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 6 relativity, general theory of, 94–95, 101, 248, 250 relativity, special theory of, 195–96 Republicans, 4–5, 15, 17, 224–25 Resnik, Judith, 243 robots, 129, 134 in space exploration, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 rocket equation, 153–54, 157 rockets: flybys and, 157 liquid-fueled, 192 phallic design of, 222–23 propulsion of, see propulsion Rodriguez, Alex, 114 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 94, 96, 135 Royal Society, 216 Russia, xiv, 6, 22, 162, 168 ISS and, 319 Star City training center of, 73, 74, 207 Sagan, Carl, 27, 28, 43, 193, 256 Salyut space module, 6 Sarge (comedian), 234 satellites, xiii, xiv, 60, 71, 94 communication, 129 first US, 124–25 Saturn, 31, 82, 112, 115, 119, 138, 157, 168, 210, 225, 245 radio emissions from, 90–91 Saturn V rocket, 15, 127, 154, 158, 172, 214, 219, 220, 229 as a wonder of the modern world, 232–33 Schmitt, Harrison, 69, 132 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 153 science, 206, 226 Arabs and, 205–6 discovery and, 98 emerging markets and, 209–10 literacy in, 57–59, 230–31, 235–36 multiple disciplines and, 209–10 Scientific American, 223 scientific method, 86 Scobee, Dick, 242 Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation, 146 Senate, US, 5, 146, 328 Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee of, 272 and appointments to Commission on Future of Aerospace Industry, 316 Appropriations Committee of, 321, 329 Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee of, 288, 321, 323, 324, 329 sense of wonder, 64–65 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 206 Sesame Street (TV show), 257 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 41, 325 Shapley, Harlow, 98–101 Shatner, William, 180 Shaw, Brewster, 221 Shepard, Alan B., 114 short-period comets, 46 Siberia, 50 Sims, Calvin, 55–62 Sirius, 178 Skylab 1 (space station), 214 slingshot effect, 119–20 Smith, George O., 175 Smith, Michael, 242 Smithsonian Institution, 216 solar sails, 159, 165–67, 170 solar system, 34, 259 many-body problem and, 117–18 perturbation theory and, 118 solar wind, 176, 235, 245 solid rocket boosters, 155 Soter, Steven, 256 sound, speed of, 108–9 sound barrier, 109 South Africa, xiv South Pole, 76 Soviet Union, xiii, 8, 94, 133, 194, 215, 218 US rivalry with, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 see also Sputnik space, space exploration: colonization of, 57, 60, 102–3 cosmic microwave background in, 92, 94–95 cross-discipline endeavor in, 24–25, 230 culture and, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 early attitudes toward, 217–18 economic motivation for, 200–201 factions against, 8–10 in Galef/Pigliucci interview of author, 75–83 inventions statute and, 311 justification for funding of, 78–81 militarization of, 60 numbers employed in, 236–37 politics and, 3–5 proposed programs and missions for, 201–2 robots and, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 significance of, 102 Soviet achievements in, 122–26 special interests and, 5, 236–37 stellar nurseries in, 93 technological innovation and, 12 US-Soviet rivalry and, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 war as driver of, 219–20 Space Cowboys (film), 162 Space Exploration Initiative, 8 Space Foundation, 221–22 Spaceguard Survey, The: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth Object Detection Workshop, 50 space junk, 176 space shuttle, 7, 12, 25, 109, 160–62, 165, 201, 202, 228, 281 contingency funding for, 321–22 fuel of, 158 launch costs of, 320–22 main parts of, 154–55 pricing policy for, 314 retirement of, 14–16, 143, 214 speed of, 222 use policy for, 312–13 weight of, 155 see also specific vehicles Space Station Freedom, 6, 8 Space Studies Board, 169 Space Technology Hall of Fame, 221, 230–31, 237 Space Telescope Science Institute, 10, 23, 135–36 Space Transportation System, 314 space travel, 191–98 coasting in, 247 in Colbert–author interview, 186–88 danger of, 198 financing of, 193–94 in Hollywood movies, 194–95 Moon missions and, 192–93 robots and, 198 special relativity and, 195–96 Space Travel Symposium, 111 Spain, 7, 87 spectroscopy, 30 Spirit (Mars exploration rover), 130–33, 138 Spitzer Space Telescope, 139 Sputnik, xiii, 5, 59, 79, 113–14, 133, 192, 218 50th anniversary of, 226 US response to, 122–24 Star City (training center), 73, 74, 207 Stars & Atoms (Eddington), 107 Star Trek (TV series), 3, 164, 170 45th anniversary of, 178–81 human behavior and, 180 technology of, 179 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (film), 37–38 Star Wars (film series), 131 State Department, US, 312 Stewart, Jon, 4 Stone, Sharon, 203 subatomic particles, 94 Sugar, Ron, 221 Sun, 27, 28, 29, 33, 46, 58, 72, 97, 112, 117, 118, 138, 195, 245 Copernican principle and, 34 energy emitted by, 93 fusion in, 101 neutrinos emitted by, 94 planets’ orbits and, 115 Superconducting Super Collider, 6–7, 80–81 Sweden, 7 Swift, Philip W., 223 Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, 139 Switzerland, 7 Sykes, Wanda, 17 Systems of the World, The (Newton), 113 Taj Mahal, 88 Tamayo-Méndez, Arnaldo, 122 TASS, 123 Taylor, Charles E., 219 technology, 89, 200, 226 aero-space integration plan for, 323–24 in alien observation of Earth, 29–32 CRDAs policy on transfer of, 304–6 energy conservation and, 96 engineering, 95 Industrial Revolution and, 95 information, 95 leadership and, 23 multiple disciplines and, 135–37 nonsectarian philosophies and, 206 predicting future of, 215–16 progress in, 218–19 space exploration and, 135 of Star Trek, 179 US lag in, 21–22 telescopes, 71, 82, 85–86, 94, 141, 225 microwave, 91–92 radio, 91 ultraviolet, 93 Tereshkova, Valentina, 122 Texas, 6 Thompson, David, 221 three-body problem, 116–17 Three Gorges Dam, 22, 233 Three Mile Island meltdown, 168 Titan, 31 Huygens probe to, 138–39 methane on, 138–39 Today Show (TV show), 210–11 Tonight Show (TV show), 144–45 Toth, Viktor, 250 Townsend, W.


pages: 386 words: 114,405

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

And patients, after all, had paid for these studies with their tax dollars and deserved an early look at the data. Putting the patient first was what the mandate of the cancer act was all about. I didn’t change the critics’ minds, but I didn’t care. I didn’t need their permission to send out clinical alerts, and I intended to continue. Years later, the Rand Corporation did a study on the use of chemotherapy in women after surgery, and it noted not only that post-op chemotherapy was being used widely but that there had been a noticeable drop in mortality from breast cancer in this group. Rand attributed that to the NCI clinical alert.2 By the mid-1980s, I had completely reorganized the NCI and made it over in the image proposed in the National Cancer Act.

.; National Cancer Act and; war on cancer and Nobel Prize non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) Northwestern University Norton, Larry Norton-Simon effect NSAIDS Nuremberg Code nurses NYU cancer center Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Medical Research Oliverio, Vince oncogenes Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) oncology Oncovin optimism Osler, Sir William ovarian cancer ovaries Oxford University oxidative phosphorylation Paget, Stephen pancreatic cancer papilloma virus paralysis pathologists patient history Pazdur, Richard PD-1 PDQ Pel-Ebstein fever penicillin perimenopause Perlmutter Cancer Center, NYU Perry, Sy Peters, Vera pharmaceutical industry; FDA and; NCI and; new drug development; profits; see also specific companies and drugs pharmacology phase I trials phase II trials phosgene physical exam placebo placenta plasma cells platelets; transfusions platinum analogs PLX4032 pneumococcal meningitis pneumonia polymyxin B POMP potassium prednisone pregnancy President’s Cancer Panel prevention procarbazine prostate cancer; chemotherapy and radiation; of DeVita; diagnosis; hormone deprivation therapy; median survival; mortality rates; recurrence prostatectomy prostate gland; enlarged; removal of prostatitis Provenge PSA; elevated; prostate cancer and PSA test pseudomonas meningitis pseudomonas rectal infections Public Health Service pulmonary edema Quinn, Luke radiation; adjuvant chemotherapy; breast cancer and; chemotherapy vs.; dosage; dosimetry and; history of; for Hodgkin’s disease; improved technology; at Memorial Sloan Kettering; MOPP vs.; for prostate cancer; risk of future cancers from; side effects; survival rates; at Yale Cancer Center radical mastectomy radium Rall, Dave Rand Corporation randomized controlled trials RARA Rauscher, Frank Rauscher leukemia virus Reagan, Ronald rectal cancer recurrence; “critical period” and; prostate cancer red blood cells Reed, Dorothy Reed, John Reed-Sternberg cell Reid, Featherstone Reinhardt, Paul Relman, Bud remission; complete; Hodgkin’s disease Republican Party research, cancer; angiostatins; beginning of war on cancer; childhood leukemia studies; CMF period; common cancers; extramural; FDA approval of drugs and; funding; future of; Hodgkin’s disease studies; immunotherapy; intramural; Mary Lasker and; Memorial Sloan Kettering; MOMP; MOPP; National Cancer Act and; NCI cancer drug program; of 1970s; of 1980s; RO1 grants; turf battles; university cancer center model; VAMP; war on cancer; wartime embargo; Yale Cancer Center; see also specific doctors, hospitals, methods, and organizations resistance, drug retroperitoneal space rheumatoid arthritis Rhoads, Cornelius “Dusty” Rivers, Joan RNA Robbins, Guy Robinson, James D.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

F ­ utures research entailed planning for the ­f uture (including urban planning), developing methods of forecasting, and involving the public in both planning and forecasting.11 GE had established TEMPO (Technical Management Planning Organ­ization) for this purpose, and the Air Force’s already well-­k nown RAND Corporation had been founded to coordinate long-­range planning with government research and development decisions.12 As he worked intensively with PLATO on the DELPHI proj­ect, Umpleby re­imagined the possibilities and the purpose of the system. He realized that PLATO was not just a teaching computer, limited to the realm of education.

., The Alternative F ­ utures Proj­ect at the University of Illinois Newsletter, no. 1 ( January 1971): 1, http://­w ww​.­g wu​.­edu ​/­~umpleby​ /­project ​_ ­newsletters​.­html, archived to https://­perma​.­cc​/­9NYS​-­PDZ9; UIUC Public Information Office, “Immediate Release Mailed 3 / 28 / 69” (on f­ utures research), http://­w ww​.­g wu​.­edu​/­~umpleby​/­a fp​/ ­U%20of%20I%20Press%20 Release%203​_ ­28​_­1969​.­pdf, archived to https://­perma​.­cc​/­528Q​-­9FBU. 12. UIUC Public Information Office, “Immediate Release Mailed 3 / 28 / 69”; RAND Corporation, “History and Mission,” http://­w ww​.­rand​.­org​/­about​ /­h istory​.­html, archived to https://­perma​.­cc​/ ­ELW9​-­N9BM. 13. Umpleby, “Citizen Sampling Simulations,” 361. 14. Ibid., 363. 15. Stuart Umpleby, The Teaching Computer as a Device for Social Science Research, Computer-­based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) Report X-7, May 1969, Box 4, CBI PLATO Collection. 16.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

It doesn't matter whether you build such a machine out of gears and springs, vacuum tubes, or transistors, as long as its operations follow this logical sequence. This theoretical template was first implemented in the Unites States at the Institute for Advanced Study. Modified copies of the IAS machine were made for the Rand Corporation, an Air Force spinoff "think tank" that was responsible for keeping track of targets for the nation's new but fast-growing nuclear armory, and for the Los Alamos Laboratory. Against von Neumann's mild objections, the Rand machine was dubbed JOHNNIAC. The Los Alamos machine assigned to nuclear weapons-related calculations was given the strangely uneuphemistic name of MANIAC.

The entire field of artificial intelligence had been challenged as a fraud, and very serious efforts that went beyond the usual acrimony of academic debate were being made to cut off funding for the foolishness Minsky et al. were attempting. The Dreyfus affair began in the summer of 1965, when Hubert Dreyfus -- a philosopher, not a computer scientist -- spent a few months at the Rand Corporation. The paper that Dreyfus wrote at the end of that summer, entitled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," was informally circulated as a Rand report. Dreyfus thought that AI was a crock. He specifically attacked some of the claims AI enthusiasts had made about the future of their field. He claimed that the "progress" the AI folks had been citing was an illusion, and attempted to prove that their goal was a delusion.


pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

They surfed the radio dial trying to lock on to the artificial moon’s beeping, its sound like an otherworldly cricket. “One can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” Those words from a letter describing a secret 1946 RAND Corporation proposal to the US Air Force, suggesting that the United States design and launch a “world circling satellite,” sounded, in 1957, like the unheeded voice of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future. In the 1940s, space research was deemed a little too far out to warrant systematic consideration and development.

Katherine Johnson, xvii, 211, 216–217, 219–223 Kennedy moon challenge, 209 launch date slips, 207–208, 215 rockets, 189, 208, 209, 213–214 suborbital flight, 211 tracking stations, 206–207, 216, 217, 221, 258 trajectories, 189–191, 214, 215–217 Rainey, Gerald, 146 Rainey, Ruby (East Computer), 231 RAND Corporation satellite report, 161 Randolph, A. Philip Communism denouncement, 103 Du Bois as guide, 229 Martin Luther King Jr. and, 6, 168, 228, 229 Negro war employment, 5–6 new generation, 168 Rauh, Joseph, 6 Redstone rocket, 189, 208–209 reentry blunt body, 163, 188 heat shield of John Glenn, 223–224 retrofire output from Goddard, 222 self-education lecture series, 177 Sue Wilder research, 219 Reid, Henry black women mathematicians, 46–47, 283 on bombing of Japan, 59 cafeteria glimpses of, 43 character of, 4, 46 correspondence with Orville Wright, 46, 283 Kathryn Peddrew for United Fund Drive, 167 spy warnings by, 52 research.


pages: 426 words: 117,722

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, MITM: man-in-the-middle, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, éminence grise

A former Kissinger aide named Daniel Ellsberg had already come under suspicion as the man who supplied the Pentagon Papers to the Times. Ellsberg had helped run the CIA rural pacification program in South Vietnam but had returned home disillusioned. His top secret security clearances enabled him to obtain an assignment from the Rand Corporation to assemble an official history of the war. He went into hiding after the FBI showed up to interview him, turning up later on the CBS evening news to accuse the U.S. government of responsibility for millions of deaths in Vietnam. As a suspected leaker, Ellsberg became an early target of the White House Plumbers.

For the past three months, Daniel Ellsberg had been on trial on charges of espionage, conspiracy, and theft of government property arising from his unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers. He had worked on the multivolume history of the Vietnam War as a Defense Department consultant for the Rand Corporation, a strategic think tank in Santa Monica. He admitted leaking the documents to The New York Times but claimed a higher, moral justification. In tearful testimony to the court, he explained that his experiences in Vietnam had turned him against the war. He had been overwhelmed by the sight of burning villages, children killed by American bombs, and corrupt South Vietnamese officials living in luxury while peasants starved.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

As early as September 1964, the CIA listed Suharto in a secret cable as one of the Army generals it considered to be “friendly” to US interests and anticommunist.53 The cable also put forward the idea of an anticommunist military-civilian coalition that could gain power in a succession struggle. Suharto, a laconic forty-four-year-old major general from Central Java, was serving as head of the Army’s Strategic Command, or KOSTRAD. Suharto had studied under a man named Suwarto, a close friend of RAND Corporation consultant Guy Pauker and one of the Indonesian officers most responsible for implementing military-led Modernization Theory, “a state within a state,” and US-allied counterinsurgency operations.54 Suharto had a checkered past within the Indonesian military. He had been caught smuggling in the late 1950s, and was fired by Nasution himself.

These numbers, three million for full members and twenty million for affiliates, respectively, come from the PKI and have been widely reproduced by historians as well as US officials. See, for example, Wieringa, Propaganda, 5, and Robinson, The Killing Season, 8. In 1964, Guy J. Pauker arrived at the estimate of between 25 percent and a third of registered voters in a paper for the Rand Corporation titled “Communist Prospects in Indonesia,” and this was only working with the affiliate figure of sixteen million rather than twenty million. It is difficult to know how much, if any, double counting occurred in these estimations. 9. On the PKI’s agitation for parliamentary elections under Guided Democracy, see Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, 120–22.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Bleek, ‘Drones of Mass Destruction: Drone Swarms and the Future of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons’, War on the Rocks, 14 February 2019 <https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/drones-of-mass-destruction-drone-swarms-and-the-future-of-nuclear-chemical-and-biological-weapons/> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 58 Missy Cummings, The Human Role in Autonomous Weapon Design and Deployment, 2014 <https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3884-cummings-the-human-role-in-autonomous-weapons>. 59 Nick Statt, ‘Skydio’s AI-Powered Autonomous R1 Drone Follows You around in 4K’, The Verge, 13 February 2018 <https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/13/17006010/skydio-r1-autonomous-drone-4k-video-recording-ai-computer-vision-mapping> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 60 ‘Autonomous Weapons and the New Laws of War’, The Economist, 19 January 2019 <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/19/autonomous-weapons-and-the-new-laws-of-war> [accessed 26 March 2021]. 61 Burgess Laird, ‘The Risks of Autonomous Weapons Systems for Crisis Stability and Conflict Escalation in Future U.S.-Russia Confrontations’, Rand Corporation, 2020 <https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/06/the-risks-of-autonomous-weapons-systems-for-crisis.html> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 62 Jindan-Karena Kann, ‘Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Liability Gap, Part One: Introduction to Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Criminal Liability’, Rethinking SLIC, 15 June 2019 <https://www.rethinkingslic.org/blog/criminal-law/51-autonomous-weapons-systems-and-the-liability-gap-part-one-introduction-to-autonomous-weapon-systems-and-international-criminal-liability> [accessed 26 March 2021]. 63 Marta Bo, ‘Autonomous Weapons and the Responsibility Gap in Light of the Mens Rea of the War Crime of Attacking Civilians in the ICC Statute in Weapons and Targeting’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, March 2021, mqab005 <https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqab005>. 64 Terri Moon Cronk, ‘DOD’s Cyber Strategy of the Past Year Outlined before Congress’, US Department of Defense, 6 March 2020 <https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2103843/dods-cyber-strategy-of-past-year-outlined-before-congress/>. 65 Paul M.

, arXiv:2009.10385 [cs.CY], 2020 <http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10385> [accessed 30 March 2021] Kranzberg, Melvin, ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”’, Technology and Culture, 27(3), 1986, pp. 544–560 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3105385> Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, NY: Penguin, 2000) ———, ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, Kurzweilai.net, 2001 <https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns> [accessed 29 July 2020] ———, ‘Average Transistor Price’, Singularity.com <http://www.singularity.com/charts/page59.html> [accessed 10 March 2021] Laird, Burgess, ‘The Risks of Autonomous Weapons Systems for Crisis Stability and Conflict Escalation in Future U.S.-Russia Confrontations’, Rand Corporation, 2020 <https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/06/the-risks-of-autonomous-weapons-systems-for-crisis.html> [accessed 2 January 2021] Langner, Ralph, To Kill a Centrifuge: A Technical Analysis of What Stuxnet’s Creators Tried to Achieve (The Langner Group, November 2013) <https://www.langner.com/to-kill-a-centrifuge/> [accessed 26 March 2020] Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Robert K.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

A new debate has emerged in recent years, with some arguing that in lieu of playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, trying to track and then shut down all terrorist use of the Internet, it might be better to let the groups stay. “You can learn a lot from the enemy by watching them chat online,” said Martin Libicki, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. The point is that the advantages of cyberspace for terrorism can be equally useful for counterterrorism. The Web has aided terrorist groups by acting as both a Rolodex and playbook. But those on the other side of the fight have access to the same Rolodex and playbooks.

Fort Benning, Georgia Cheryl Rodewig, “Geotagging Posts Security Risks,” US Army, March 7, 2012, http://www.army.mil/article/75165/Geotagging_poses_security_risks/. WHAT ABOUT CYBER COUNTERTERRORISM? “a link for download” Adam Rawnsley, “‘Spyware’ Incident Spooks Jihadi Forum,” Danger Room (blog), Wired, September 1, 2011, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/jihadi-spyware/. for terrorists to target and kill Ibid. RAND Corporation Warrick, “Extremist Web Sites Are Using U.S. Hosts,” p. A01. “mysteriously resurfaced” Rawnsley, “‘Spyware’ Incident Spooks Jihadi Forum.” Mujahideen Secrets 2.0 Ibid. “housewife-next-door” genre Fenton, “Student’s Web Site Hacked by al-Qaida.” SECURITY RISK OR HUMAN RIGHT?


pages: 481 words: 121,300

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

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

Part of this cost represents the impact on the airline industry, from the grounding of all American aircraft on the day of the attack and the shutdown of air transportation for several days afterward to the temporary but crucial fear-induced shrinkage in passenger volume. The chaotic and inconsistent installation of airport security systems further damaged the industry. Today the system works better. But a RAND Corporation study published in January 2005 raises the prospect of potential attacks on commercial aircraft in the United States by terrorist operatives using shoulder-fired missiles because hijacking an airliner by boarding it is now less feasible. A key segment of this report, however, raises a troubling cost assessment: about $1 billion for the aircraft and its passengers and crew, $3 billion if the aviation system were again shut down for up to a week, and another $12 billion resulting from lost business and reduced passenger loads following an attack.

See also specific regions and countries distribution, 98-99 "doubling times" for, 105 and environment, 101-3 future patterns, 95-97 and global warming, 53, 82, 278 growth, 51,92-95, 94 on maps, 116-17 overpopulation, 92, 100, 101 and politics, 100-101 ZPG (Zero Population Growth), 93, 106 Portugal and China, 136, 142 colonialism, 262, 263, 264 and European Free Trade Association, 210 and Muslim realm, 161 nation-state model, 110 Postglacial Optimum, 76 Potsdam Agreement, 224 poverty, 8-9, 256 Powell, Colin, 256, 274 Precambrian, 59 primates, 65-68, 68, 72 Primorskiy Territory, Russia, 242, 243 Protcrozoic eon, 58, 59, 60 Protestant Reformation, 166 provincialism, 21 public transportation, 203 Pudong, China, 129, 139 Puntland, 37-38, 185 Pushtuns, 157-58 Putin, Vladimir, 247, 250-51, 252, 256 Qing (Manchu) Dynasty, 135, 135-36, 138 Quebec, Canada, 109 Queen Elizabeth Lslands, 108 Quran, 164 RAND Corporation, 175 Ratzel, Friedrich, 111 Reader, John, 264 Reagan, Ronald, 17, 50 Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), 161 Red Guards, 126 Red Sea, 70, 259 refrigeration, 93 reglaciation, 78 Reilly, Jack, 18 relative location in maps, 33 religion. See also specific religions, including Islam and European Constitution, 214-15 extremism, 21 freedom of religion, 166, 281 and population, 94 religious conversion, 165 separation of church and state, 166 remote sensing, 46 reptiles, 60, 62 Republic of Ichkeria (Chechnya), 247 Republic of Somaliland, 37 303 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), 181 Rhine River, 80 Rhone-Alpes (region), 218, 220 Richardson, Douglas, 48 "RingofFire," 55,56 river basins, 97-98, 134 Robinson, Arthur H., 24, 34, 35 Roma (Gypsies), 212 Roman Catholic Church, 94, 101, 186 Romance languages, 201 Roman Empire, 9, 77, 128, 202 Romania devolutionary pressure, 206 and European Union, 211, 218, 225, 226, 228 and Muslim realm, 161 and NATO, 229 and Roma (Gypsies), 212 Rotterdam firebombing, 150, 275 Royal Geographic Society, 127-28 Rumaylah Oil Field, 114 rural areas, 96, 100, 134, 158-59, 177 Rushdie, Salmon, 163, 165 Russia, 231-54.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

A study conducted in the United States in 1994 found that only 13 per cent of hard-core drug users who received help were able to reduce their use substantially, or kick it entirely.39 This may seem a demoralizingly low success rate, but it is far higher than that achieved by arresting, jailing, disenfranchising, and un-employing drug addicts. A study by the RAND Corporation in 1994 found that to achieve a 1 per cent reduction in cocaine consumption in the United States, the government could spend an additional $34 million on drug-treatment programmes, or twenty-three times as much ($783 million) on trying to eradicate the supply of cocaine from Colombia.40 Despite this vindication of the efficacy of drug-treatment programmes, provision in the United States is woefully inadequate.

Antonin Artaud, ‘Appeal to Youth: Intoxication-Disintoxication’, reproduced in Susan Sontag (ed.), Selected Writings, pt. 24 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). 39. C. P. Rydell and S. S. Everingham, Controlling Cocaine, prepared for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the United States Army (Santa Monica, CA: Drug Policy Research Center, RAND Corporation, 1994), p. xvi. 40. Ibid. 41. Abt Associates, What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs 1988–1998 (Washington, DC: ONDCP, Dec. 2000), p. 9, citing data from the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration. 42. See Ministry of Health, Drug Policy in the Netherlands, September 2003. 43.


pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

That may sound trivial, but speak to the bean counters that monitor such things and you discover a net capital loss to these companies of $54 million annually. Ask any board of directors whether they would like to correct a single problem fleecing their company of more than $50 million a year in lost revenue and the vote will be rapid and unanimous. An independent report by the RAND Corporation on the economic cost of insufficient sleep offers a sobering wake-up call for CFOs and CEOs.II Individuals who sleep fewer than seven hours a night on average cause a staggering fiscal cost to their country, compared to employees who sleep more than eight hours each night. Shown in figure 16A, inadequate sleep costs America and Japan $411 billion and $138 billion each year, respectively.

Both of these global tragedies were entirely preventable. The same is true for every sleep-loss statistic in this chapter. * * * I. National Sleep Foundation, 2013 International Bedroom Poll, accessed at https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-polls-data/other-polls/2013-international-bedroom-poll. II. “RAND Corporation, Lack of Sleep Costing UK Economy Up to £40 Billion a Year,” accessed at http://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/11/30/index1.html. III. W. B. Webb and C. M. Levy, “Effects of spaced and repeated total sleep deprivation,” Ergonomics 27, no. 1 (1984): 45–58. IV. M. Engle-Friedman and S. Riela, “Self-imposed sleep loss, sleepiness, effort and performance,” Sleep and Hypnosis 6, no. 4 (2004): 155–62; and M.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The theory was invented in the 1950s by Harry Markowitz, and for his contribution he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990. His book Portfolio Selection was an outgrowth of his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago. His experience has ranged from teaching at UCLA to designing a computer language at RAND Corporation. He even ran a hedge fund, serving as president of Arbitrage Management Company. What Markowitz discovered was that portfolios of risky (volatile) stocks might be put together in such a way that the portfolio as a whole could be less risky than the individual stocks in it. The mathematics of modern portfolio theory (also known as MPT) is recondite and forbidding; it fills the journals and, incidentally, keeps a lot of academics busy.

., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.


pages: 400 words: 121,708

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

It is now known that several of the missile sites were operative and fully armed by the time the US discovered them. An attack on the sites would no doubt have provoked a nuclear retaliation against the US mainland, and this would almost certainly have triggered a nuclear Armageddon.11 Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, brought several strategists from the RAND Corporation, a defence think-tank, into the Pentagon. He came up with a new concept called ‘Assured Destruction’. Neither side would attack the other because they knew it was suicidal: if one superpower attacked, the other had enough nuclear capacity to strike back, causing massive destruction. Someone added the word ‘Mutual’ to this new phrase, and ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’, better known by its acronym MAD, became one of the central tenets underpinning the Cold War.

Edgar 24 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 24 Howe, Sir Geoffrey 211, 218, 259, 270, 271, 272, 288 Hubbard, Carroll 149 human intelligence (HUMINT) operations 82 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 Hungary 42, 264 Hungarian Revolution 43–4 political reforms 328 HVA 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 251–2, 253, 336 and Operation RYaN 85–6 hybrid warfare 342 Ikle, Fred 142 India, nuclear arsenal 343 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 12–13, 34, 53, 60, 194, 198, 239, 313 Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320, 321–2, 333 verification processes 322 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) 13 Iran 209 Iranian Revolution 29, 202 Tehran embassy hostage crisis 20, 29 Iran-Contra scandal 319–20 Iraq, US military incursions 342, 343 Irgun 203 Iron Curtain 23, 24, 332 Islamic fundamentalism 76, 202, 209, 323 Israel Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 203–4, 205, 206–7 Israeli Air Force 205 nuclear arsenal 343 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 Ivy League 82 exercise 59, 61–3, 97 Japan Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1–4, 93 listening stations 161–2, 183 Joan (MI6 case officer) 121–2, 291 John Birch Society 149 Johnson, Lyndon B. 26 Jones, General David 56 Jones, Nate 348–9 Kádár, János 43 Kalinin 159 Kalugin, Oleg 85, 240 Kamchatka peninsula 136, 138, 139–40, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 168, 180, 183 Kardunov, Marshal Alexandr 163 Karelian Republic 40–2 Kazakhstan 5, 333, 334 KC-135 tanker aircraft 191 Kennedy, John F. 10, 11, 320 Kennedy, Robert 114 KGB 43, 45–7, 49, 338 and the Able Archer 83 exercise 250–1 Andropov as head of 35, 45, 46–7, 48, 69, 74, 80, 83, 106, 341 directorates 73 First Chief Directorate (FCD) (Foreign Intelligence) 73–4 foreign residencies 46, 81, 118–20, 122–5, 218, 227, 228, 277, 278, 279 intelligence successes 125–8, 134–5 moles within see Gordievsky, Oleg; Martynov, Valery; Vetrov, Captain Vladimir role 45–6, 70 see also Operation RYaN Kharbarovsk 161, 163, 164 Khomeini, Ayatollah 29, 202 Khrushchev, Nikita 9, 10, 42, 43, 45 Cuban missile crisis 11, 114 denounces Stalin 42 Kim Eui-dong 150, 152 Kirghizia 333 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 183 Kissinger, Henry 99, 114 Kline, Major John 56 Kohl, Helmut 319 Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 149–56, 157–88, 165 downing of 157–69 intelligence community’s verdict on 187 Soviet defence of action 181–2, 183–5, 186–7, 216 Soviet propaganda disaster 176–7, 180 US response 169–79, 187–8 Kosygin, Aleksei 68–9 Kremlinologists 37, 214 Kryuchkov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich 74, 75, 80, 127, 229, 255, 279, 281, 282, 333 Kuklinski, Colonel 110–11 Kulikov, Marshal Viktor 248 Kuntsevo Clinic 234–5, 236, 242, 250, 255, 275 Kurchatov, Igor 5 Kurile islands 136, 139, 155, 171, 187 labour camps 46 Lang, Admiral 137 Laos 29 Latvia 329 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 Leahy, Patrick 176 Lebanon 202–9, 220 Israeli bombardment of Beirut 205–7, 228 Israeli invasion of 203–4 Multinational Force 206, 207, 208, 209 UN peacekeepers 203 Lee Kuan Yew 259 LeMay, General Curtis 8 Libya 110, 310 limited nuclear war concept 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Line X operation 123, 143, 144, 285 listening stations 163–4, 168, 170, 176, 183, 217, 227, 231, 267–8 lithium H-bomb 7–8 Lithuania 329 Lockheed 54 Lokot, Sergei 246–7 Los Angeles Olympic Games (1984) 268 Lubyanka 46, 284 M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank 53 McDonald, Larry 149–50, 171 McFarlane, Robert ‘Bud’ 208–9, 262, 297, 320 and Able Archer exercise 231, 260, 261, 265–6 and SDI 99, 100 McNamara, Robert 12 malware 144–5 Manchuria 4, 330 Mao Zedong 44–5 Martynov, Valery 285–6 Marxism-Leninism 36, 45, 50, 65, 69, 71, 134 maskirovka 160, 227, 253 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Matlock, Jack 312 Mauroy, Pierre 37 Meese, Edwin 32, 169 MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service) 110, 121, 122, 126, 281, 336 exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky 286–92 MiG 204, 205 MiG-23 248 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 Minsk 138 Minuteman missiles 195 Misawa 162, 170, 171, 172 missile silos 13, 194, 195, 200, 239, 242–3 Mitterrand, François 143 Moldavia 333 Mondale, Walter 269 Mons 223–4, 225, 229, 250, 256 Moorestown 193 Morrow, Douglas 91 Moscow Olympics (1980) 30, 49, 268 Moscow summit (1988) 323–5 Mozambique 29 Mujahideen 76, 77, 110, 310, 323 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12, 242, 244 Munich Olympic Games (1972) 203 Murmansk 126 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Nagasaki, bombing of (1945) 4, 93 Nagy, Imre 43 Nakasone, Yasuhiro 183 National Association of Evangelicals 66 National Command Authority 241 National Emergency Airborne Command Post (Boeing 747) 59, 61 National Intelligence Council 269 National Military Command Center 61, 91, 193 National Security Advisors 189, 309, 320 National Security Agency (NSA) 141, 156, 161, 187, 258, 299 expansion of 54–5 National Security Archive (NSA) 17, 348–9, 350 National Security Council 144, 145, 208, 209, 231 NATO 55, 82, 86, 88, 100, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 140, 318, 320 Abel Archer 83 exercise 222–56, 344 Allied Command Europe (ACE) 222 Autumn Forge 83 exercises 223 Current Intelligence Group 131 East German agent in 130–5 MC 161 document 132–3 Political Affairs Directorate 131 response to SDI 134 neo-Nazis 129 Nicaragua 29, 70, 319, 323 Contras 110, 319–20 Nicholson, Major Arthur 295–6 Nine Lives exercise 61, 63 9/11 241 1983–The Brink of Apocalypse (documentary) 346 Nitze, Paul 313 Nixon, Richard 32, 114, 298, 320 anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) Treaty 92 signs Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13 Watergate 14, 28, 74 NKVD 5 nomenklatura 70, 220 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) 90–1, 145, 189, 190, 193 North Korea 4, 44 nuclear capability 343 North, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver 320 Norway 126, 127 intelligence service 157 Norwegian Labour Party 127 nuclear accidents 190–2 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 310–11 nuclear arms race 6–9, 12–13 nuclear arsenal 200 Soviet 223 US 8 nuclear ‘football’ system 55–6, 240–1 Nuclear Freeze peace movement 96, 103 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 13 nuclear war Counterforce strategy 10 Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) 204, 230 false alerts 189–201, 239 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 limited nuclear war 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 probable consequences 8, 60, 63, 68, 248–9 protocols for launching nuclear weapons 10, 15–16, 55–6, 62–3, 240–1 simulated nuclear attack 61–2 Withhold Options 60 nuclear war scare (1983) 344 Able Archer 83 exercise and 222–56, 344 CIA report on 339–40 Soviet arsenal on maximum alert 16, 240, 242, 243–9, 255, 257, 307 Soviet paranoia and miscalculation 16, 224, 227–9, 232–3, 239, 240, 242, 250–1, 254, 256, 258–61, 344 nuclear winter 16, 249 Nyerere, Julius 259 Obama, Barack 256, 343 observation satellites 90, 111, 194–5, 196, 248, 256 October War (1973) 204, 230 Odom, William 189 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 107 Ogarkov, Marshal Nikolai 73, 183–4, 184, 198, 236, 241, 245, 250, 255 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 145, 285 Okinawa 138 Oko satellite network 194–5 O’Malley, General 173 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 Operation Barbarossa 80–1, 247 Operation Chrome Dome 190–2 Operation RYaN 80, 81–7, 88, 105, 118, 124–5, 216, 217–18, 227, 228–9, 237, 251, 255, 257, 340 categories of intelligence 81–2 confirmation bias 81, 86 information processing 83–4 spurious reports 81, 84, 86, 124–5, 227–8, 250–1 Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States 210 Ossipovich, Major Gennady 162–3, 164–7, 168, 178, 184–5 Pakistan, nuclear arsenal 343 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 203–4, 205, 206 Palestinian-Israeli conflict 202–9 Palmerston, Lord 273 Palomares incident (1966) 191–2 Parr, Jerry 56–7 Partial Test Ban Treaty 13 peace movement 66, 95–7, 96, 103, 123–4, 237 Pelše, Arvids 214 Pentecostal Christians 59, 116 perestroika 311, 325, 329 Perroots, Lieutenant-General Leonard 253–5 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Petropavlosk 138, 158 Petrov, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav 195–200, 239 Pfautz, Major General James 172–3 Phalangist militiamen 207 Philby, Kim 278, 292 PL-5 missiles 157 plutonium implosion bomb 4, 6 Podgorny, Nikolai 69 Poindexter, Admiral John 320 Poland 65, 94 political reforms 328 popular protests 42–3 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Polaris 13 Politburo 34, 47–8, 64, 70, 76, 78, 181, 214, 215, 236, 255, 264, 275, 312, 317, 319 Prague Spring 47 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) 339, 349–50 protective missile system see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) psychological operations (PSYOPS) 139–43, 147, 162, 182, 187, 310, 340 Putin, Vladimir 341 Pym, Francis 37 radiation sickness 3–4, 249 radioactive contamination 192 RAF Lakenheath 190 Ramstein Air Force Base 253 RAND Corporation 12 RC-135 spy planes 140–1, 156–7, 170, 178, 182 Reagan, Nancy 19, 25, 32, 66, 114, 302, 306 Reagan, Ronald 108 and Able Archer 83 exercise 231–2, 261, 262, 263, 265–6 anti-communism and anti-Soviet rhetoric 23, 24, 25, 26, 30–1, 51–2, 64–7, 77–8, 93, 94–5, 110, 114–15, 116, 177, 182, 216, 266 appearance and personality 21, 22, 33 approval ratings 28, 97, 265, 323 approves technological sabotage 144 attempted assassination of 56–8 background of 20–2 belief in personal diplomacy 51, 93–4, 268 ‘bombing Russia’ poor-taste joke 267–8 and Brezhnev 59 Cold War warrior 31, 267, 321 on the decision to launch nuclear weapons 15–16 demands Berlin Wall be pulled down 321 diary entries 64–5, 98, 99–100, 102, 116, 206, 262, 268, 294, 308 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 177, 178, 179, 182, 188 economic policies 27–8, 31 elected President 15, 31–2 ‘evil empire’ rhetoric 66–7, 89, 117, 176, 182, 216, 324 film career 22, 25–6, 301 Geneva summit 297–9, 300–9, 305 Governor of California 27–8 ‘Great Communicator’ 268 and human rights issues 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 and invasion of Grenada 210, 211, 212 and Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 leadership style 27 and Margaret Thatcher 211–12 meets Gordievsky 337, 337 Moscow summit 323–5 and nuclear policy 51, 58–9, 63–4, 91–3, 97–101, 103–4, 114, 261 political philosophy 22–3, 26 populism 19, 27, 33 president of Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 presidential inauguration 19–20, 21, 32–3 protocol for launching nuclear weapons 55–6, 62–3 re-election 265, 266–7, 269 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 and SDI 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 secret meeting with Soviet ambassador 115–17 signs INF Treaty 321 spouses see Reagan, Nancy; Wyman, Jane suggests rapprochement with Soviet Union 266–7, 268, 294 and total abolition of nuclear weapons 51, 93, 315, 318 visits Berlin 320–1 visits London 65 visits NORAD base 90, 91 war games, participation in 61–3, 62, 97, 262 Washington summit 321–3 Reagan Doctrine 110 Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan (RISOP) 55, 60 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Reed, Thomas 61, 62, 143–4 Reforger 83 exercise 223 Regan, Don 208 reunification of Germany 332 Rex 82 Alpha exercise 61, 63 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 Rivet Joint operations 141, 162 Rogers, William 61 Romania 332 Romanov, Grigory 238, 270 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 27, 146 Rubin, Professor 213 Rupp, Rainer 128–34, 135, 251–3, 336 Russia 334 hybrid warfare capabilities 342 military exercises 342 Sabra and Shatila massacres (1982) 207 Sadat, Anwar 202 Sakhalin island 136, 160, 168, 171, 172, 173, 180, 183, 184 Sakharov, Andrei 48 Sandinistas 29 Saudi Arabia 208, 343 Scarlett, John 121, 125, 218, 259 Schmidt, Helmut 94 Schneider, Dr William 142 Scowcroft, Brent 327 Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 Sea of Okhotsk 136, 138, 156, 159, 162, 168, 180, 187, 299 Second World War 40–1, 107, 146, 255 end of 4 German invasion of Soviet Union 40, 80–1, 247 Serpukhov-15 194, 195–200 Severomorsk 245 Sharansky, Anatoly 49 Sharon, Ariel 203, 207 Shchelokov, Nikolai 88 Shemya 156, 157 Shevardnadze, Eduard 297, 309, 313, 320, 330 Shultz, George 37, 113–16, 117, 146–7, 208, 219, 262 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 175, 176, 179, 185 and the Geneva summit 297, 303 on Gorbachev 295 and the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320 meets with Gromyko 185, 240, 296–7 meets with Shevardnadze 320 and the Reykjavik summit 313, 314, 315, 318 and SDI 100, 298 and the Soviet ‘peace offensive’ 309 signals intelligence (SIGINT) 82, 141, 170, 176, 183 Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) 10, 11, 55, 56, 60, 62, 262 Six Day War (1967) 203 ‘snap-ons’ 161, 163, 164, 170 Snow, Jon 324 Sokol 164 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 48 Son Dong-hui 150, 155, 161, 166, 167 South Korea 138 South Korean Navy 137 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Soviet Air Force 247–8 expansion of 138 Far East Air Defence Command 139, 158, 162, 163, 180–1 Soviet embassy, London 81, 118–20, 122, 218, 228, 279 Soviet embassy, Washington 81, 277, 278 Soviet Far East 136–40, 137, 149–88 Soviet missile systems intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 34, 194, 239 PL-5 missiles 157 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 161 Soviet Navy Northern Fleet 126, 140, 245, 246 Pacific Fleet 138 submarine fleet 245–7 Soviet Union anti-Jewish purges 46 centralised planning 6, 69 civil defence programme 30 communist orthodoxy 36–7 Congress of People’s Deputies 329 corruption and organised crime 87–8, 333 defence budget 30 dismantling of 329, 333 economic stagnation 37, 48, 50, 64–5, 69, 71, 111 Five Year Plans 39–40 German invasion of 40, 80–1, 247 Great Terror 36, 39–40 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 intelligence community see GRU; KGB; SVR invasion and occupation of Afghanistan 30, 76–7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 204–5 Kremlin nuclear paranoia 85, 86, 112, 125, 233, 238, 240 see also Able Archer 83 exercise; Operation RYaN Middle East policies 220 military strength and personnel 222–3 nuclear arsenal 223 nuclear programme 4–6, 8, 9, 12 office of head of state 35, 36 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 285 outrage over Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) launch 104–5, 106 political reforms 311–12, 329 post-Soviet problems 333 post-war reconstruction 41 reduced nuclear stockpile 333–4 reduction of Soviet forces in Europe 328, 333–4 Second World War 4, 40–1, 80–1, 247, 255 Sino-Soviet relations 44, 45, 220, 330 social conditions 69–70 support for global liberation struggles 29, 30, 52, 70, 94, 109, 301 suspected of influencing American presidential elections 269, 342 suspicion and fear of the West 14, 71–2, 73, 78, 80, 85, 240 technology gap 72, 73, 104, 120, 143, 144 The Soviet War Scare, 1983 (documentary) 346 Soyuz spacecraft 14 space weapons see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Speakes, Larry 169, 176 Sputnik 9, 194 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 stagflation 28–9 Stalin, Joseph 5, 23, 24, 35, 146, 237, 329 anti-Jewish purges 47 death of 42 and the Great Terror 36, 39–40 ‘Star Wars’ see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Stasi 85, 128, 130, 133, 335 Stewart, Nina 349 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 Stombaugh, Paul, Jr 284 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13, 14, 94, 156 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) 30, 77 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) 94, 105, 270, 334 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 103 costs 102 Geneva summit and 298, 299, 304 Gorbachev’s hostility to 273, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 309, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 origins of 97–100 proposed limits on 313 public attitudes towards 102 Reagan’s enthusiasm for 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 Soviet fears of 104–5, 106, 117, 216 ‘strip alert’ 248, 254 Su-24 248 submarines Delta class 138, 246 nuclear weapon-carrying submarines 13, 136, 140, 200, 246 Ohio class 54 Typhoon class 246 suicide bombers 208–9 Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) 223, 229 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1, 161 Suslov, Mikhail 45 SVR 285, 334 Symms, Steve 149 Syria 204, 205, 209, 220 Syrian Air Force 205 systems failures 192, 193, 200, 201, 239 T-72 tank 204 Tadzhikistan 333 Taliban 77, 323 Tass news agency 182 Tehran embassy hostage crisis (1979–81) 20, 29 telemetry intelligence (TELINT) 156 Teller, Edward 6–7, 97–8, 101 ter Woerds, Margreet 347 terrorism 108–9 Thatcher, Denis 272 Thatcher, Margaret 124, 134, 210, 211–12, 217, 218, 231, 259, 264, 293 and British–Soviet relations 270 and Gordievsky 337, 338 meets Gorbachev 272–4, 274 on nuclear deterrence 318–19 thermonuclear weapons 7–8, 45, 190–1 Thor missiles 13 Thule 192 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 330 Titan missiles 13 Titov, Gennadi 127 Tkachenko, Captain Viktor 243–4 Tolkachev, Adolf 283–4 Tomahawk Cruise missiles 53 Topaz see Rupp, Rainer Treholt, Arne 127–8 Trident missiles 54, 319 ‘Trinity’ atomic test 5 Tripoli 310 ‘Trojan horses’ 144–5 Trudeau, Pierre 271 Truman, Harry 6, 7, 107 Trump, Donald 31, 269, 342, 343 Tsygichko, Vitalii 239 Tupolev TU-22M ‘Backfire’ bomber 138, 247 United States budget deficit 55, 102 Ukraine 333, 334, 341 United Nations 185 Lebanese operations 203 peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) 203 Security Council 183 United States declining superpower role 342–3 defence budget 52, 66, 79, 342 intelligence community see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); National Security Agency (NSA); Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 203–4 military rearmament 52–4, 116 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 nuclear arsenal 8 nuclear programme 6–8, 9, 12 peace movement 66, 96, 96, 103 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Second World War 107 Washington KGB residency 81, 277, 278 US Air Force Air Force Intelligence 172–3, 178 PSYOPS 140–1, 142 Strategic Air Command 8, 10, 58, 90–1, 156, 190–1, 193 US Marines 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 217 US missile systems anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) 12, 13 Cruise missiles 53, 78, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 258, 270, 299, 309, 321 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 12–13, 53, 198 Minuteman missiles 195 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 submarine-launched ballistic missiles 13 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1 Trident missiles 54 Vanguard missiles 9 US Navy 142 expansion 54, 138 Pacific Fleet 138 PSYOPS 142 US presidential elections 1964 26 1976 28 1980 30–1 1984 265–9 2016 269, 342 suspected Soviet influence 269, 342 USS Coral Sea 137 USS Eisenhower 140 USS Enterprise 136–7 USS Midway 137, 139 USS New Jersey 208 Ustinov, Marshal Dmitri 34–5, 87, 180, 181, 198, 215, 236, 241, 242, 255 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Uzbekistan 333 Vanguard missiles 9 Velikhov, Yevgeny 104 Velvet Revolution 332 Vessey, Admiral 262 Vetrov, Captain Vladimir 143 Vietnam war 27, 29 Vladivostok 138 Volk Field Air Base 192–3 Wakkanai 162, 168, 170, 172, 174 Warsaw Pact 43, 47, 55, 86, 88, 132, 222, 318 Washington summit (1987) 321–3 Watergate 14, 28, 74 Watkins, Admiral James D. 98–9, 139–40 Weinberger, Caspar 32, 52, 58, 100, 131, 179, 262, 296, 320 Weiss, Dr Gus 144, 145 West Germany 14, 128, 319 peace movement 95 Winter War (1939–40) 40 Withhold Options 60 Wolf, Markus 85, 86, 135, 335 Wright, Oliver 260 Wyman, Jane 22, 25 Yeltsin, Boris 329, 333, 338 Yesin, General-Colonel Ivan 245 Yom Kippur War (1973) 204, 230 Yugoslavia 44 Yurchenko, Vitaly 299–300 Zapad 17 exercise 342 Zeleny 139 zero-zero option 94–5, 315, 316, 318, 321, 321–2 Zil limousines 74, 111, 112, 236 Zionists 74, 202, 203 US lobby 204 Zubok, Vlad 348


pages: 414 words: 128,962

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, connected car, Etonian, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Khyber Pass, land reform, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, rewilding, Silicon Valley

* Historians of Rome and modern Iraq always seem to agree with the generals that there was nothing intrinsically impossible about these interventions. The problem lay with resources or the details of the implementation – and the answer was generally a ‘surge’. Analysts of Afghanistan argue that the problem was that there had only been one soldier for every forty members of the adult population, while, as the Rand Corporation had ‘established’, the real ratio should have been one to twenty. And in Roman Britain, where there was one Roman soldier for every twenty adults, historians argue that the ratio should have been closer to one for every fifteen – that the problems would have been solved if there had been four Roman legions, rather than three.

., 102 Hermitage Castle, 225–6 Herodian, 77 Hexham Abbey, 77 High Street (Lake District fell), 130 Highland Clearances, 268 Highland Line, 9, 11, 12, 124, 236 Highlands, geology of, 10–12 Hirsel Estate, 242, 243 HMS Birkenhead (ship), 298 Hogg, James, 205, 207 Holme Cultram Abbey, 162, 167–8, 177 Home, Alexander, 3rd Lord Home, 242–3 Home, Alexander, 14th Earl of, 242 Hong Kong, 19, 66, 109, 317 Housesteads (Roman fort), 69 Howard, Philip, 222, 243–4, 246 Hume, David, 259 Hussein, Saddam, 37, 46 Iban people, Malaysia, 95 Iceland, 132 India, 15, 28, 39, 107–8, 111, 143, 193, 219, 274 Indonesia, 18, 19, 49–50 Innerleithen, Scotland, 259 Iran, 41, 193, 251 Iraq, 44, 46, 89, 93, 103–4, 131–2 Irian Jaya, Indonesia, 24, 133 Iron Age Britain, 74–6, 94–5 Irving, Washington, 204, 252, 254 Irwin, Angus, 333 Isel Hall, Cockermouth, 156 Isle of Harris, 145 Jakarta, Indonesia, 49–50 James I, King (James VI of Scotland), 219 James IV, King of Scotland, 243–5 James V, King of Scotland, 190–1 Jedburgh, 239 Johnson, Lyndon, 90 Johnson, Samuel, 96, 241–2 Joicey, James, 5th Baron, 245–7, 250 kelpy, 252 Kershopefoot, Cumbria, 203, 219 King’s Own Scottish Borderers, 39–40 Kipling, Rudyard, 81 Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, 133 Kirriemuir, Scotland, 61, 101, 110 Kuala Lumpur, 19 Langholm, Scotland, 113 Lauder, Harry, 32 Leslie-Melville, Roderick, 334 Leyden, John, 115 Liddesdale, Scotland, 197, 199, 225, 227 Liddell, Eric, 31 Livingston, West Lothian, 287–8 Livingstone, David, 31 Loadpot Hill, Lake District, 130 Loch Turret Reservoir, Crieff, 9, 267 Lochmaben stone, 179, 184 Loder, Barbara, 195–6 Longtown, Cumbria, 215 Lord of the Isles, 266 Lowlands, 10, 12, 24–5, 260 Luguvalium, 60 Lyne (River), 195 lynxes, 150 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 103 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 12, 21, 31–2, 113, 261 MacDonald, Flora, 27 MacGregor clan, 10, 13, 268 Maclaren clan, 10, 13, 14, 268 Maclean, Sir Fitzroy, 60, 272 Maclean of Duart, 272 Malacca, 16, 19, 79, 96 Malayan Colonial Service, 16, 66 Malayan Emergency, 16, 78–9, 90, 93, 97, 101 Malaysia, 18, 66–8, 95–6, 108 Malcolm, Charles, 107–8 Malcolm, James, 107–8 Malcolm, Pulteney, 107–8, 113 Malcolm, Robert, 107 Malcolm, Sir John, 107, 111–13 ‘march gate,’ 121 Marches, the, 198 see also Borderlands/ Borders; Wardens of the Marches march-line, 235 Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor), 324 Mauretania (ship), 39, 40 McCosh, Andrew, 333 McGonagall, William, 31 McGruder clan, 14 McLaurin clan, 15 Melrose Abbey, 168, 252 Melville, Henry Dundas, Viscount, 275 Messenger, Mark, 175–6, 178, 179 metissage, 81, 86 ‘Middleland,’ 47–8, 60, 118, 121, 124, 155, 157–8, 167–8, 185, 214, 230, 249 Monteath, Alexander, 15, 16 Montrose, Marquess of, 253 Monzie, Perthshire, 10, 12 Motherwell, 261 munitions factories, Scotland, 181–2, 189 Murray, John, 111 Nairn, Tom, 32 National Trust, 135 Naworth Castle, 198, 222 Neolithic monuments, 14, 116, 122, 153, 179, 184, 275, 328 Newcastle, 38–9, 42, 60, 145, 158, 174 Newcastle University, 246 Newcastleton, Scotland, 221–3, 222 Nien Cheng, 61 Norman Conquest, 157–8, 167 Normandy, France, 16, 100, 181, 295–6, 303–8 Norse language, 24, 131–3, 138 Norse raiders (Vikings), 139 Northumbria, 125–6, 131–3, 157, 175, 264 Northumbrian language, 236 nuclear power stations, 229–30 nuclear waste, 179, 230 ‘Old North,’ 123, 125 onager (catapult), 85–6 Oram, Richard, 225 Orkneys, 266 Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier, 248 Otterburn, Northumberland, 86, 229, 236 Owen, Robert, 261 Oxford University, 18, 295 Pakistan, 198, 219 Park, Mungo, 115, 124–5, 253–5 Pattinson, Steve, 215–16 peat bogs, 161–2 Peel, John, 149 pele towers, 199, 205, 218 Penang, 18, 78–9, 96 Penrith, Cumbria, 28, 54–5, 133, 138 Percy family, 235 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 214 Picts, 24, 106, 124, 186, 262, 266 Pons Aelius, 60 porridge, 152 Pound, Ezra, 34 Raeburn, Henry, 225 Rand Corporation, 89 Rauray, France, 295, 304–5 ‘reivers’ (Border raiders), 198–201, 204, 206–12, 217–19, 223–4, 248, 249, 259 Rheged (Cumbric kingdom), 124–5, 126–7, 149, 154 Richard I, King, 175 Richardson, Johnny, 149–50 ring-garth, 121 Roadhead, Cumbria, 195, 196 Robert the Bruce, 15, 167, 177–8, 185, 186 Robertson, Charlie, 237–9 Rodger, Alan, 263 Roman forts, 39–40, 43, 44, 46, 79, 96–7, 161, 174, 185, 212–14 Roman occupation of Britain, 77–8, 87–9, 103–7 Rose, Colonel David, 14, 267, 274–5, 333 Routledge, Gordon, 183 Routledge family, 195, 200, 208–10, 212, 217, 221 Rowan-Hamilton, Angus, 333 Roxburgh, 238–40, 250 Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland, 250 Royal Scottish Chamber Orchestra, 246 Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, 20 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 146 Ruskin, John, 158 Russell, James, 206–7 Sanders of the River (film, 1935), 101 Sark (river), 187, 189 Scotland: referendum (2014), 28, 119; Union of Crowns with England (1604), 219–20, 223 Scott, George, 115, 255 Scott, Sir Walter: on the Battle of Flodden, 243, 244–5; and Border culture, 204–7, 209, 211, 226, 254; on Hadrian’s Wall, 35–6; on Helvellyn, 141; and oral history, 182; portrait by Henry Raeburn, 225; Redgauntlet, 179; on Scottish clans, 267–8; on Scottish National Identity, 252–3; and tartan, 28; on Traquair, 256; and the Yarrow Stone, 115 Scottish dancing, 19–22, 67, 332–4 Scottish education system, 110–11 Scottish national identity, 185–6, 191, 260, 264, 266–9 Scottish National Party, 28 Scottish Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments, 23 seanachaidhs, 269, 271–2 Segedunum (Roman fort), 39–40 Selgovae tribe, 179 Selkirk, Scotland, 242, 246, 254 Septimus Severus (Roman Emperor), 88 Sfax, Tunisia, 300, 301 Shakespear, Sir Richmond, 15 Shanghai, 18, 20, 61 sheep farming, 134–6, 146–7 Shehadeh, Raja, 257 Sheriffmuir, Battle of, 114 shielings, 13 Sicily, 300–1 Sidney, Sir Philip, 236 Silloth, Cumbria, 161 Smiles, Samuel, 110 Solway Firth, 175–80, 229 South Shields, 42–3 Spadeadam, Cumbria, 229 Stanegarth Hall, Kershopefoot, 203–4 Stephenson, Robert, 113 Steuart-Fothringham, Thomas, 333 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 182, 206 Stewart, Alexander Wolf, 282, 283, 309, 323 Stewart, Annie, 16, 18, 293 Stewart, Brian: ancestry, 7–9, 72–3; books by, 100; career, 15–18, 73, 108–9; death, 317–19; funeral, 326–33; linguistic abilities, 16, 50, 78, 98–100; love of Scottish dancing, 19–22, 67; musical interests, 67–8; portrait commissioned, 278–80, 310–12; and Scottishness, 27–32 Stewart, Fiona, 18, 321, 333 Stewart, George, 296–300, 330 Stewart, Heather, 16, 18 Stewart, Sandy, 333 Stewart, Shoshana, 282 Stewart, Sir John, 13 Stewart family ancestry, 7–9, 13 Stewart Society, 27 Stirling, David, 31 Strathclyde, kingdom of see Cumbria, kingdom of Strathearn, Perthshire, 114 Stuart, Catherine Maxwell, 256–8 Surrey, Thomas Howard, Earl of, 243, 244 Swan Hunter shipyard, 39 Swettenham, Sir Frank, 66 Swindale, Lake District, 145–7 Tacitus, 91, 262; Agricola (AD 90), 78 tartan, 10, 27–8, 96 Telford, Duncan, 209–11, 221, 222–4 Telford, Thomas, 107, 110, 113 Telford, Trevor, 196–8, 200–1, 207–8, 215, 222 Templer, Gerald, General, 18 Thirlmere, Lake District, 148 Threlkeld, Lake District, 148, 149 Tigris (river), 43, 44, 46 Todhunter, Barry, 148–51 Tootle, Jim, 200 Traquair House, 256–61 Turkey-Iran border, 193 Turner, J.


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The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

., Birth Quake: The Baby Boom and its Aftershock, Chicago University Press, 2002 Maddison, Angus, Phases of Capitalist Development, Oxford University Press, 1982 Mahdi, Mushin, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016 Malthus, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, vol. 1, An Essay on the Principle of Population, London, William Pickering, 1986 Maluccio, John, and Duncan, Thomas, Contraception and Fertility in Zimbabwe: Family Planning Services and Education Make a Difference, Santa Monica, Rand Corporation, 1997 Marshall, Alex, The Russian General Staff and Asia 1800–1917, London and New York, Routledge, 2006 Marshall, Monty G., and Gurr, Ted Robert, Peace and Conflict: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements and Democracy, Centre for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2005 Martin, George, ‘Brazil’s Fertility Decline 1965–1995: A Fresh Look at Key Factors’, in Martine, George, Das Gupta, Monica, and Chen, Lincoln C., Reproductive Change in India and Brazil, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 169–207 Meacham, Carl, and Graybeal, Michael, Diminishing Mexican Immigration into the United States, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013 Merk, Frederick, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, New York, Alfred A.

., Population and People, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1968 Stoddard, Lothrop, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920 Stolper, Gustav, The German Economy 1870 to the Present, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967 Stone, Norman, World War Two: A Short History, London, Allen Lane, 2013 Sunak, Rishi, and Rajeswaran, Sarath, A Portrait of Modern Britain, London, Policy Exchange, 2014 Suny, Ronald Grigor, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide, Princeton University Press, 2015 ‘Sydney’, ‘The White Australia Policy’, Foreign Affairs, 4 (1), 1925, pp. 97–111 Szayna, Thomas S., The Ethnic Factor in the Soviet Armed Forces: The Muslim Element, Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corporation, 1992 Szporluk, Roman, Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution Press, 2000 Tabutin, Dominique, ‘Les Relations entre pauvreté et fécondité dans les Pays du Sud et en Afrique-Sub-Saharienne–bilan et explications’, in Ferry, Benoît, L’Afrique face à ses défis démographiques: un avenir incertain, Paris, Agence Française de Développement, 2007, pp. 253–88 Tarver, James D., The Demography of Africa, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1996 Tauber, Irene B., The Population of Japan, Princeton University Press, 1958 Teitelbaum, Michael, The British Fertility Decline: Demographic Transition in the Crucible of the Industrial Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1984 , ‘U.S.


pages: 436 words: 123,488

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by John Abramson

disinformation, germ theory of disease, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, p-value, placebo effect, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

If one of the goals of medical care is to prevent disease, then don’t doctors have a professional responsibility to address the unique health needs, habits, and risks of each individual patient? Unfortunately, the training and culture of medicine leave many doctors feeling that this is too mundane, not worthy of their skills or time. In fact, a study done by researchers from the Rand Corporation, published in the NEJM in December 2003, shows that doctors provide appropriate counseling to their patients only 18 percent of the time. If our model of heart disease prevention is dominated by reducing the number of LDL cholesterol particles migrating through arterial walls, then certainly the proper focus of care is the individual patient.

The failure of the market to serve Americans’ medical needs is certainly demonstrated by the combination of our poor health status compared with that of other industrialized countries, the low quality of our medical care (barely half of the standards for basic medical care are being met, according to a study done by the Rand Corporation and published in the NEJM in December 2003), and the singularly high cost of our medical care. But these are just symptoms of a more fundamental problem, which is not market failure, but market success. The medical industries have thrived as health care spending in the United States increased more than fivefold and the percentage of our GDP devoted to health care rose from 8.8 to 15.5 between 1980 and 2004.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

For one thing, they were simultaneously pursuing multiple, uncorrelated trading strategies: around a hundred of them, with a total of 7,600 different positions.82 One might go wrong, or even two. But all these different bets just could not go wrong simultaneously. That was the beauty of a diversified portfolio - another key insight of modern financial theory, which had been formalized by Harry M. Markowitz, a Chicago-trained economist at the Rand Corporation, in the early 1950s, and further developed in William Sharpe’s Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).83 Long-Term made money by exploiting price discrepancies in multiple markets: in the fixed-rate residential mortgage market; in the US, Japanese and European government bond markets; in the more complex market for interest rate swapsbf - anywhere, in fact, where their models spotted a pricing anomaly, whereby two fundamentally identical assets or options had fractionally different prices.

unsafe investment bet 229 protectionism 159. see also free trade Prussian government bonds 86 public housing 246-7 publicly owned firms 353 Public Works Administration 246-7 Pückler-Muskau, Prince 90 Putin, Vladimir 276 put options 12 ‘quants’ 321-7 Quantum Fund 319 Quilmes 274 race divisions 243-6 . see also anti-Semitism; ethnic minorities Rachman, Peter 252 railways 226 Rand Corporation 323 random drift 350 randomness 342 ‘random walk’ 320 Ranieri, Lewis 259 rating agencies 268 raw materials see resources RCA 160 Reagan, Ronald 252 and capital account liberalization 312 and S&Ls 254 welfare reforms 219 real estate see property recessions 103-4 prospects of 8 recourse 270n.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

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

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

In 1997, however, the Clinton administration insisted that Russia was threatening no one, and did not need to be contained. “This NATO,” newly expanded to the East, Albright said, “is not directed against Russia. It is not us versus them or them versus us. We are all on the same side.” An influential RAND Corporation study published that same year, coauthored by Asmus, controversially estimated only modest NATO expansion costs on the grounds that the alliance had no enemy; the “premise [was] avoiding confrontation with Russia, not preparing for a new Russian threat.”49 Many of NATO expansion’s most prominent advocates, however, could not abide this thinking.

“Europe’s Eastern Promise: Rethinking NATO and EU Enlargement.” Foreign Affairs. January/February 2008. Asmus, Ronald D., Richard L. Kugler, and F. Stephen Larrabee. “Building a New NATO.” Foreign Affairs. September/October 1993. ———. “What Will NATO Enlargement Cost?” Reprints. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1997. [Originally published in Survival, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 1996): 5–26.] Asmus, Ronald D., and F. Stephen Larrabee. “NATO and the Have-Nots: Reassurance After Enlargement.” Foreign Affairs. November/December 1996. Augusta Chronicle. “Grave Decision.” March 13, 1947. Bacha, Edmar L. “A Three-Gap Model of Foreign Transfers and the GDP Growth Rate in Developing Countries.”

Shchetko, Nick, and Alan Cullison. “Ukraine Ends ‘Nonaligned’ Status, Earning Quick Rebuke from Russia.” Wall Street Journal. December 23, 2014. Shlapak, David A., and Michael Johnson. “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics.” Research Reports. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1200/RR1253/RAND_RR1253.pdf. Simms, William Phillip. “Truman Doctrine.” Washington Daily News. March 14, 1947. Simon, Zoltan. “Orban Says He Seeks to End Liberal Democracy in Hungary.” Bloomberg. July 28, 2014. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-28/orban-says-he-seeks-to-end-liberal-democracy-in-hungary.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

.: Brookings Institution Issues in Governance Studies No. 34, April 2010). 11 See the chapters by Thomas E. Mann and Gary Jacobson in Pietro S. Nivola and David W. Brady, eds., Red and Blue Nation? Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006); also James A. Thomson, A House Divided: Polarization and Its Effect on RAND (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). There is some debate on exactly how polarized the American public is; on many cultural issues, like abortion and guns, there is a broad centrist group without strong convictions, with far more committed minorities at either end of the spectrum. See Morris P. Fiorina et al., eds., Culture War?

“War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America.” American Journal of Political Science 49(3):451–65. Thomas, Melissa. 2009. “Great Expectations: Rich Donors and Poor Country Governments.” Social Science Research Network Working Paper. Thomson, James A. 2010. A House Divided: Polarization and Its Effect on RAND. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Tiger, Lionel. 1969. Men in Groups. New York: Random House. Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1998. The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. One. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. Democracy in America.

Three Books Against the Simoniacs (Humbert of Moyenmoutier) Three Dynasties Three Gorges Dam Three Kingdoms Tibet Tiger, Lionel Tilly, Charles Time of Troubles Timor-Leste Tocqueville, Alexis de Togo Tokugawa shogunate Tolstoy, Leo Tonga Tönnies, Ferdinand Tower of Babel, biblical story of Transoxania Transparency International Transylvania tribal societies; Arab; Chinese; European; Indian; in Latin America; law and justice in; legitimacy in; military slavery and; mitigation of conflict in; persistence to present day of; property in; religion in; state-level societies compared to; transition from or band-level organization to; Turkish; warfare and conquest by; see also kinship; lineage; specific tribes Trivers, Robert Trobriand Islands Tudors Tunisia Tuoba tribe Turcoman tribes Turenne, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turkana people Turkish Republic Turks; in Abbasid empire; in China; in Hungary; in India; in Transylvania; see also Ottoman Empire Tursun Bey Tylor, Edward Ukraine ulama Umar, Caliph Umayyad dynasty United Nations United States; accountability in; Afghanistan and; antistatist traditions in; bureaucracy in; during cold war; dysfunctional political equilibrium in; economic crises in; homicide in; invasion of Iraq by; Japan and; local governments in; military of; modernization theory in; patronage politics in; per capital spending on government services in; rule of law in; slavery in; South Korea and; taxation in Urban II, Pope urban centers, see cities Uthman, Caliph Uzbekistan Vaishyas Vanuatu Varangians Vedas Velasco, Andres Vena, King venal officeholding: in England; in France; in Russia; in Spain Venezuela Venice, republic of Vietnam Vikings Vinogradoff, Paul violence; in agrarian societies; in chimpanzee society; in China; as driver of state formation; in England; in France; in India; in prehistoric societies; property rights and; religion and; in Russia; in state of nature; see also war Vladimir, Prince Voltaire Vorontsov, Count Vrijjis, gana-sangha chiefdom of Wahhabism Wales Wallis, John Wang, Empress of China Wang family Wang Mang Wanli emperor waqfs (Muslim charity) war; civil, see civil war; counterinsurgency; financing of; institutional innovations brought on by; in Malthusian world; in Muslim states; prisoners of; religion and; state formation driven by; in state of nature; technology of; tribal; see also specific wars War and Peace (Tolstoy) Warring States period; cities during; cultural outpourings during; education and literacy during; infantry/cavalry warfare during; kinship groupings during; map of; road and canal construction during Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Weber, Max; on bureaucracy; on charismatic authority; on feudalism; modernization theory of; on religion Wei, state of Wei Dynasty Weingast, Barry Wei state well-field system Wen, Emperor of China Wendi, Emperor of China Westphalia, Peace of Whig history White, Leslie William I, King of England William III (William of Orange), King of England Wittfogel, Karl Woolcock, Michael World Bank World Trade Organization World War I Worms, Concordat of Wrangham, Richard Wriston, Walter Wu, Emperor of China Wu Zhao (Empress Wu) Xia Dynasty Xian, Duke Xianbei tribe Xiang Yu Xiao, Duke Xiao-wen, Emperor of China Xin dynasty Xiongnu tribe Xi Xia tribe Xu, Empress of China Xun Zi Yale University Yan, Empress of China Yangdi, Emperor of China Yang family Yang Jian Yangshao period Yanomamö Indians Y chromosome Yellow Turban rebellion Ying Zheng Young Turk movement Yuan Dynasty Yuezhi Yugoslavia Yurok Indians Yushchenko, Viktor Zaire Zakaria, Fareed zemskiy sobor zero-sum games Zhang Shicheng Zhao Kuangyin Zheng He Zhongzong, Emperor of China Zhou Dynasty; bureaucracy during; Confucianism during; Eastern (see also Spring and Autumn period; Warring States period); feudalism of; Later; Mandate of Heaven and; Western Zhu Yuangzhang Zi Chan Zoloft Zoroastrianism A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Resident at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He has taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. He was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the deputy director in the State Department’s policy planning staff. He is the author of The End of History and the Last Man, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. He lives with his wife in Palo Alto, California.


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

Three years ago the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy published a report on the drug war by ex-Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, and César Gaviria of Colombia calling for decriminalizing marijuana and treating drug use as a public-health problem. Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane. Experience conforms to these conclusions. By far the most lethal substance is tobacco, which also kills nonusers at a high rate (passive smoking).


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Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Since every major computer manufacturer was following a proprietary strategy designed to prevent connections between dissimilar systems, the Arpanet represented a government-funded project that sought to compensate for this evident market failure.14 The most distinctive attribute of the Arpanet was its reliance on packet-switching, a new method of transmitting data across telephone lines that had been invented independently in the mid-1960s by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation and Donald Davies at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Where traditional circuit-switched telephone networks required a direct, dedicated connection between users, packet-switched networks broke data into discrete blocks, which Davies dubbed “packets,” that contained basic information about their places of origin and destination.

See Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company 119 Pack, Robert 117 Packet Communications 176 Packet-switching 167–168, 186 Padlipsky, Michael A. 243, 245 Parsons, Frank 28, 33, 34–35 Parsons, Talcott 10 Pelkey, James 187 Phillips, Charles 150, 151 Philosophy of Science (journal) 10 Pipe Manufacturers Association 46 Piscitello, David 244, 250 Plan Calcul 162 Popper, Karl 9, 10 Post Office Act of 1792 266 Postel, Jon 187, 234, 235, 237, 242–243, 258, 259 Pouzin, Louis Cyclades and 163–164, 170, 190–193 datagram service versus virtual circuit service 177 generally 23, 163, 197, 209, 211, 233, 240–241, 242, 280 IFIP and 174 INWG and 170–171, 173–174, 175, 182–190, 193–195, 198 open systems and 206 OSI and 220–221, 224, 225 on X.25 data transmission standard 180–182 Proceedings of the IEEE 222 Progressivism 61 Pupin, Michael 105 Raff, Daniel 265 RAND Corporation 167, 168 Raunig, Gerald 5 Raymond, Eric 15 RCA 134, 145 Reagan, Ronald 146–147, 276 Roberts, Lawrence 166, 178, 187, 236 Roberts, Warren R. 63 Rohlfs, Jeffrey 197 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 63 Rosa, Edward B. 63, 66–67 Rose, Marshall T. 230–231, 244–246 Rosenblueth, Arturo 10 Ross, Hugh McGregor 210 “Rough consensus and running code,” 229–233, 254–255 Routing and Addressing (ROAD) Working Group 248–249 Rowland, Henry 38–39 Ruina, Jack 165–166 Rybczynski, Tony 178, 179 Safety codes 74 Sarnoff, David 134 SC6 (ISO) 202–203 SC16 (ISO) 203–204 see also Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Scantlebury, Roger 182, 185, 187, 189–190 Schumacher, E.F. 157 Schumpeter, Joseph 5 Scott, Howard 58–59, 93 Scott, W.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Manchester University's Mark I prototype ran the first fully electronic stored program on June 2 I of the same year. Researches were under way on the EDSAC (at Cambridge University), UNIVAC and BINAC (first at the Moore School, and then at John P. Eckert's and John W. Maulchy's Electronic Control Company), ILLIAC (at the Uni- versity of Illinois), JOHNNIAC (at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California), MANIAC (at Los Alamos Laboratories, New Mexico), and most importantly, WHIRLWIND (at MIT).6 In the United States, these computing projects were all connected to mili- tary research and development activities in one way or another. By 1948, the Office of Naval Research was funding 40 percent of al/ basic research, and most advances in computing research were classified. 7 In August 1949, the So- viet Union exploded an atomic bomb, and the Cold War climate settled in, without any prospect for a thaw.

In Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, edited by R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. Buxton, and S. Greenberg, pp. 469-82. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann. AvaIlable on-line at http:// www.dgp.toronto.ed/OTP/papers/bill.buxton Ihaptic.html. Baran, P. et al. 1964. "On DIstnbuted Communications." RAND Corporation Memos, vols. I-I I. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND. Bardini, T., and A. T. Horvath. 1995. "The Social ConstructIon of the Personal Com- puter User: The Rise and Fall of the Reflexive User." Journal of CommunI- catIon 45, no. 3: 4 0 - 6 5. Bateson, G. I977. "Afterword." In About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson, ed- ited by J.


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What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 94 World Population Forecasts: Data from United Nations Population Division. (2002) “World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision.” http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2002/WPP2002-HIGHLIGHTSrev1.pdf. 94 that is, for the next 300 years: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. (2004) “World Population to 2300.” http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf. 95 Estimated Long-Range World Population: Data from United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. (2004) “World Population to 2300.” http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf. 95 every country in Europe is below 2.0: Rand Corporation. (2005) “Population Implosion? Low Fertility and Policy Responses in the European Union.” http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9126/index1.html. 95 Japan is at 1.34: (2008, June 24) “Negligible Rise in Fertility Rate.” Japan Times Online. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20080624a1.html. 96 Recent Fertility Rates in Europe: Data from Rand Corporation. (2005) “Population Implosion? Low Fertility and Policy Responses in the European Union.” http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9126/index1.html. 100 “would have turned out to be right”: Julian Lincoln Simon. (1995) The State of Humanity.


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Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

People were scared that these stories might be true, confused about what to believe, and unsure about how to deal with this flood of negative stories. Censorship by disinformation focuses on attention as the key resource to be destroyed and credibility and legitimacy as the key components necessary for a public sphere that can support dissident views—or indeed, any coherent views. Rand Corporation researchers refer to this phenomenon as the “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model.18 The primary goal is simple: “to confuse and overwhelm” the audience.19 As in many such cases, it is impossible to pin down responsibility for the campaign, but “numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V.

Jon Henley, “Russia Waging Information War against Sweden, Study Finds,” Guardian, January 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/11/russia-waging-information-war-in-sweden-study-finds; Martin Kragh and Sebastian Åsberg, “Russia’s Strategy for Influence through Public Diplomacy and Active Measures: The Swedish Case,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2017): 1–44. 18. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It,” Rand Corporation, 2016, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf. 19. Giorgio Bertolin, “Conceptualizing Russian Information Operations: Info-War and Infiltration in the Context of Hybrid Warfare,” IO Sphere (Summer 2015): 10. 20. Neil Macfarquhar, “A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories,” New York Times, August 28, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html. 21.


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The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most

Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, independent contractor, Menlo Park, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, safety bicycle, streetcar suburb, transcontinental railway

All Beach had done was to use the power of suggestion to push mankind to imagine the possibilities of technology, to think big, not small, to always ask, Why not? instead of merely, Why? A century after Beach’s dream died, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times under the headline L.A. TO N.Y. IN HALF AN HOUR? The article in 1972 went on to describe the acclaimed RAND Corporation physicist Robert M. Salter’s dream of digging a tunnel along the routes of U.S. highways that crossed the country. Tubes inside the tunnel would carry trains that floated on electromagnetic fields—at top speeds of ten thousand miles per hour. The cars would float on the fields just as a surfboard rides on the ocean’s waves.

In New York, 1.7 billion trips: MTA Facts and Figures, http://www.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm; “MBTA Ridership Hits New Record,” Boston Globe, July 31, 2012. an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “L.A. to N.Y. in Half an Hour?,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1972. “Safe, convenient, low-cost, efficient”: Robert M. Salter, “Trans-Planetary Subway Systems,” The Rand Paper Series, The Rand Corporation, February 1978, 1. BIBLIOGRAPHY Blodgett, Geoffrey. The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Bobrick, Benson. Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War. New York: Henry Holt, 1981. _____.


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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Despite the hype, their numbers weren’t magical—indeed, key metrics that determined major war decisions were often chosen not because they were the best, but because they were easiest to calculate.28 One military report on the bombing effort following the war found that Stat Control methods had been an “overall disappointment.” Even the RAND Corporation, the shadowy, pseudomilitary institution that actually developed the systems analysis techniques later deployed by McNamara at the War Department, issued a self-critical report in 1950, saying its methods had been too rigid and reactive. This internal report, authored by a RAND engineer, noted that “the great dangers inherent in the systems analysis approach…are that factors which we aren’t yet in a position to treat quantitatively tend to be omitted from serious consideration.

Byrne, The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business—and the Legacy They Left Us (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 36. 27. Ibid., 50; Abraham Zaleznik, “The Education of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense, 1961–1968,” Revue Française de Gestion 6, no. 159 (2005). 28. David R. Jardini, “Out of the Blue Yonder: The RAND Corporation’s Diversification into Social Welfare Research, 1946–1968” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1996); Gabor, The Capitalist Philosophers, 136. 29. E. J. Barlow, “Preliminary Proposal for Air Defense Study,” RAND Archives D(L)-816-2, October 1950, quoted in Jardini, “Out of the Blue Yonder,” 67. 30.


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Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Although it’s true that some petrostates have ties to terrorism—Iran being an obvious example—it’s just as true that Iran and other oil exporters cannot be isolated from the global oil market. Terrorism isn’t an ideology, it’s a tactic, a cheap tactic, and it doesn’t depend on petrodollars. In May 2009, the Rand Corporation, one of the oldest defensefocused think tanks in Washington, released a report concluding that America’s “reliance on imported oil is not by itself a major national security threat.” The report went on to debunk the claim that oil and terrorism are related, saying, “Terrorist attacks cost so little to perpetrate that attempting to curtail terrorist financing through measures affecting the oil market will not be effective.”11 Many people may be worried about peak oil, but those concerns frequently ignore the fundamentals of the marketplace.

v=TUxwiVFgghE. 5 For Romm’s rantings, see Climateprogress.org. 6 Set America Free, “Set America Free Update E-mail,” January 29, 2007, www.setamericafree.org/safupdate012907.htm. 7 Environment New Jersey, “Report Says Fossil Fuels Status Quo Will Cost New Jersey Billions; Urges Clean Energy Solutions,” June 30, 2009, http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/newsroom/energy/energy-program-news/report-says-fossil-fuels-status-quo-will-cost-new-jersey-billions-urges-clean-energy-solutions. 8 These issues are fully discussed in my last book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008). 9 Energy Information Administration, “Petroleum Navigator,” http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mttexus2M.htm. 10 Energy Information Administration, “Country Energy Profiles,” http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/index.cfm. 11 Keith Crane, Andreas Goldthau, Michael Toman, Thomas Light, Stuart E. Johnson, Alireza Nader, Angel Rabasa, and Harun Dogo, “Imported Oil and US National Security,” Rand Corporation, May 11, 2009, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG838.pdf, xvi. 12 Edward Gismatullin, “BP Makes ‘Giant’ Oil Discovery in Gulf of Mexico,” Bloomberg, September 2, 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=adF31W9._rik. 13 BP press release, September 2, 2009, http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?


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Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

This is a very common analogy used by drug reformers, and I suspect it was thought of by many of us simultaneously. The earliest example of its use that I can find is on page 68 of James Gray’s Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It. 17 Jeffrey Miron, Drug War Crimes, 47. 18 Miron, Drug War Crimes, 48. 19 Ibid., 51. The RAND Corporation has interesting research on this, too. See http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP325.pdf, accessed January 14, 2014. Chapter 6: Hard to Be Harry 1 They were: Joe Arpaio in Arizona; Leigh Maddox in Maryland; Stephen Dowling in New York City; Fred Martens in New Jersey; Howard Wooldridge in Washington, D.C.; João Figueira in Lisbon; Joe Toft in Reno, Nevada; Michael Levine in upstate New York; Neil Franklin in Baltimore; Peter Moskos in New York City; Olivier Gueniat in Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Terry Nelson in Fort Worth, Texas; Marisol Valles García in the United States.

Miron notes that it has been falling before national prohibition was introduced; but this may be because most states had introduced their own prohibitions during this period. 35 MacCoun and Reuter, Drug War Heresies, 28. 36 Tom Feiling, The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, 270. 37 There were some caveats to his support for legalization; these emerged in our conversation. 38 http://norml.org/news/1999/01/07/dutch-marijuana-use-half-that-of-america-study-reveals, accessed December 2, 2013; see also “Addiction” doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03572.x; Robert J. MacCoun, “What Can We Learn from the Dutch Coffee Shop System?” Working Paper for Rand Corporation. As accessed http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/working_papers/2010/RAND_WR768.pdf on June 24, 2014. 39 See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47064492/ns/msnbc_tv-hardball_with_chris_matthews/t/hardball-chris-matthews-monday-april/#.T9-Ds82TSqk, accessed May 1, 2012. 40 For good references, read Jacob Sullum’s account of Hart’s theories, at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/11/04/everything-youve-heard-about-crack-and-meth-is-wrong/, accessed November 10, 2013.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

The papers convinced the Supreme Court that the First Amendment prohibited prior restraint of the press’s right to publish the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study of the events between 1945 and 1967 that led to America’s deep involvement in the Vietnam War. (The Boston Globe also had a set of the Papers that it proceeded to publish, but its litigation lagged behind and was mooted when the Supreme Court ruled for the Times and Post.) It was leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time worked for the Rand Corporation, a private think tank that conducted the highly classified project. Nixon and members of his administration were furious about the publication, which began its run one morning in what was described as a multi-part series, and was seen by administration press critics as more a demonstration of media power and hubris than a public-spirited revelation meant to enlighten citizens and history.

Fortunately for the reporters, Seymour responded “[n]ot in this District.”12 Soon thereafter, Watergate came to the media’s rescue.13 Nixon’s Justice Department lost its attempt to get a court order barring publication of the Pentagon Papers, and it never brought criminal charges against the newspapers, publishers, editors, and reporters. However, Nixon’s prosecutors did bring espionage charges against Daniel Ellsberg, the former Rand Corporation employee who had smuggled a copy of the study to the Times and other newspapers. This was hardly unexpected. Ellsberg had clearly violated the terms of his security clearance and had conveyed admittedly classified documents to the news media. He was the leaker from within who blew the whistle, even though he was clearly prohibited by law from doing so.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

When I met Mert in 1999 he and Louise had been married for more than fifty years. Just after the war, Davies heard that a think tank within Douglas was working on a paper for the Air Force about the possible uses of an artificial satellite. He applied to join the team more or less on the spot. The think tank soon became independent from Douglas and, as the RAND Corporation, it went on to play a major role in defining America’s national-security technologies and strategies throughout the Cold War. In the early 1950s Davies and his colleagues looked at ways to use television cameras in space in order to send back images of the Soviet Union. Then they developed the idea of using film instead of television—experience with spy cameras on balloons showed that the picture quality could be phenomenal—and returning the exposed frames to Earth in little canisters.

See Mars (ocean) Olympus Mons, 44, 45–46, 47–48, 96, 99, 110, 115n, 137–38, 140, 146, 179 difficulties involved in representing, 135 “On the Origin of Hypotheses” (Gilbert), 71, 83 Ophir, 101 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 237 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 9 Out of the Cradle (Hartmann/Miller/Lee), 289 Oyama, Vance, 300 Pacific Edge (Robinson), 176 Paine, Thomas, 238, 260, 272 Panetta, Leon, 253–54 Pardee, Joseph Thomas, 190–91 Parker, Tim, 184–88, 200–206, 213, 228, 234, 298 Pavonis Mons, 98, 102 Penrose, Roger, 213n Pesek, Ludwig, 130, 319 Phlegra Montes, 123 Pieri, David, 164, 188 Pigwad (Planetary Interactive GIS-on-the Web Analyzable Database), 240 Pilcher, Carl, 67–68, 70 Pioneer Astronautics, 273 Pioneer mission, 61 “Pioneering the Space Frontier” (Paine), 246, 260 Place and Placelessness (Relph), 222–23 Planetary Explorer program, 65 Planetary Society, 30 Planetfest, 32, 35–36, 42 Planum Australe, 104, 105–6 Pohl, Frederik, 173–75, 178, 179 Pollack, James, 46, 100, 121, 158–60, 304 Poor, Kim, 92, 131 Poss, Richard, 132, 133 Poundstone, William, 100 Pournelle, Jerry, 178 Powell, John Wesley, 79, 148 Proctor, Richard, 14 Protonilus Mensae, 104, 186 Ptolemaus (crater), 2 Rainbow Mars (Niven), 213n Raine, Craig, 19 RAND Corporation, 23, 24 Rawlings, Pat, 32, 134, 290 Reagan, Ronald, 185 Red Mars (Robinson), 36, 108n, 177, 179, 186, 289, 319, 322 Red Planet (film), 290, 290n Red Planet (Hemlein), 178 “Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, The” (Bogdanov), 178 Relph, Edward, 222–23 Return to Utopia (Rawlings), 32 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 36, 108n, 173–83, 205n, 213n, 257n, 281, 289, 308, 310–11, 319, 322, 323 Roddenberry, Gene, 264 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 324–25 Royal Astronomical Society, 12 Royal Greenwich Observatory, 10–11 Sacks, Oliver, 19 Sagan, Carl, 30, 42, 46, 95, 96, 100, 108n, 158, 197, 227, 234, 240, 257, 268, 303, 304–5 San Juan Mountains (Colorado), 91 Sanchez, Anthony, 53, 55 Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada (O’Sullivan), 237 Sands of Mars, The (Clarke), 219, 303 Saturn, 131, 132, 133 Saturn V, 31, 316 Saunders, Steve, 188 Schama, Simon, 324n Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 15–16, 21, 44, 96, 100, 101n, 102 Schiaparelli (crater), 102–3 Schrödinger, Irwin, 301 Schmitt, Harrison, 57 Schubert, Frank, 275, 276 Schultz, Peter, 144–45, 150, 222 Science (journal), 68, 190, 210, 211, science fiction, 17, 36, 93, 135–36, 173–83, 289–90, 319–23 and Martian giganticism, 108n See also individual authors Scott, Dave, 112–16, 115n, 117, 150, 167–72, 324 Scott, Robert Falcon, 30 Scout missions, 287 Secchi, Father Angelo, 14, 155 Secchi Continent, 14 Secret of Life, The (McAuley), 271n Seed, David, 175 Service, Robert W., 141 Shakespeare, William, 324–25 Sharp, Bob, 24, 163, 164 Sheffield, Charles, 180 Shergotty meteorites, 139, 247 Shelley, Percy, 173 Shiner, Lewis, 289 Shirley, Donna, 61n Shoemaker, Gene, 84–92, 95, 148, 150, 162, 254, 324–25 Shultz, Peter, 254 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 263, 264 “Significance of the Martian Frontier, The” (Zubrin), 265 Silent Spring (Carson), 300 Simud Vallis, 96, 102 Sinai Planum, 101 Sleep, Norm, 122–23, 124, 313 Smith, Brad, 40, 42 Smith, David, 63–64, 65, 69–70 Smith, Peter, 69, 100, 233–34, 235, 236, 239, 239, 315n Smithsonian Air & Space Museum (Washington, D.C.), 322 SNC meteorites, 249 Snell, Willebrord, 25 Snyder, Gary, 180n Soderblom, Larry, 42, 166–67 Solis Lacus, 16 Solis Planum, 101, 102 South Spot (Arsia Mons), 44, 46, 98 Space Shuttle, 60–61 Space Task Group, 60 “Spell of the Yukon, The” (Service), 141 Sputnik, 85 Squyres, Steve, 119 Star Trek, 93 Stoker, Carol, 244, 246, 263, 276, 293 Storm, Bob, 196 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 19, 156, 302n Strickland, Ed, 134n Sturgeon, Theodore, 319 Surface of Mars, The (Carr), 163 Syria Planum, 101 Syrtis Major Planum, 13, 14, 15, 103 See also Hourglass Sea Taber, Frank, 324–25 Tanaka, Kenneth, 112, 211, 240 Teapot Ess, 86 Tempe Terra, 186 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 18, 48 Terra Meridiani, 102, 143, 203, 205–206, 232, 287 Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (Fogg), 315 Tharsis, 15, 46, 98–101, 112, 145, 179 Titan, 316 Tithonium Chasma, 101 Tiu Vallis, 41–42, 96, 102 Tolkien, J.R.R., 309 TOPS probes, 61 “Transit of Earth” (Clarke), 319 Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System, The (Hartmann/Miller), 130–31, 136 See also Grand Tour, The Triton, 96, 214 true polar wander, 144–45 Truman, Harry, 264 Tucson Mafia, 196, 209 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 110–11, 263–64 Turner, J.M.W., 131, 132 Turrell, James, 73, 297 Tyrrhena Patera, 103 Tyrrhenian Sea, 15 “Under the Surface” (Brown), 153 Understanding Comics (McCloud), 116 United States Geological Survey (USGS), 40, 84, 88 Apollo missions, contribution to, 167 Gilbert building, 93, 94, 94n given Mars mapping role, 50 as link between Mars and the West, 85–88 Mars Digital Image Mosaic, 57 1:15,000,000 maps, 3–4 1:5,000,000 maps, 57 Pigwad, development of, 240 University of Washington Department of Nuclear Engineering, 254 Utopia Planitia, 2, 16, 104, 119–21 Valles Marineris, 46–47, 57, 101, 101n, 102, 121, 135, 143, 169 Grand Canyon, compared with, 146–48 influence on fictional landing sites, 289–90 “Value of Outrageous Geological Hypotheses, The” (Davis), 184 van Hoogstraten, Samuel, 49 Van Sant, Tom, 297 Vastitas Borealis, 97, 119 Venus, 81, 109n, 170, 214, 236n, 304 Verne, Jules, 295 Victoria, Queen, 58n Viking (missions), 2, 28, 39–40, 61, 184, 234n, 322 color cameras, 99–101, 228–30 crater pictures, 76 exobiology experiments, 301–2 landing sites, 227–28 picture archive, 193, 198, 234 replica lander, 322 success of, 61 Thomas Mutch Memorial Station, 322 “Viking Results—The Case for Man on Mars, The” (Clark), 243, 245 Vishniac, Wolf, 247, 300 von Braun, Wernher, 132, 260 Von Braun Planitia, 275 Voyage (Baxter), 289 Voyage to the Red Planet (Bisson), 289 Voyager, 214 Wagner, Richard, 267 Wallace, Alfred, 211–12 Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist (Friedrich), 134–25 Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons), 134–37 Watkins, Carleton, 235, 237 Watson, Ian, 174–75, 178, 179 Weinbaum, Stanley, 3 Wells, H.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

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

Licklider at the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) proposed an ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’ and described many of the aspects that would become the internet infrastructure. When Licklider started working at ARPA, he convinced his colleagues to work with network technology. The ‘package-sharing’ way of sending information was borrowed by American and British academics, and also suggested at the RAND Corporation. More networks were developed and there was a need for more efficient communication between them. ARPA’s Robert Kahn, also from BBN, together with Vint Cerf at Stanford University created the TCP/IP protocol that linked the networks into an open architecture. Since the pioneers primarily wanted to share processor time at mainframe computers, they could have made the decision to block other applications.

(Fukuyama), 362–5 End of Work, The (Rifkin), 312 Engels, Friedrich, 33, 36, 162, 206, 247, 256 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Enigma machine, 124–6 Enlightenment, 4, 5, 6, 13, 103, 154–60, 165–6, 195–6 Environmental Performance Index, 327 Ephesus, 45 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 38 Epicurus, 134–5 Epstein, Richard, 320 equality matching, 262–6, 267 Erasmus, 152 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 354 Ethiopia, 72, 130 ethnocentrism, 219, 271 Etruscan civilization (c. 900–27 BC), 43 Eubulus, 47 eugenics, 109 Euphrates river, 37 Euripides, 132 European Organization for Nuclear Research, 306 European Parliament, 325 European Union (EU) Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 common currency, 280–81 freedom of movement, 118, 343 migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 342–3, 358 subsidies in, 280 trade and, 272 United States, trade with, 19 Evans, Oliver, 203 Evolution of God, The (Wright), 249 evolutionary psychology, 14, 23, 225 exoticism, 84 Expressionism, 198 Facebook, 239, 309 Falwell, Jerry, 113–14 Farage, Nigel, 241 farming, see agriculture Fascist Italy (1922–1943), 105, 219 FedEx, 319 Feifer, Jason, 290–92 Fenway Park, Boston, 223 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 97, 98, 106 Ferguson, Charles, 314 Fermi, Enrico, 105 Ferney, France, 153 feudalism, 92, 194, 202, 208 fight-or-flight instinct, 15, 346, 348–9 filter bubbles, 239 financial crisis (2008), 10, 15, 62, 254, 333, 358, 359–60 fire, control of, 32–3, 76 Flanders, 208 fluyts, 100 Flynn effect, 109 Fogel, Robert, 276 folk economics, 258–62 football, 223–4, 245–6 Forbes, 274 Ford, Henry, 203 Fortune 500 companies, 82 Fox News, 82, 302, 354 France, 151 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 201 automation in, 313 Cathars, 94, 142 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 corruption in, 345 Dutch War (1672–8), 101 Encyclopédie, 154 free zones in, 180–81 Huguenots, persecution of, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 immigration in, 115 Jews, persecution of, 96, 97, 254 languages in, 289 Minitel, 313 Revolution (1789–99), 201, 292 Royal Academy of Sciences, 156 ruin follies, 287 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 Thököly Uprising (1678–85), 137 Uber in, 320 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 Francis I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, 178 Franciscans, 144 Franklin, Benjamin, 107 Franks, 92 free speech, 127, 131–2, 160, 163–5, 343 Chicago principles, 164–5 emigration for, 152–3 university campuses, 163–5 free trade, see under trade Fried, Dan, 289 Friedman, Benjamin, 253 Friedman, David, 284 Friedman, Thomas, 325 Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, 153 Fukuyama, Francis, 362–5 Fulda, Germany, 179, 180 Future and Its Enemies, The (Postrel), 300 Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 288 Galatia, 90 Galaxy Zoo, 80 Galilei, Galileo, 146, 150 Gallup, 164 game theory, 26 Gandhi, Indira, 326 gas lighting, 297 Gates, William ‘Bill’, 274, 277, 309 Gauls, 90, 91, 92 gay rights, 113, 336 Geary, Patrick, 288–9 gender equality, 113, 114 General Motors, 64 generations baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 generation X (1965–80), 340 immigration and, 106, 110–11, 113–14 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 nostalgia and, 291, 293–4, 296 genetically modified organisms (GMO), 299, 301 Geneva, Switzerland, 152, 153 Genghis Khan, 94–5, 96, 174 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 193 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 103, 193 George Mason University, 257, 258 Georgia, 365 Georgia, United States, 349 German Conservative Party, 254 Germany automatic looms, 179 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Bronze Age migration, 75 budget deficits, 60 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 guilds in, 190 immigration in, 114, 115 Jews, persecution of, 99, 104–6, 109, 220, 233 migration crisis (2015–), 342–3 Nazi period (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Neolithic migration, 74 protectionism in, 314 Reichstag fire (1933), 353 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 United States, migration to, 104, 107–8, 111 Weimar period (1918–33), 353 al-Ghazali, 139 Gholia, 89 Gibbon, Edward, 90 Gilder, George, 314 Gilgamesh, 38 Gillis, John, 291 Gingrich, Newton, 313 Gini coefficient, 273 Gintis, Herbert, 36 global history, 13 global price crisis (2010–11), 11 global warming, 75, 323, 325, 326–34 globalization, 4, 55, 270 backlashes against, 9, 14, 54, 57 cities and, 35 classical world, 43–50 conspiracy theories on, 323 disease and, 11, 77–9 United States and, 19 Westernization, 4 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 Goa, India, 146–7 golden nugget theory, 5 Golden Rule, 251–2 Golding, William, 219, 243, 244 Goldstone, Jack, 5, 133, 353 Goodness Paradox, The (Wrangham), 227 Google, 309, 311 Gordon, Thomas, 201 Göring, Hermann, 106 gossip, 229 Goths, 92 Gottlieb, Anthony, 135 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 56, 254 Great Enrichment, 167, 204 Great Recession (2007–9), 254–5, 358, 359–60 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 37 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Great Wall of China, 178 Greece, ancient, 127–32, 169 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131–2, 134 Axial Age, 129 cosmopolitanism, 87–8 golden nugget theory, 5 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 Mycenae, 88 philosophy, 13, 70, 127–32, 134–5, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44, 45, 46 science, 127–32, 136 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 trade, attitudes towards, 47, 54 xenophobia in, 90 Green New Deal, 302 Greene, Joshua, 216, 259 Greenland, 51 Gregorian calendar, 137, 152 Gregory IX, Pope, 142 Gregory XIII, Pope, 152 gross domestic product (GDP), 68–9, 257, 278–9 Grotius, Hugo, 147, 152–3 groupthink, 83 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 352 guilds, 190 Gutenberg, Johannes, 146 Haber, Fritz, 105 Habsburg Empire (1282–1918) anti-Semitism in, 254 Austria, 151, 179, 190 refugees, 99 Spain, 98–9, 208 Hadrian, Roman Emperor, 91 Hadrian’s Wall, 47 Hagley Park, West Midlands, 286–7 Haidt, Jonathan, 163, 229, 344, 348, 357 Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 72 Hamas, 365 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 173 Hanseatic League (1358–1862), 53 Hanson, Robin, 282 Hanway, Jonas, 298 Happy Days, 294 Harari, Yuval Noah, 38 Harriot, Thomas, 150 Hartsoeker, Nicolaas, 159 Harvard Business Review, 313 Harvard University, 116, 122, 137, 253, 309, 313 Haskell, Thomas, 206 Hässelby, Stockholm, 217–18, 245 Hayashi, Stuart, 370 Hayek, Friedrich, 1, 7, 29, 300, 325 Hebrew Bible, 248–50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 288, 365 Helm, Dieter, 328, 331 Henrich, Joseph, 36 Hercules, 87 Herodotus, 132 Hewlett-Packard, 304 Higgs, Robert, 337 Hill, Christopher, 182 Hinduism, 136, 149, 354 von Hippel, William, 24, 25, 262, 284 Hippocrates, 128 Hispanic people, 110–11 Hitler, Adolf, 104–5, 353 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 152, 226 Hofer, Johannes, 288 Holmgren, Pär, 325 Holocaust (1941–5), 109, 220 Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), 155, 181, 288 Homestead Acts, 171 Homo economicus, 34, 36 Homo erectus, 76, 267 Homo sapiens, 3, 21, 23, 30–33, 76, 259–62, 282, 371 homosexuality, 79, 113–14, 336 Homs, Syria, 82 Honeywell, 303 Hong Kong, 53, 235, 316 Hoover, Herbert, 55 horseshoes, 203 House of Wisdom, Baghdad, 136 Household Narrative, The, 297 housing, 375–6 Huguenots, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 human rights, 87, 147, 213 humanitarianism, 204–7 Hume, David, 151, 154, 194 Hungary, 105, 190, 235, 237, 354, 357 hunkering down, 121, 165 Huns, 93 hunter-gatherer societies death rate, 9 disease and, 78 division of labour and, 29, 32, 40–41, 57 equality matching, 262–3, 265 inbreeding and, 78 isolation and, 52 migration, 73–4, 78–9 physical fallacy, 268 race and, 232 trade, 265 tyranny of cousins, 230 Huntington, Samuel, 110, 362–3, 365–6 Hussein, Saddam, 345 Hussey, Edward, 287 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 165 Hutus, 230–31 Hypatia, 134 hyper-fast stars, 80 IBM, 305, 307, 319 Ibn al-Haytham, 156 Ibn Hayyan, Jabir, 156 Ibn Rushd, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 ice core drilling, 49 Identity & Violence (Sen), 231 identity politics, 241 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 137 immigration birth rates and, 115 crime and, 110, 119 culture and, 69–73, 116, 119, 120–23 disgust and, 336, 371 division of labour and, 117 empires and, 84–106 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 118, 342–3 exoticism, 84 GDP and, 68 innovation and, 81–4 Islam and, 112–14, 255 labour market and, 115, 116–19 opposition to, 69, 70, 114–23, 223, 254–5 productivity and, 68, 81, 117, 204 protectionism and, 66–7 self-selection and, 107, 112 skilled vs unskilled, 66, 82, 102, 116, 117 trade and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 tribalism and, 223, 235–6, 240, 243 urban vs rural areas, 114 welfare and, 118, 281 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 immigration in United States, 102–14 crime and, 110, 119 innovation and, 81–2, 202 overestimation of, 115, 223 tribalism and, 223, 240 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 In Defence of Global Capitalism (Norberg), 270 in vitro fertilization, 298–9 inbreeding, 78 India, 42, 45, 46, 56, 75, 129, 136, 140, 146, 270 Arabic numerals, 70, 137 engineering in, 269 Hindu nationalism, 354 industrialization, 207 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 national stereotypes, 235 Pakistan, relations with, 366 pollution in, 326 poverty in, 276, 326 Indo-European language, 75 Indonesia, 41 Industrial Revolution; industrialization, 5, 6, 13, 54, 132, 180, 339 in Britain, 182, 188–99, 202 in China, 169, 172–3, 207 climate change and, 326 in Dutch Republic, 101 in India, 207 in Japan, 71 in United States, 202, 291–2 in Vietnam, 207 inequality, 273, 349 Inglehart, Ronald, 339 ingroups and outgroups, 217–47 fluidity, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42 zero-sum relationships and, 252–5 Innocent III, Pope, 233 InnoCentive, 126–7 innovation, 4, 6, 10, 27, 80 ancient world, 32, 42, 44, 46 authoritarianism and, 318 bureaucratic inertia and, 318–21 canon and, 195 cities and, 40, 53, 79 creative destruction, 57, 179, 182, 190 cultural evolution, 28 immigration and 81–4 patent systems, 189–90 population and, 27, 51, 53 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 resistance to, 10, 179–81 zero-sum thinking and, 266–9 Inquisition, 150 France, 94, 143 Portugal, 100 Spain, 97, 98 intellectual property, 58 Intergalactic Computer Network, 307 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 117 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312, 313 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 Inuit, 22, 51 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 IQ (intelligence quotient), 109 Iran, 365 Ireland, 104, 108–9, 111, 112, 379 iron, 172 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 97 Isaiah, 46 Isaura Palaia, Galatia, 90 Isenberg, Daniel, 296 Isis, 89 Islam; Islamic world Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 365 conflict within, 365 efflorescence, 6, 53, 136–41 fundamentalism, 112, 134, 139, 351 Koran, 137, 250–51 migration from, 112–14 orthodox backlash, 148–9 philosophy, 5, 13 science, 70, 132, 136–41 values in, 112, 113 Islamic State, 351, 365–6 Islamic world, 5, 6, 13, 53, 70 Israel, 111, 365 Italy, 6, 151, 169 anti-Semitism in, 254 Fascist period (1922–1943), 105 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 guilds in, 190 Lombard League (1167–1250), 181 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Padua, 144, 146 Papacy in, 155, 181 Renaissance, 6, 150, 153, 169 United States, migration to, 104, 109 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Jacobs, Jane, 39–40, 79, 264 James II and VII, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 185–6 Jamestown, Virginia, 200 Japan housing in, 376 kimonos, 73 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 protectionism, 314 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 United States, migration to, 104, 236, 335 Japanning, 156 JavaScript, 310 jealous emulation, 154–7 jeans, 73 Jefferson, Thomas, 103, 184, 201, 205 Jenner, Edward, 296 Jerusalem, 87, 251 Jesus, 250 Jews in Abbasid Caliphate, 136 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Ashkenazim, 99 Babylonian captivity, 87, 249 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50 Black Death and, 355–6 in Britain, 101, 193 in Dutch Republic, 99, 100, 150 in Germany, 99, 104–6, 109, 111, 254 Inquisition and, 97, 98 in Israel, 111 Mongol invasion and, 95 Muhammed and, 251 Nazirites, 72 in Ottoman Empire, 98 persecution of, 11, 95–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 355–6 in Poland, 111, 220 in Roman Empire, 90, 93, 94 Sephardim, 99 in Song Empire, 170 in Spain, 97, 98, 99, 140 in United States, 102, 109 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Job Buddy, 375 Jobless Future, The (Aronowitz), 312 Jobs, Steven, 82, 304 John Chrysostom, 135 John III Sobieski, King of Poland, 237, 238 Johnson, Samuel, 191, 197 Johnson, Steven, 306 Jones, Rhys, 51 Joule, James Prescott, 196 Judaism, 46, 72, 93, 94, 96, 97 Jupiter, 145 Jurchen people, 172 Justinian I, Byzantine Emperor, 134, 224 Kahn, Robert, 307 Kandinsky, Wassily, 220–21, 289 Kant, Immanuel, 154 Karakorum, Mongol Empire, 96 al-Karaouine, Morocco, 137 Kearney, Denis, 109 keels, 44 Kenya, 21–2 Khayyam, Omar, 137 al-Khwarizmi, 137 Kiesling, Lynne, 328 Kim Jong-il, 314–15 kimonos, 73 King, Martin Luther, 19 King, Steven, 111 Kipling, Rudyard, 70 Klee, Paul, 220–21, 289 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Kodak, 319 Koran, 137, 250–51 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 37, 292 Krastev, Ivan, 342–3 Krugman, Paul, 309 Ku Klux Klan, 254 Kublai Khan, 174 Kurds, 136 Kushim, 37–8 labour mobility, 69, 374–7 lacquerware, 156 lactose, 75 Lao Tzu, 129 lapis lazuli, 70 Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 Lebanon, 43, 236 Lee, William, 179 leisure, 199 Lenin, Vladimir, 256 Lesbos, 141 Levellers, 183–4, 186 Leviathan (Hobbes), 152 Levinovitz, Alan Jay, 290 Levy, David, 205 Lewis, David Levering, 140 Libanius, 49 liberalism, 14, 183, 334–40 colonialism and, 214 disgust and, 335, 336 dynamism and, 301 economic, 185, 336 Islam and, 112–14 security and, 334–40, 378 slave trade and, 205 universities and, 163 Libya, 48, 89, 366 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett, 307 life expectancy, 4, 169, 339 light bulbs, 297 Lilburne, John, 183 Lincoln, Abraham, 203 Lind, Amanda, 72 Lindsey, Brink, 301 literacy, 15, 57, 168 in Britain, 188, 198 in China, 148 in Dark Ages, 50 empathy and, 246–7 in Greece, 128–9 in Renaissance, 146, 148 Lithuania, 238 Little Ice Age, 148 lobbying, 280, 329 Locke, John, 100, 152, 185, 186, 201 Lombard League, 181 London, England, 190, 193–4, 197 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 Long Depression (1873–86), 253–4 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 219, 243, 244 Lord’s Resistance Army, 365 Louis IX, King of France, 96 Louis XIV, King of France, 237 Louis XVI, King of France, 201 love, 199 Lucas, Robert, 167 Lucy, 24–5 Lugh, 89 Lul, 111 Luther, Martin, 150, 356 Lutheranism, 99, 356 Lüthi, Max, 351 Lysenko, Trofim, 162 Lyttelton family, 286 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Macedonian Empire (808–148 BC), 84, 87–9 Madison, James, 337 madrasas, 138 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Maduro, Nicolás, 354, 380 Magna Carta (1215), 5 Magris, Claudio, 219 Malacca, 100 Maltesholm School, Hässelby, 217–18, 245 mammoths, 76 Manchester United, 246 Manichaeism, 93 Mann, Thomas, 79 Mansfield, Edward, 271 Mao Zedong, 53, 162, 315, 316, 317, 355 Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, 91 Marduk, 87 de Mariana, Juan, 147 markets, 37 humanitarianism and, 204, 206 immigration and, 68 tribalism, 247 ultimatum game, 34–5 Marley, Robert ‘Bob’, 72 marriage, 199 Marshall, Thurgood, 335 Marx, Karl, 33, 36, 162, 169, 247, 255–6 Marxism, 33, 36, 162, 182, 256, 268 Mary II, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, 186, 193 Maryland, United States, 349 Maslow, Abraham, 339, 341 al-Masudi, 136 mathematics, 70, 134, 135, 137, 156 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mauss, Marcel, 71 McCarthy, Joseph, 335 McCarthy, Kevin, 108 McCloskey, Deirdre, 167, 189, 191–2, 198 McConnell, Addison Mitchell ‘Mitch’, 108 McKinsey, 313 measles, 77 media, 346–9, 370 Medicaid, 119 Medina, 251 Medusa, 88 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 Mencken, Henry Louis, 325, 353 Mercury, 89 Merkel, Angela, 343 Mesopotamia, 37–43, 45, 70, 292–3 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 142 Mexico, 73, 77, 257 United States, migration to, 110, 122, 223, 240, 255 Miami, Florida, 120 Micro-80 computers, 304 Microsoft, 305–6, 309 middle class, 60–61 Migration Advisory Committee, UK, 118 Miletus, 127 militarism, 214 Mill, John Stuart, 124, 160, 164, 176, 319 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 Milton, John, 150 Ming Empire (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 minimal group paradigm, 220–22 Minitel, 313 Mobutu Sese Seko, 187 Mokyr, Joel, 157, 195, 196–7 Molyneux, Stefan, 84 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 53, 84, 94–7, 138, 139, 173–4, 352–3 monopolies, 182, 189 Monte Testaccio, 48 Montesquieu, 89, 94 Moral Consequences of Growth, The (Friedman), 253 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 253 Moriscos, 97 mortgages, 375 Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, 304 most-favoured-nations clause, 53–4 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 Muhammed, Prophet of Islam, 251 Murray, William Vans, 104 Muslims migration of, 112–14, 170, 255 persecution of, 97, 106, 233, 355 Mutz, Diana, 271 Mycenae, 88 Myth of Nations, The (Geary), 288–9 Myth of the Rational Voter, The (Caplan), 258 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 167 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 288 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 126, 127 National Library of Medicine, US, 12 National Science Foundation, US, 313 National Security Agency, US, 313 national stereotypes, 235 nationalism, 9, 11, 13, 16 civic nationalism, 377–8 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 cultural purity and, 69, 70, 71, 352 immigration and, 69, 70, 82 nostalgia and, 287–8, 351 World War I (1914–18), 214 zero-sum thinking, 253, 254, 259, 272 nativism, 14, 122, 176, 223, 254, 349–51, 358 Natural History Museum, London, 124, 125 Naturalism, 198 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Nazirites, 72 Neanderthals, 30–33, 75, 76 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian Emperor, 46 neckties, 72 negative income tax, 374–5 Neilson, James Beaumont, 194 Nemeth, Charlan, 83 Neo-Classicism, 198 Neolithic period (c. 10,000–4500 BC), 74 Netflix, 309, 310 Netherlands, 99 von Neumann, John, 105 neurasthenia, 291 New Atlantis (Bacon), 147 New Guinea, 41 New Testament, 250 New York, United States crime in, 246, 334 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42 New York Times, 291, 297, 325 New York University, 223 New York Yankees, 223 Newcomen, Thomas, 196 Newton, Isaac, 158–9, 201 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 131 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 365 Nîmes, France, 73 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 230, 368 Nineveh, Assyria, 248–9 Nixey, Catherine, 134 Nobel Prize, 82, 105, 276 non-market societies, 34, 35 Nordhaus, William, 273–4 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 63, 64 North Carolina, United States, 102 North Korea, 54, 314–15, 366 North Star, 44 nostalgia, 14, 286–95, 313, 351 Not Fit for Our Society (Schrag), 107 novels, 188–9, 246–7 nuclear power, 301, 327, 328, 329, 332 nuclear weapons, 105, 290, 306 O’Rourke, Patrick Jake, 280 Oannes, 267 Obama, Barack, 66, 240, 329 obsidian, 22, 29 occupational licensing, 376–7 Ögedei Khan, 96 Ogilvie, Sheilagh, 179 Oklahoma, United States, 218–19 Old Testament, 46, 72, 248–50 olive oil, 48 Olorgesailie, 21–2 omnivores, 299 On Liberty (Mill), 160 one-year-old children, 26 open society, 6 open-mindedness, 35, 112 Opening of the mouth’ rite, 70 Orbán, Viktor, 354, 380 de Orta, Garcia, 146–7 Orwell, George, 230, 368 Osman II, Ottoman Sultan, 148 Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), 84, 94, 98, 148, 215, 220, 237, 353 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 overpopulation, 81, 160 Overton, Richard, 183 Pacific islands, 52 Paine, Thomas, 56, 158, 247 Pakistan, 70, 366 Pallas Athena, 89 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 150 Palmer, Tom Gordon, 15 Panthers and Pythons, 243–4 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178 Papin, Denis, 179, 180 Paris, France exiles in, 152, 153 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 parochialism, 216 patent systems, 58, 82, 189–90, 203, 314 in Britain, 179, 189–90, 203, 314 in China, 58 in France, 189 immigrants and, 82 in Netherlands, 189 in United States, 203 PayPal, 310 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 peer review, 127 Pence, Michael, 108 penny universities, 166 Pericles, 131 Permissionless Innovation (Thierer), 299 Perry, Gina, 243 Perseus, 87–8 Persia, ancient, 84, 86–7, 88, 95, 129, 215 Abbasid period (750–1258), 136 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88 Greeks, influence on, 129 Mongols, influence on, 95 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 Sasanian Empire (224–651), 134 personality traits, 7 Pertinax, Roman Emperor, 91 Pessimists Archive, 290, 297, 298 Pessinuntia, 89 Peters, Margaret, 66 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 60 Petty, William, 296 Philip II King of Spain, 98 Phoenicia (2500–539 BC), 43–6, 49, 70, 128–9 Phoenicia dye, 44 Phrygians, 89 physical fallacy, 267–8 Physics (Aristotle), 142 Pietists, 153 Pinker, Steven, 23, 243, 266, 324 Plague of Justinian (541–750), 77 Plato, 130, 131, 132, 134, 352 pluralism, 85, 129, 357 Plutarch, 45–6 Poland Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Dutch Republic, migration to, 99 Holocaust (1941–5), 220 immigration, 116 Israel, migration to, 111 United Kingdom, migration to, 120 United States, migration to, 108, 109 Polanyi, Karl, 37 polio, 293 pollution, 326, 347 Polo, Marco, 174 Popper, Karl, 6, 26, 127, 129, 130, 182–3, 237, 362 population density, 28 populism, 9, 13, 14, 16, 324, 379–82 authoritarianism and, 325, 350–51 complexity and, 324 nostalgia and, 295, 324, 351 trade and, 19 zero-sum thinking and, 254, 259, 274 pornography, 113, 336 Portugal Empire (1415–1999), 100, 146–7, 178 guilds in, 190 Inquisition, 100 Postrel, Virginia, 300, 312, 326 pound locks, 172 poverty, 4, 168, 213, 270 in Britain, 256 in China, 4, 316 immigration and, 66, 69, 81, 121 in Japan, 71 Jeff Bezos test, 275–9 Preston, Lancashire, 190 priests, 41, 128 printing, 146, 153, 171 Pritchard, James Bennett, 43 productivity cities and, 40 foreign trade and, 57, 59, 63 free goods and, 278 immigration and, 68, 81, 117, 204 programming, 8 Progress (Norberg), 12–13 progressives, 286, 300–302 Proserpina, 89 protectionism, 13, 15, 16, 54–5 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 immigration and, 66–7 Internet and, 314 Trump administration (2017–), 19, 57–8 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178, 237 Prussia (1701–1918), 153, 288 Psychological Science, 335 Puerto Rico, 80 Pufendorf, Samuel, 147 purchasing power, 59, 61, 63, 66, 198 Puritanism, 99, 102 Putin, Vladimir, 14, 353–4 Putnam, Robert, 121, 165 Pythagoras, 137 Pythons and Panthers, 243–4 al-Qaeda, 351 Qianlong, Qing Emperor, 153 Qing Empire (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179 Quakers, 99, 102, 206 Quarantelli, Enrico, 338 Quarterly Journal of Economics, The, 63 race; racism, 76–7, 206, 231–4, 358–9 railways, 53, 179, 202, 296, 297 Rammstein, 274 RAND Corporation, 307 Raphael, 137 Rastafari, 72 Rattlers and Eagles, 218–19, 236, 243, 252 reactive aggression, 227–8 Reagan, Ronald, 63, 111 Realism, 198 realistic conflict theory, 222 Reconquista (711–1492), 139 Red Genies, 236 Red Sea, 75 Reformation, 148, 155 refugees crime and, 119 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 281, 342–3 integration of, 117–18 German Jews (1933–45), 104–6, 109 Rembrandt, 99 reminiscence bump, 294 Renaissance, 5, 6, 132, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 215 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 Republic, The (Plato), 352 Republican Party, 164, 225, 238, 240, 301 Reynell, Carew, 184 Reynolds, Glenn, 308 Ridley, Matthew, 20–21, 80 right to work laws, 65 Rizzo, Frank, 334 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 325 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Robbins, Caroline, 200–201 Robertson, Marion Gordon ‘Pat’, 114 Robinson, James, 185, 187, 200 rock paper scissors, 26 Rogers, Will, 282 Roman Law, 5 Romanticism, 198, 287, 296–7 Rome, ancient, 47–50, 89–94, 132 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 assimilation, 91–2 chariot racing, 224 Christianity in, 90, 93–4, 133–4 citizenship, 91 cosmopolitanism, 89–91 fall of, 54, 94 gods in, 89–90 golden nugget theory, 5 globalization, 45–6, 47–50 haircuts, 72 Latin alphabet, 45 philosophy, 70, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44 Sabines, relations with, 89 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 trousers, attitudes towards, 92 Romulus, 89, 90 Rotterdam, Holland, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 226 Royal Navy, 205 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196 Rubin, Paul, 258 ruin follies, 286–7 rule of law, 68, 189, 269, 334, 343, 358, 379 Rumbold, Richard, 183–4 Rushdie, Salman, 73 Ruskin, John, 206, 297 Russia Imperial period (1721–1917), 154, 289–90 Israel, migration to, 111 Mongol period (1237–1368), 95, 352 Orthodox Christianity, 155 Putin period (1999–), 14, 15, 347, 353–4, 365, 367 Soviet period (1917–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 United States, relations with, 236 Yamnaya people, 74–5 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Rwandan Genocide (1994), 230–31 Sabines, 89 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 safety of wings, 374 Saint-Sever, France, 180 Salamanca school, 147, 150 Sanders, Bernard, 302 Santa Fe Institute, 216 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 3, 162 Saudi Arabia, 365 Scandinavia Bronze Age migration, 75 Neolithic migration, 74 United States, migration to, 104, 108 see also Sweden scapegoats, 11, 83, 253, 268, 349, 355–61 Black Death (1346–53), 352, 355–6 Great Recession (2007–9), 255 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 38 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 137 School of Salamanca, 147, 150 Schrag, Peter, 107 Schrödinger, Erwin, 105, 128, 129, 132 Schumpeter, Joseph, 277 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 science, 127–66 in China, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73 Christianity and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Enlightenment, 154–9 experiments, 156–7 Great Vanishing, 134–5 in Greece, 127–32 jealous emulation and, 154–7 in Islamic world, 70, 132, 136–41 Renaissance, 145–6 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 sclera, 25 Scotland, 101, 194 Scotney Castle, Kent, 287 Sculley, John, 304 sea peoples, 43 sea snails, 44 Seinfeld, Jerry, 224 Seleucid Empire (312–63 BC), 88 self-esteem, 372, 379 Sen, Amartya, 231 Seneca, 49, 91 Sephardic Jews, 99 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor, 91 Servius, Publius, 90 Seven Wonders of the World, 45 Seville, Spain, 91, 139 sex bonobos and, 226 encoding and, 233 inbreeding, 78 views on, 113, 336 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), 307 Shaftesbury, Lord, see Cooper, Anthony Ashley Sherif, Muzafer, 219, 220, 222, 243, 252 Shia Islam, 149 Shining, The, 335 shirts, 72 Siberia, 76 Sicily, 89 Sierra Leone, 365 Siger of Brabant, 143, 144 Sikhism, 149 Silicon Valley, 311 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 silver processing, 49 Simler, Kevin, 282 Simmel, Georg, 266 Simon, Julian, 81 Simple Rules for a Complex World (Epstein), 320 Singapore, 53 skilled workers, 36, 45, 66, 95, 97, 101, 117 Slater, Samuel, 202 slavery, 86, 156, 205–6, 232 in British Empire, 182, 199, 200, 205 in Mesopotamia, 40, 41, 43 in Rome, 47, 48 in Sparta, 54 in United States, 103, 106, 205, 232 smallpox, 77, 197, 293, 296 Smith, Adam, 21, 59, 192, 194, 205, 280 Smith, Fred, 319 smoke detectors, 234 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 snack boxes, 20 Snow, Charles Percy, 105 social media, 239, 347, 370 social status, 281–5 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 Socrates, 130, 131–2, 330 solar power, 328, 329, 331, 332 Solomon, King of Israel, 38, 45 Solyndra, 329 Song Empire (960–1279), 53, 169–75 Sony, 319 Soros, George, 323 South Korea, 314, 366 South Sudan, 365 Soviet Union (1922–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 Sovu, Rwanda, 231 Sowell, Thomas, 267–8 Spain, 97–101, 184, 207 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 amphorae production, 48 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Columbus’ voyages (1492–1503), 178 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 98–9, 101 Empire (1492–1976), 147, 178, 182 guilds in, 190 Inquisition (1478–1834), 97, 98 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 106, 140 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106 Reconquista (711–1492), 97, 138–9, 140 regional authorities, 152 Roman period (c.218 BC–472 AD), 48, 91 Salamanca school, 147, 150 sombreros, 73 Uber in, 320 vaqueros, 73 Spanish flu (1918–19), 77 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 Spencer, Herbert, 165, 214 Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 150, 153 Spitalfields, London, 190 sports, 199, 223–4, 232–3, 245–6 Sri Lanka, 100, 365 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 St Louis, SS, 109 Standage, Tom, 166 Stanford University, 307, 311 Star Trek, 246, 259 stasists, 301–2 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 steam engine, 179, 180, 189, 194, 203, 296 steamships, 53, 202 Stenner, Karen, 242, 343, 348, 350, 357 Stockholm, Sweden, 217–18 Stranger Things, 294 Strasbourg, France, 153 strategic tolerance, 86–96 Strindberg, August, 239 Suarez, Francisco, 147 suits, 72 Sumer (4500–1900 BC), 37–43, 45, 55, 292–3 Summers, Larry, 329 Sunni Islam, 148, 149, 238, 365 superpowers, 338–9 supply chains, 11, 62, 66 Sweden DNA in, 73 Green Party, 325 Lind dreadlocks affair (2019), 72 immigration in, 114, 115, 118, 281 manufacturing in, 65 Muslim community, 114 Neolithic migration, 74 refugees in, 118, 281, 342 United States, migration to, 107 Sweden Democrats, 281 swine flu, 3 Switzerland, 152, 153 Sylvester II, Pope, 137 Symbolism, 198 Syria, 42, 82, 342, 365, 366 tabula rasa, 225 Tacitus, 91 Taiwan, 316, 366 Taizu, Song Emperor, 170 Tajfel, Henri, 220, 221–2 Tandy, Geoffrey, 124–6 Tang Empire (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Tanzania, 257 Taoism, 129, 149 tariffs, 15, 56, 373 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Obama’s tyre tariffs (2009), 66 Trump’s steel tariffs (2018), 272 Tasmania, 50–53, 54 Tatars, 238 taxation in Britain, 72, 187, 188, 189 carbon tax, 330–31 crony capitalism and, 279–80 immigration and, 69 negative income tax, 374–5 in Song Empire, 172 in Spanish Netherlands, 98 Taylor, Robert, 306 TCP/IP protocol, 307 technology, 296–9 automation, 63, 312–13 computers, 302–14 decline, 51–2 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312 nostalgia and, 296–9, 313 technocrats, 299–300, 312, 313–14, 326–9 technological decline, 51–2 telescopes, 145–6 Teller, Edward, 105 Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, 45 Temple of Serapis, Alexandria, 134 Tencent, 311 terrorism, 10, 114, 229, 340–41, 363 Tetlock, Philip, 160 textiles, 172–3 Thales, 127 Thierer, Adam, 299 third-party punishment game, 35 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 72, 97, 148, 150 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 142–3, 144–5 Thoreau, Henry David, 203 Thracians, 130 Thucydides, 131, 132 Tiangong Kaiwu, 153 Tibetans, 85 Tierra del Fuego, 52–3 Tigris river, 37, 139 Timurid Empire (1370–1507), 139 tin, 42 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 Toledo, Spain, 140 tolerance, 86–114, 129 Tomasello, Michael, 25 ‘too big to fail’, 280 Tower of Babel, 39 Toynbee, Arnold, 382 trade, 13, 19–23, 28–9, 129, 140, 363, 373 backlashes against, 19, 54–67, 254 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Britain, 181–99 competitive advantage, 28–9 division of labour and, 28, 31, 57 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Greece, ancient, 47 humanitarianism and, 204–7 Mesopotania, 37–43 migration and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 morality of, 33–6 Phoenicia, 43–6 Rome, ancient, 47–50 snack boxes, 20 United States, 19, 57–8, 202–3 zero-sum thinking and, 248, 252–66, 270–72 trade unions, 64, 65, 272, 374 Trajan, Roman Emperor, 91 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 58 Transparency International, 381 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 354 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 353 Trenchard, John, 201 Treschow, Michael, 65 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 215, 356 tribalism, 14, 217–47, 362, 368–72 fluid, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42, 378, 379 media and, 348, 370 threats and, 241, 350, 370 Trollboda School, Hässelby, 218 Trump, Donald, 9, 14, 240, 313, 321, 322, 354, 365, 367, 380 immigration, views on, 223 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 stasism, 301, 302 steel tariffs (2018), 272 trade, views on, 19, 57–8 zero-sum attitude, 248 Tunisia, 45, 48 Turing, Alan, 124 Turkey; Turks, 70, 74, 136, 156, 354, 357, 365 turtle theory, 121–2 Tutsis, 230–31 Twilight Zone, The, 260–61 Twitter, 84, 239, 245 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 186, 201 tyranny of cousins, 229, 230 tyre tariffs, 66 Tyre, 45 Uber, 319–20 Uganda, 365 Ukraine, 75, 116, 365 ultimatum game, 34–6 umbrellas, 298 uncertainty, 321–6 unemployment, 62, 373–4, 376, 377 ‘unicorns’, 82 United Auto Workers, 64 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations, 327 United States, 199–203 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 America First, 19, 272 automation in, 313 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 China, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 citizenship, 103 Civil War (1861–5), 109 climate change polices in, 328 Constitution (1789), 102, 202 consumer price index, 277 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 crime in, 110, 119, 120, 346 Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 dynamism in, 301–2 Federalist Party, 103 free trade gains, 60, 61 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 254 gross domestic product (GDP), 257 Homestead Acts, 171 housing in, 376 immigration, see immigration in United States Industrial Revolution, 202, 291–2 innovation in, 53, 203, 298–9 intellectual property in, 58 Internet in, 306–14 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Ku Klux Klan, 254 labour mobility in, 374, 376–7 lobbying in, 280, 329 Manhattan Project (1942–6), 105 manufacturing, 62–6 McCarthy era (1947–57), 335 Medicaid, 119 middle class, 60–61 NAFTA, 63, 64 National Library of Medicine, 12 national stereotypes, 235, 236 nostalgia in, 290–92, 294 open society, 169, 199–203 patent system, 203 political tribalism in, 224–5, 238, 240 populist movement, 254 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 railways, 202 Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 365 Senate, 108 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 slavery in, 103, 106, 205 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 Supreme Court, 108, 335 tariffs, 66, 272 trade deficits, 60, 270 Trump administration (2017–), see Trump, Donald unemployment in, 373, 376 universities, 163–5, 241 Vietnam War (1955–75), 345 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 World War II (1939–45), 56, 64, 335 Yankees, 58 United Steelworkers, 64, 272 universal basic income (UBI), 374, 375 universities, 140 University Bologna, 140 University of California, Berkeley, 311 University of Cambridge, 140 University of Chicago, 165 University of Leeds, 357 University of London, 201 University of Marburg, 153 University of Oxford, 140, 144, 145, 328 University of Padua, 144, 146 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 University of Pennsylvania, 271 University of Salamanca, 140 University of Toulouse, 144 unskilled workers, 36, 66, 102, 117 untranslatable words, 288 Ur, 55 urbanization, see cities Uruk, Sumer, 39 US Steel, 64 Usher, Abbott Payson, 196 Uyghurs, 85, 174 vaccines, 12, 296, 299 Vandals, 92 Vanini, Lucilio, 150 vaqueros, 73 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 213, 261 Vatican Palace, 137 Vavilov, Nikolai, 162 Venezuela, 354 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Vermeer, Johannes, 99 Vespucci, Amerigo, 146 Vienna, Austria, 95, 237, 238 Vienna Congress (1815), 288 Vietnam, 171, 207, 270, 345 Virgil, 91 Virginia Company, 200 vitamin D, 74 de Vitoria, Francisco, 147 Vladimir’s choice, 221, 252, 271 Voltaire, 153, 193 Walton, Sam, 277 Wang, Nina, 315 War of the Polish Succession (1733–8), 289–90 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, 50 warfare, 216–17, 243 Warren, Elizabeth, 302 washing of hands, 10, 335 Washington, George, 103, 205 Washington, DC, United States, 280 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 Watson, John, 291 Watson, Peter, 79 Watt, James, 172, 189, 194, 274 Weatherford, Jack, 95 Web of Science, 159 Weber, Maximilian, 204 WeChat, 311 Weekly Standard, 312 welfare systems, 118, 281, 374 Wengrow, David, 42 West Africa Squadron, 205 Western Roman Empire (395–480), 94, 135 Westernization, 4–5 Wheelan, Charles, 20 Whig Party, 185, 201 White House Science Council, 313 white supremacists, 84, 351, 367 Whitechapel, London, 190 Who Are We?


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

At SRI, Schwartz had been early to foresee the impact of new digital technologies (he had consulted with the screenwriters for WarGames, alerting them to the emergence of the new subculture of computer hackers), with a special interest in scenario planning. The scenario-planning method was defined by twin intellectual heritages: “thinking the unthinkable” nuclear war-gaming by Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, and the ideas of Pierre Wack, a planner at Royal Dutch Shell who had brought from his intellectual apprenticeship with the French mystic and philosopher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff a focus on narratives rather than quantitative charts and data. Although Schwartz had been an antiwar activist and a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in college, in 1982 he joined Royal Dutch Shell to lead the firm’s scenario-planning group.

., 272, 291, 306–7, 319 People’s Computer Company, 148–49, 158 Peradam conference, 185–87 Perry, David, 101–2 personal computers, 147, 168–69, 211–13 advent of, 185 Albrecht and, 149 early models of, 250–51 Fred Moore and, 196–97 hackers and, see hackers, hacker culture hobbyists and, 148–49, 252 Quarterly features on, 230 SB’s early use of term, 212 transformative impact of, 239, 241, 252, 259, 280 see also cyberspace peyote, SB’s experiences with, 100–101, 109, 112, 119 Phase Raga (Brand), 136 Phelan, Kathleen, 353 Phelan, Patty, 262, 268, 281, 290, 313, 317, 324, 332, 333, 338, 353, 360, 361 background of, 235–36 Baker scandal and, 247–48 Direct Medical Knowledge founded by, 326, 342 DNA Direct founded by, 343 Equestrian Catalog business of, 291, 312 failed pregnancy of, 312 health problems of, 238, 311 in London with SB, 286 at Long Now Foundation, 342–43 marriage of SB and, 246–47, 312 at Planetree, 245–46 Ponzi scheme losses of, 334 Quarterly’s hiring of, 236 SB dated by, 237–38 with SB in Kenya trip, 271–76 Phillips, Michael, 128, 149, 203, 250 Phillips Exeter Academy: Mike Brand at, 14–15, 17 SB at, 15–18, 20–21, 23 photography: of SB’s Indian reservation visits, 86–87, 95, 96, 97–98, 118 SB’s interest in, 68, 90, 93, 199 photojournalism, Brand’s pursuit of career in, 3, 15–16, 44, 53, 55, 57, 63–64, 70, 75, 83, 85–87 Pinchot, Gifford, 340 planetary consciousness, 6, 362 Planetree, 245–46, 326 Point Foundation, 203, 210, 216, 233, 249, 250, 271, 276, 289, 292, 333–34, 343 Pomo Indians, 101 Pontin, Jason, 341 Pool, Ithiel de Sola, 279 Pope, Carl, 340 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 45, 177, 187, 206, 341 Pork Chop Hill (film), 39 Portola Institute, 146, 147, 150–51, 155, 158, 161–62, 170, 196, 273 pragmatism, of SB, 4, 77, 340–41 Price, Richard, 71, 84 Prime Computer, 259 print media, computers’ transformation of, 239, 241 privacy, SB’s warning on cyberspace threat to, 315 Project Jonah, 206 Project One, 197–98 psychedelics, 28, 194, 241 SB and, 101, 104, 162–63, 177–78 see also LSD; peyote Pyramid Lake, 108 Q Question 7 (film), 62 R Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), 72, 79, 89, 103, 107, 139, 160, 216 Ramparts, 158, 202 Rancho Diablo, 164, 188, 189 Rand, Ayn, 31, 132 Randall, Doug, 339 RAND Corporation, 273 Random House, 193, 200, 201, 213 Rathbun, Emilia, 40 Rathbun, Harry, 40–41 Rawn, William, 305 Ray, Janet and William, 304 Raymond, Ann, 170 Raymond, Dick, 85–86, 113, 146, 147, 151, 158, 160, 163, 164, 170, 188 and creation of Whole Earth Catalog, 155, 157 education fair project of, 150, 151, 152 Point Foundation and, 202–3 SB’s friendship with, 23–25, 83, 149, 150, 152 see also Portola Institute Realist, 136, 162, 234 Reality Club, 294–95 Rear Window (film), 15 Reddy, Raj, 268 Red Scare, 17 Reed College, 355 Reiss, Spencer, 340 Remy, Danica, 287–88 Renault, Mary, 52 renewable energy, 167, 223, 297, 346, 349–50, 351, 356 Resource One, 197 Revive & Restore, 360 Rexroth, Kenneth, 66, 70 Rheingold, Howard, 265, 310, 311 Rhode Island School of Design, 217 Richards, M.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

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

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

McKinsey shocked Washington by releasing a survey that projected almost one-third of employers “definitely or probably” would stop offering health coverage when the law took full effect in 2014. The study suggested the cure was worse than the illness, threatening to undermine the law before it rolled out. McKinsey’s findings clashed with other studies, including those by the Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, prompting Democrats to demand that the consultants release their methodology. For nearly two weeks McKinsey refused, saying its research was proprietary, further infuriating congressional Democrats. “The findings of this survey are so markedly out of sync with the other assessments that it has raised legitimate questions about the product, including how and why it was created,” Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote in a letter to McKinsey’s managing partner, Dominic Barton.

., 10, 11, 13–15 Princeton University, 135 prisons and jails, 25, 78, 81, 157 private equity firms, 18, 64, 157 Private Finance Initiative (NHS), 265 privatization, 52, 261, 263–64, 269, 272–74 Procter & Gamble, 249 productivity, 49–50 Project Destiny, 263–64 ProPublica, 25, 72, 75, 79–88 PT Pertamina, 166 Public Citizen Health Research Group, 67–68, 145 public option, 62–63 Pulido, Alfonso, 126 Purdue Pharma, 109, 131–44, 280 Evolve to Excellence and, 142 FDA and, 137, 144–45, 148 settlements and, 136, 148 pure loss ratio, 198 Putin, Vladimir, 26 Q Qatar Petroleum, 163 QuantumBlack, 210–11, 214–15 Quartet, 244 Queensland, 158 R Race for the World (Bryan), 208 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, 1970), 115, 119–20 Raghavan, Anita, 39 railroads, 33, 102, 226–29, 263–64, 269 Railtrack, 263–64 Rand, Ayn, 9 Rand Corporation, 63 Rauner, Bruce, 52–53 Raytheon, 246 Reed, Maureen, 194–95 Reform think tank, 268, 271 Regiments Capital, 227, 229–30, 233, 237, 239–40 regulation, 18, 236. See also specific agencies financial industry and, 171–81, 189–90 health care and, 62, 64–65 Republican Party, 52, 59, 62–65, 107 Reuters, 178 Rice, Susan, 224 Rice University, 20 Riefberg, Vivian, 65 Rio Tinto, 156, 261 Riyadh economic conference (Davos in the Desert), 256 Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, 247, 250 Riyadh social media presentation, 280 R.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

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

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

Lenin may have been a dreamer, Stalin a monster, but under their centralized leadership an agricultural society was transformed into a powerful industrial state. Britain and the United States imposed planning and direction on their wartime economies. Allied work in code breaking led to the development of the computer. At the RAND Corporation in California, a group of formidably intelligent young men known as the Whiz Kids developed techniques of operations research. Their methods improved the logistics of the U.S. armed forces and suggested that computers could be used extensively in planning for the private sector.6 The Whiz Kids moved from government into business.


Beat the Market by Edward Thorp

beat the dealer, book value, buy and hold, compound rate of return, Edward Thorp, margin call, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, short selling, short squeeze, transaction costs

Catskill Conference: Sperry Rand Late in the summer of 1962, with the Molybdenum warrant expiring in a year, we had to plan for the future. I turned to the Sperry Rand warrant. During the hot, steamy Labor Day weekend my wife and I sought relief in the Catskills. One night we met my brother in a resort dining room, where I tested my ideas on him. Sperry Rand Corporation, with sales of more than $1 billion yearly, resulted from the merger of Remington Rand and Sperry Gyroscope. This giant company produced business machines, the Univac electronic computers, instrumentation and controls, farm equipment, and consumer goods. The common stock, at 24 earlier in the year, fell to a new low of 14 in late September.


pages: 174 words: 52,064

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide by Luke Hart, Ryan Hart

access to a mobile phone, Jeremy Corbyn, late fees, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Skype, zero-sum game

EverytownResearch.org. [Online] 11 April 2017. https://everytownresearch.org/reports/mass-shootings-analysis/. 3. Walby, S. The Cost of Domestic Violence Up-date 2009. Lancaster Univesity. [Online] 23 June 2018. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/doc_library/sociology/Cost_of_domestic_violence_update.doc. 4. Rand Corporation. The cost of terrorism in Europe. Rand.org. [Online] 23 June 2018. https://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/the-cost-of-terrorism-in-europe.html. 5. HM Treasury. Spending review and autumn statement 2015. gov.uk. [Online] 23 June 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-review-and-autumn-statement-2015-documents/spending-review-and-autumn-statement-2015#protecting-britains-national-security-1. 6.


pages: 161 words: 49,972

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

Albert Einstein, feminist movement, Isaac Newton, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

They go from the B-9 to the B-10 to the B-12 to the B-15 prototype to the B-17 to the B-29 in about ten years, which is extraordinary when you think about it. 3. I worry that I haven’t fully explained just how radical—how revolutionary—the Bomber Mafia thinking was. So allow me a digression. It’s from a book I’ve always loved called The Masks of War, by a political scientist named Carl Builder. Builder worked for the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica–based think tank set up after the Second World War to serve as the Pentagon’s external research arm. Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Department of Labor, Bureau of International Affairs (2003), and Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, “State of World Population 2003: Making 1 Billion Count” (New York: United Nations Population Fund, 2003). 285 “These poor, young billions” Petersen, “A Strategy for the Future of Humanity.” 285 Population growth in Sudan “Water Find ‘May End Darfur War’ ” BBC News, July 18, 2007 (cited July 18, 2007); available at http://news.bbc.couk/2/hi/africa/6904318.stm 285 “the century of ‘not enough’ ” Peters, “The Culture of Future Conflict.” 285 global warming will bring water scarcity Rob Taylor, “Millions to Go Hungry by 2080: Report,” Truthout, January 30, 2007, http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/013007EA.shtml 285 100 million people Michael Casey, “Report: Millions Face Hunger from Climate Change,” Christian Post, April 10, 2007, http://www.christianpost.com/article /20070410 /26802_Report: _ Millions_ Face_Hunger_from_Climate_Change.htm 285 “Unchecked climate change” Ibid. 286 “Now the ignorant know” Ralph Peters, interview, Peter W. Singer, March 29, 2007. 286 the more people are connected Richard O. Hundley and RAND Corporation, The Global Course of the Information Revolution: Recurring Themes and Regional Variations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003). 286 fifty countries that have “stateless zones” George J. Tenet, The Worldwide Threat 2004: Challenges in a Changing Global Context. 286 “Extreme losers in the information revolution” Hundley and RAND Corporation, The Global Course of the Information Revolution. 287 Al-Qaeda’s movement of its training camps George J. Tenet, The Worldwide Threat 2004. 287 “It has become increasingly difficult” Syed Hamid Albar, “Remarks at the U.S. and Islamic World Forum” (presentation, Doha, Qatar, February 17, 2006). 287 over half of humankind Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Walker & Company, 2006), 93; David Oliver, “Training Street Fighters,” Military Technology 31, no. 4 (2007): 39. 287 are about forty times larger Joseph Grosso, review of Monster at Our Door by Mike Davis (2005), Z Magazine 19(11) (2005), available at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Nov2006/grosso1106.html. 287 “The city—capstone of human organization” Ralph Peters, “Our Soldiers, Their Cities,” Parameters 26, no. 2 (1996): 45. 287 “the new forests” Ralph Peters, e-mail, Peter W.

., “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 1912,” Parameters, 12, no. 4 1992. 213 “are part of the traditional U.S. military repertoire”Jeffrey Record, “Why the Strong Lose,” Parameters 35, no. 4 (2005): 16. 213 “During the Cold War” Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counter-Insurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2006), 78. 213 not being localized battles of asymmetry Rick Brennan et al., “Future Insurgency Threats” (RAND Corporation, 2005); David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005). 213 “in discussing any modernization effort” Ann Roosevelt, “FCS Would Bring Significant Advantages to Future Insurgency-Type Operations, Harvey Says,” Defense Daily, January 23, 2007. 213 “We continue to focus” Thomas X.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

“Uber banned in Germany as police swoop in other countries,” BBC News 20 March 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31942997 (accessed 21 October 2016). 4. Personal communication with author. 5. James A. Dewar, The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead, Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation, 1998, http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html (accessed 21 October 2016). PART TWO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Gustavo Diaz-Jerez, “Composing with melomics: Delving into the computational world for musical inspiration,” LMJ December 2011; 21:13– 14, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LMJ_a_00053 (accessed 21 October 2016). 2.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

In: Levien RE (ed) Computers in instruction: their future for higher education: proceedings of a conference held in October 1970. A Report Prepared for National Science Foundation and Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, pp 185–99. R-718-NSF/CCOM/RC. Santa Monica, CA; Washington, D.C.: The RAND Corporation; distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. http://​files.​eric.​ed.​gov/​fulltext/​ED052635.​pdf *Nelson TH (1971) The route to Halftone image synthesis. Comput Decis May. Begins p. 12 Nelson TH (1973) A conceptual framework for man-machine everything. In: Proceedings of the June 4–8, 1973, National Computer Conference and Exposition, m21–26.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

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

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

“I was scared shitless,” he later told Stewart Brand, in a Wired magazine interview, “because you had all these missiles that could go off by anyone’s stupidity. The technology was never to be trusted.” As the cold war intensified after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Baran took a new job at the RAND Corporation, where he got involved in a project to design a new command-and-control architecture for military communications. Baran was concerned that a nuclear detonation would disrupt high-frequency communications, so he began tinkering with a model whereby the military could hijack “ground wave” communications between broadcast stations, with each station relaying the message to others along the chain.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Together with its adjoining naval air station, which in its own way was quite as busy as Clark, Subic Bay was about the same size, at more than two hundred sixty square miles. It was principally used as a forward operating base for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and during the Vietnam War it repaired and resupplied hundreds of vessels and their aircraft. In 1987 the RAND Corporation, which advises on long-term military planning for the American government, had little doubt as to the strategic value of the two bases: “It would be devastating to regional security if the USA’s relationship with the government in Manila deteriorated to the point where it lost its base access.

See also Hawaii; and other specific regions Ellices Islands and, 9, 214 French nuclear tests and, 19 Hawaii and, 4–6, 9 home sea of, 431 migrations and navigation by, 125n, 126, 427–41, 444 Micronesia and, 43 surfing and, 27, 122, 127–33, 139–40, 142, 144–45, 149 Polynesian Voyaging Society, 435 Popular Science, 141 Port Arthur, 414 Port Dawin cable station, 232 Port Edward, 414 Port Moresby, 5 Portugal, 28, 228–29, 273, 414, 424 Poseidon aircraft, 404n Potsdam conference (1945), 203, 393 ppwo and ppalu (Polynesian navigation and navigators), 433–34, 434 President, USS (frigate), 152 Prinz Eugen (German cruiser), 12–13, 13n, 57 Project 4.1, 74 “Prokaryotic Cells in the Hydrothermal Vent Tube Worm” (Cavanaugh), 325–26 Pueblo, USS (spy ship), 151–52, 156–76, 187, 158, 168 Pulama Lanai, 374 Pulau Island, 10 Pupukea, Hawaii, 144 QE75 pens, 200 Qingdao (formerly Tsingtao), 9, 408 Queen Elizabeth (liner), 190–99, 191, 202, 229 Queen Mary (liner), 192–94 Queensland, 212n, 220, 234, 281n, 293, 339, 341, 347–48 Quinn, Sally Mae, 108 Rabaul, 333 racism, 296–98 radioactivity, 32–37, 62–63, 67–78, 68, 218 radio transistor, 83–119 RAF bombers, 13n Raffles, Stamford, 212 rafts, 126 Raiateans, 431 Ralik Chain (Sunset Chain), 49 Ramos, Fidel, 396 Rand Corporation, 381–82 Rapa Nui, 431. See also Easter Island Ratliff, Smiley, 218n rats, 357n, 362 RCA, 113 Réard, Louis, 43 Red Guards, 196 Redondo Beach, 135–37, 140 Red Sea, 343, 346 Reed Tablemount, 396 refugees, 298–303 Regency TR-1 radio, 105, 107 Riddiford, Charles, 153 Rifleman Bank, 396 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 356 Ring of Fire, 313, 315, 333, 378, 389 RMA (revolution in military affairs), 415n, 416 Roaring Forties, 309, 356 Robert Island, 396 Robeson, Paul, 285 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 19 Robinson family, 375 Rockhampton, Australia, 349 Rodney, Lord, 167 Roi-Namur Islet, 15 Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site (Kwajalein), 12 Rongelap Atoll, 52, 60, 64, 65, 70, 73–77, 78 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 46, 64–65 Roosevelt, Theodore, 367, 386, 411, 415 Rose Atoll, 367 Rosenbluth, Marshall, 71–72 Rossby waves, 262 Royal Charlotte Reef, 396 “Royal Sport, A” (London), 121, 133 Rusk, Dean, 154 Russia, 116, 190, 337, 362, 401n, 415, 416, 421n.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

According to senior officials at the Pentagon, Nicaragua acquired its first Soviet-made tanks in mid-1981: “Until then, another Defense Department official said, they had been receiving ‘small arms and light artillery, mostly’.” FDN spokesman Bosco Matamoros stated “that armed rebels began attacks in 1980,” which is “when Sandinista officials began complaining of attacks.” They also date their “training and assistance from the Argentine military” to 1980. Rand Corporation specialist Brian Jenkins, discussing “indirect forms of warfare,” observes that “Argentina acted as a proxy for the United States in Central America,” referring to Argentina under the neo-Nazi generals during the period when congressional human rights restrictions were hampering direct US engagement in state terrorism.

He and his terrorist associates, holding Argentine passports, transmitted information to the Argentine neo-Nazi generals on left-wing exiles and passed on “arms, equipment, and finally men for the Salvadoran death squads.”64 Surely all of this was well-known to the US government. As noted earlier, Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian Jenkins notes blandly that “Argentina acted as a proxy for the United States in Central America,” referring to Argentina under the murderous neo-Nazi generals, now on trial for massive crimes; he adds that the US “provides military assistance and training to the Honduran armed forces, while Argentinian advisers until recently provided training and management support to the Nicaraguan guerrillas,”65 a well-coordinated joint operation, terminated when the military dictatorship in Argentina was overthrown.


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The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Wikipedia lists an additional five nations with ‘no standing army but ... limited military forces’: Haiti, Iceland, Mauritius, Monaco, and Panama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces; accessed 28 September 2011), all of which the CIA lists as having ‘no regular military forces’. 55 U.S. Department of State 2011. 56 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 2011. 57 U.S. Department of Defense 2010; Canadian Department of National Defence 2011. 58 All data on terrorist fatalities is from the RAND Corporation (2011). 59 Disaster Center 2011a. I focus on American deaths here because reliable U.S. statistics are more readily available than worldwide statistics. 60 Disaster Center 2011b. Death totals for years not shown in the table were estimated based upon death totals in nearby years. 61 Lugar 2005, 14, 19. 62 Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism 2008, xv.

Pritikin, Martin H. 2008. ‘Is Prison Increasing Crime?’ Wisconsin Law Review 2008: 1049–1108. Rachels, James. 2003. The Elements of Moral Philosophy, fourth edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Rand, Ayn. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Signet. ——. 1967. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: Signet. RAND Corporation. 2011. RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents, http://smapp.rand.org/rwtid/search_form.php. Accessed October 2, 2011. Rawls, John. 1964. ‘Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play’. Pp. 3–18 in Law and Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook. New York: New York University Press. ——. 1974. ‘Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion’, American Economic Review 64, 2 (Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association): 141–46. ——. 1985.


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The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

And almost every state’s courts have found “implied contracts” based on the employer’s conduct, which limit the ability to fire an employee despite the fact that no explicit contract ever existed.95 As a result of these decisions, employers are more reluctant to hire new employees, and longer-tenure employees are likely to keep their jobs even if they fail to perform. It is impossible to measure the precise economic effect of restrictions on at-will employment, but a thorough 1992 research project by the Rand Corporation found that “aggregate employment averages 2.9 percent lower in years following a state’s recognition of tort damages for wrongful termination,” and that states recognizing both tort and contract causes of action for wrongful termination would have about 4.7 percent lower employment than states that did not.96 When state courts adopt limits on the at-will employment contract, 235 The Right to Earn a Living aggregate employment drops by 2 to 5 percent—even more in service industries and large businesses.

Bogen), 288 privileges and immunities clause, 4 Corfield and, 40–41 dormancy, 43–44 overruling, revival, reversal of, 287–92 right to make and enforce contracts, 288–89 Slaughterhouse and, 41–44 states’ rights and, 40–41 productive work, 3 professions barriers to entry, 63, 141 licensing, 23, 63, 99–100, 145–56 restricted entry, 22, 23 restricting or eliminating competition, 289–90 unskillfulness, 23 Progressive Era, xiv–xv, 44–50 eminent domain and, 32 misconceptions about, 47–49 regulation of business and economy, 13, 15, 123–27, 136–37 Supreme Court, 15, 279. see also specific justices 371 Index Progressivism agenda, ideology, and philosophy, 11, 12–13, 44–50, 279–81 assault on economic liberty, 11–16, 44–50, 279–81, 290, 292 changing American political philosophy, 44–50 criticism of and attack on Lochner, 107–10, 121 doctrines, 279–81 economic freedom argument, 123–27 free speech and, 191–92 majority over individuality, 11, 44–45, 109–10, 121, 279, 292. see also collective decisionmaking notion of individual freedom, 116–17 pro-government presumption, xiii–xiv, 11–13, 44–50 rational basis test and, 125–27 rights as permissions, 95, 109, 116–17, 279, 282–83 socialist nature of, 46, 123–27 visionary zeal to do gooders, 13, 46 Prohibition, legacy of, 183–84 property corporate, 34 regulation as secondary to, 272–73 property redistribution government redistributive programs, 283 Progressivism and, 13 property rights, xvii, 24–25 of criminals, 259 givings theory and, 272–74 land-use regulation, 160. see also zoning laws, protectionism and Locke on, 273 ownership as separate from right to use, 257 partial property rights in other people, 290–91 Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, 277–78 right of use of property or land, 257, 271 see also regulatory takings Property Rights from Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment (Bernard Siegan), 283 Prosser, William, 76 protection of the public. see public interest or public welfare protection of unenumerated rights, 93–94 372 protectionism, xvi, 141–44, 173–74 agricultural adjustment programs, 164–70, 174 barriers to entry, 141 contracts clause and, 154 dormant commerce clause and, 153–54 franchise acts and, 170–73, 174 as legitimate state interest, 289 licensing laws, 145–59, 174 necessity of new business and certificates of necessity, 143–44 public choice theory and, 289–90 tariffs, 141 taxi industry example, xi–xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 143–44, 286 zoning laws, 159–63, 174 public choice theory, 289–90 public contracts, 69–73 public interest or public welfare contracts clause, 75–81 Liebmann and, 142–43 Munn and Nebbia and, 101, 125–27. see also rational basis test Powers and, 152–55, 159, 162, 289 seizure of property. see eminent domain doctrine; regulatory takings public nuisance, xvii Blackmun on, 240 common or public right definition, 241 reasonable and lawful conduct, 243–45 reasonableness and unreasonableness, 240–41, 242 regulatory takings and, 258 tort law abuse, 239–45 public policy, manipulation of contracts and, 214, 215, 220–24 public use, synonymous with public benefit, 255 Pumpelly v. Green Bay Company, 256–57, 258 Radford, R. S., 262 railroads antitrust case Alaska Railroad, 56–57 corporation as person in Santa Clara County, 34 eminent domain doctrine and, 31–32, 48 raisin-confiscation case, 164–65, 167–69, 270–71 Rand, Ayn, 285 Index Rand Corporation employment research, 235–36 rational basis test, xv, xvi, 15, 273, 286, 289 argumentum ad ignoratium fallacy, 129 burden of proof and, 128, 129–30 constitutional double standard, 136–40 defining legitimate state interest, 129, 132–33 evolution, 123–27 laws related to legitimate government interest, 132–33 occupational licensing and, 133–34, 148–49, 151, 153, 156–59, 174 problems with, 127–34 varying standards and levels of scrutiny, 135–40 realist school of legal thought, 12 Redish, Martin, 200, 201 regulation, secondary to concept of property, 272–73 regulation of business and economy, 11 constitutionality of, xv Populist Era, 39–44 Progressive Era, 13, 15, 44–50, 123–27, 136–37 protecting business from competition. see protectionism in public interest, 5, 125–27, 142–43 unfettered, 6 see also rational basis test regulatory state, 286, 289 entrenched interests and lobbyists and, xiv–xv regulatory takings, xvii, 255–56 categorical (with compensation) takings, 260–62 character of government action and, 262–63 compensation-denial tactics, 268–74 compensation requirement and, 255, 264–68, 271 constructive consent rule, 269 controversies surrounding, 264–68 definition of “take,” 256–60 development and, 265, 271, 275–76 eminent domain and, 255–60, 267 exactions as, 274–77 extortion in, 274 fairness within, 263 Fifth Amendment and, 255 future of takings law, 277–78 givings theory and, 272–74 noncompensable regulation as actual confiscation, 258–59 notice rule theory, 269 Penn Central test, 260, 262–64, 268 police powers and, 257–60, 263 public good over individual rights protection, 265–66 reasonableness of owner expectations, 263–64, 270 reasons for, 256–60 right of use of property or land, 257, 271 types of, 260–64 Rehnquist, William, 277 Reinhardt, Stephen, 237–38 rent-control, 75 residential development fees, 275–76 resource allocation and use, Progressives and, 13–14 Restatement of Torts, 240–41 The Return of George Sutherland (Hadley Arkes), 7 Rhode Island common insignia laws, 207 lead paint public nuisance case, 239, 244–45 regulatory taking examples, 262, 270 Richardson, Dorsey, 124 right to earn a living, xvi–xvii, 1–5, 12 as a natural right, 23–25, 39, 48, 169. see also natural rights of all humanity noncompetition clauses and, 64–65 present-day attitude toward and consensus on, 5–6 see also economic freedom and liberty rights limits of, 7 as permissions, 95, 109, 279, 282–83 Roberts, John, 277–78 Robinson-Patman Act, 53 Rockefeller, Edwin, 54 Romer v.


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One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Carlsson says that in creating a moving, celebratory event, Critical Mass “opens up the field of transit to new political contestation, and pushes it to another level by pioneering swarming mobility as a new tactic.”116 indeed, the model is apparently effective enough to be highlighted in the ranD Corporation’s report for the national Defense research institute entitled “networks and netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy.”117 The authors of the study thankfully manage to distinguish bicyclists from international terrorists and drug cartels, but their respect for the tactical potential of “swarming mobility” is abundantly clear. and while bikes are not widely used in public protests, activists have experimented with this possibility at antiwar protests in portland, pittsburgh, Houston, richmond, and San Francisco.

See also individual bands Punk Planet (zine), 143 pursell, Caroll, 285n71 pye, Dennis, 35 Quartuccio, Brad, 180 Quicksilver (film), 112 Quigley, anita, 130 raab, alon, 87–88 racial profiling and Biking While Black, 102 radical flank effect, 100 rail transportation: and panoramic view, 40; as segregated, 32 raleigh (bicycle manufacturer), 217 rambo (band), 145 ranD Corporation, 104 rather, Dan, 3 rational Dress Society, 20 rat patrol, 155 ravenscroft, lee, 191 reagan, ronald, 285n71 Real World (television program), 112 reason Foundation, 136, 209 rebar: and parKcycle, 96; and parK(ing) Day, 96 reclaim the Streets, 8, 80, 137 re~Cycle, 188 reCycle ithaca’s Bicycles (riBS), 172, 283n52 recycle-a-Bicycle, 172, 173 re-cycles Bicycle Co-op, 175 redwood Highway, 44 reilly, rebecca “lambchop,” 126–127, 164, 165, 264n76 rennes, France, 58 replogle, Michael, 172, 186–187 republican national Convention, 1, 104 richmond, virginia, 104 right of Way, 97 rimbaud, penny, 273n44 rinaldi, “Chicken” John, 155 ritchie, andrew, 30, 210, 235–236n108 road building, 38–39, 238nn157–158; cost of improvement of national road system, 209; and symbolic power of roads, 83 roberts, John, 159 rosen, paul, 8, 141, 149, 153–154, 213, 226– 227n2 ross, andrew, 123, 273–274n49 roth, Matthew, 9 rothman, Greg, 183 rowan, David, 129 rudge and Company, 41 ruelas, Fernando, 275n66 ruin, Erik, 146 rwanda, 201 Sadler, Simon, 85 Safety bicycles, 19, 22 Salvadoran Center for appropriate Technology (CESTa), 191–192, 200 San Francisco, California, 79, 96, 100, 104, 123, 250n7 San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, 63, 68, 79, 99, 100 Schimek, paul, 113 Schimmelpenninck, luud, 56, 58 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 32, 40 Schmidt, Conrad, 105 Schudson, Michael, 119 Schumacher, E.


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Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

The “baseline” of peacekeeping forces worldwide in the post–Cold War era, about 100,000, “has been inadequate for the tasks at hand.” Two recent studies cost out the options for expanding these capabilities. The first, by military policy expert Michael O’Hanlon, finds the costs of a large standby force from industrialized countries would be “very expensive” but “not astronomical.” The second, by the RAND Corporation, finds that costs run ten times higher in a mission that must impose a solution by force compared to one operating with the consent of all parties. For a poor country of 5 million, such as Sierra Leone, a “light peacekeeping” mission needs 8,000 international troops, 1,000 police, and $500 million.

“Quincy Wright’s Contribution to the Study of War: A Preface to the Second Edition.” In Quincy Wright. A Study of War: Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 1965. Diehl, Paul F. Peace Operations. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Dobbins, James, Seth G. Jones, Keith Crane, and Beth Cole DeGrasse. The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2007. Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Downes, Alexander B. Targeting Civilians in War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Doyle, A. Conan. “Silver Blaze.” In Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. New York: A. L. Burt, 1894.


pages: 504 words: 147,722

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

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

About 10 percent of patients have the kind of IC marked by Hunner’s ulcers, and a major focus of research efforts is to further pull out different subtypes of IC/PBS patients, who may have different underlying causes for their similar symptoms and respond to different treatments. In 2011, researchers from the RAND Corporation came up with the first prevalence estimate based on a nationally representative population-based survey. It suggested that 3.3 to 7.9 million women in the United States have symptoms consistent with IC/PBS. On average, they’d had the condition for fourteen years. Most had consulted multiple doctors, but less than half had been given any diagnosis at all and just 10 percent of them had received an IC/PBS diagnosis.

Brody, “Personal Health; Interstitial Cystitis: Help for a Puzzling Illness,” The New York Times, January 25, 1995, www.nytimes.com/1995/01/25/us/personal-health-interstitial-cystitis-help-for-a-puzzling-illness.html. In 1987, encouraged by the ICA, the National Institute drew up a first consensus . . . Meijlink, “Interstitial Cystitis.” In 2011, researchers from the RAND Corporation came . . . Sandra H. Berry et al., “Prevalence of Symptoms of Bladder Pain Syndrome/Interstitial Cystitis Among Adult Females in the United States,” The Journal of Urology 186, no. 2 (August 2011), doi:10.1016/j.jur0.2011.03.132. Strikingly, a follow-up study . . . Katy S. Konkle et al., “Comparison of an Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome Clinical Cohort with Symptomatic Community Women from the RAND Interstitial Cystitis Epidemiology Study,” The Journal of Urology 187, no. 2 (February 2012), doi:10.1016/j.jur0.2011.10.040.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

Martin's Press, 1998), p. 275. 12. P. W. Singer, "Caution: Children at War," Parameters 31. no. 4 (Winter 2001). 13. Thomas Homer-Dixon. "Fnvironmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Kvidence from Cases." International Security 19, no. l (Summer 1994): 3—40. 14. Ian Lesser, Countering the Neic Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1999). 13. Ralph Peters, "The New Warrior Class." Parameters 24 (Summer 1994): 24: John Kee- gan, ''Natural Warriors," Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1997, p- A20. 16. As General Barry MacCaffrey. the former U.S. drug c/ar, notes of the FARC. "They've got more automatic weapons in one of their battalions than the Colombian Army does."

Paper presented at the Eastern Economic .Association Meetings, Crystal City, Virginia, April 4, 1997- Leander, Anna. "Global Ungovernance: Mercenaries, States, and the Control over Violence." Copenhagen Peace Research Institute Working Paper, 2002. Lee, Jeffrey. "Give a Dog of War a Bad Name." The Times, May 4, 1998. Lesser, Ian. Countering the New Terrorism. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1999. Lew, Jack S., and Michael M. Barnett, "Alliance Formation, Domestic Political Economy, and Third World Security," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4 (December 1992): 19-40. BIBI IOGRAPHY ggg Lieber, Keir, "Grasping the Technological Peace: The Offense Defense Balance and International Seem ity."


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Roberts, Villages of the Moon: Psychological Operations in Southern Afghanistan (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2005); ARSTRAT IO Newsletter, Joint Training Integration Group for Information Operations (JTIG-IO), Information Operations (IO) Training Portal; Arturo Munoz, “U.S. Military Information Operations in Afghanistan: Effectiveness of Psychological Operations, 2001–2010,” RAND Corporation, 2012, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1060.pdf. 22. John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (New York: Penguin, 2014). 23. Ibid., 18. Portions of this section draw on a review of Nagl’s book originally published in The Washington Post.

Ernesto Londoño, “Study: Iraq, Afghan War Costs to Top $4 Trillion,” Washington Post, March 28, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html. 2. Clausewitz, On War, 75. 3. “Military Careers,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015, accessed January 23, 2016, www.bls.gov/ooh/military/military-careers.htm. 4. Dave Baiocchi, Measuring Army Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, RAND Corporation, 2013, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR145/RAND_RR145.pdf. 5. Nese F. DeBruyne and Anne Leland, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics (CRS Report No. RL32492) (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 2, 2015), www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf. 6.


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Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

The actions of Elliott Spitzer galvanized the SEC to action and led to two large efforts: First was the Global Settlement, an enforcement agreement reached in April 2003 that led to a record $1.4 billion of disgorgement and penalties.28 Then, in fiscal year 2005 it assessed $700 million against three mutual fund companies,29 following up on $700 million it had collected from six complexes the year before, in matters relating to market timing and late trading at mutual funds.30 In February 2003 the SEC received approval to hire over 800 new staff members, and its FTEs numbered over 3,500 in FY 2008.31 Disgorgements and penalties have fallen off to less than $500 million in FY2007, but this is well above the $216 million seen in the quiet year of 2004. The SEC’s budget, or appropriated funding as it is known, was $906 million for FY2008, having risen 11.5 percent annually since 2001. Investor complaints however, have barely increased. From 2001 to 2007 their annual growth was just 1.6 percent.32 According to a Rand Corporation study of investment advisors and broker-dealers registered with the SEC, the combined total of these grew at an annualized rate of just 3.4 percent over the five years 2001-2006, but this growth rate was skewed by some 700 hedge funds that subsequently deregistered after the study’s end point; excluding these the annualized growth would shrink to just 2.5 percent.

., 242 Patterson, Mark, 141 Paul, Ron, 160, 336 Paulson, Henry, 141, 143, 185 Payne, Stanley, 97 Pease, Michael, 141 Peretz, Martin, 145 Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (Limbaugh), 269 Peterson, Pete, 336, 339 Pew Charitable Trust, 176 Pew, Howard, 176 “Philanthropic Correctness” (Olasky), 176 PIMCO, 141–142, 144, 264 Ping, Luo, 106 Plosser, Charles I., 120 Pogo, 145 Polonius, 379 Pop! Why Bubbles are Good for the Economy (Gross), 161 Private Public Investment Program (PIPP), 32, 50, 143 Pyramiding, 37–38, 40, 53, 58, 67, 68, 175–179 415 Quick, Becky, 336 Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, 180, 183 Raines, Franklin, 19, 186, 214–215 Rand Corporation, 328 Ray, Ronald, 178 Reagan, Ronald, 199, 201, 215–216 Real bills doctrine, 49 “Redlining,” 213 Rich, Marc, 330 Rimel, Rebecca, 176 Risk management, 19–21 end of moderation, 359–362 evidence-based investing, 27–29 fake alpha and derivatives, 21–24 foreign relations, 362–368 generational event, 29–32 operational risk, 24–27 Rockefeller Foundation, 178 Rockoff, Hugh, 91–93 Roman Empire, decline of: decadence, 258–260 external factors, 260–261 leveling the masses, 272–274 military costs, 265–268 privatization, 261–265 religious upheaval, 268–272 slavery, 257–258 See also Capitalism Roosevelt, Franklin, 197, 199–200, 216, 348 Roosevelt, Theodore, 279 Rosen, Sherwin, 280 Rosenberg, Emily, 279–280 Rothbard, Murray N., 36–37, 38, 41, 44, 46–47, 53, 54, 354–356 Roubini, Nouriel, 122 Rove, Karl, 184 Rubin, Robert, 141 Rumsfeld, Donald, 15 Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA (Scarborough), 363 416 Sachs, Jeffrey, 99–105 Sailer, Steve, 212 Sarbanes Oxley Act, 317, 320, 321 Saul, Andrew, 330 Scarborough, Rowan, 363 Schact, Hjalmar, 62 Schapiro, Mary, 324, 325–326 Schiller, Robert, 373–374 Schwartz, Anna, 85, 91–92, 112 Secrets of the Temple (Greidner), 109 Secured Funding, 149 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 327–329 Seidle, A.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

If the cost of water needed to produce a pound of meat were not subsidized, the cheapest hamburger meat would cost more than $35 a pound! Cornell economist David Fields and his associate Robin Hur have studied the fiscal consequences of water subsidies to the meat industry: Reports by the General Accounting Office, the Rand Corporation, and the Water Resources Council have made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to livestock producers are economically counterproductive. Every dollar that state governments dole out to livestock producers, in the form of irrigation subsidies, actually costs tax payers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs, and reduced business income… The 17 Western states receive limited precipitation, yet their water supplies could support an economy and population twice the size of their present ones.

., 248, 286–88 Public Health Research Institute, 278 public schools animal protein promoted in, 151, 158–59, 167 dairy industry “educational materials” at, 146, 182, 216 frog dissections in, 5 meat industry “educational materials” at, 107–13, 108–9, 182 Puccini, Giacomo, 23 Puerto Rico, 287–88 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), 121 purines, 268 purse seines, 13–14, 21 R Rabon, 312–13 railroads, cattle shipping regulations of, 86 Rainforest Action Network, 340 rain forest destruction, 338–40 RAMBLING ROSE BRAND, 100 Rand Corporation, 342 Reagan, Ronald, 13–14, 292–93 Reed, Herbert, 41 “Re-evaluation of the Nutrient Role in Animal Products, A” (report), 285 Regenstein, Lewis, 293, 297, 308, 310, 313–14, 318–19 renewable energy, 350, 367 Republic (Plato), 329–30 Reuben, David, 153 rheumatoid arthritis, 267, 268 Rifkind, Basil, 224 Ringo (dog), 9 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), environmental summit in, 361 Ritewood Farms (Idaho), 307–8 ritual slaughter, 120–23 Riverside Meat Packers, 240 “Rocky Mountain oysters,” 114 rodeos, 90 Romney, Hugh, 261 roosters, 32, 41 Rose, Murray, 141, 143 Ryan, Kerrie, 296–97 Ryan, Michael, 296 S Saenz, Carmen A., 286–88 safflower oil, 258 Saleh, Randy, 9 salmonellosis, 277–81 salmon fishing, 13–14 salt, 179, 270–71 Salt, Henry S., 113–14 saturated fats atherosclerosis caused by, 188–96 blood cholesterol and, 193 t.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Even if the electrical transformers were to flame out, if a fully functioning Energy Internet were operational across every region of the country, local communities could go off-grid and continue to generate their own green electricity, sharing it with their neighbors and businesses on microgrids, keeping the power and lights on, at least long enough to keep society functioning. Interestingly, a similar concern about the vulnerability of America’s communications network inspired, at least in part, the creation of the Internet. In the 1960s, Paul Baran and other researchers at the Rand Corporation began to ponder the question of how to ensure the continued operability of the nation’s communications network in the event of a nuclear attack. Baran and his colleagues began to envision a distributed network of host computers, without a central switchboard, that could continue to function even if a nuclear attack was to cripple part of the nation’s communications system.

Wald, “Terrorist Attack on Power Grid Could Cause Broad Hardship, Report Says,” New York Times, November 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/science/earth /electric-industry-is-urged-to-gird-against-terrorist-attacks.html?_r=0 (accessed July 16, 2013). 70. April Mara Major, “Norm Origin and Development in Cyberspace: Models of Cybernorm Evolution,” Washington University Law Review 78(1) (2000):78–79; “Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet,” RAND Corporation, 2013, http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html (accessed November 14, 2013). 71. Diane Cardwell, “Solar Companies Seek Ways to Build an Oasis of Electricity,” New York Times, November 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/business/energy-environment/solar -power-as-solution-for-storm-darkened-homes.html (accessed February 2, 2013). 72.


pages: 651 words: 161,270

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

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

The think tanks themselves are seldom investigated by the media.12 Most cited think-tanks in 1999, by media13 Think-Tank Political Orientation No. of Citations Brookings Institution centrist 2,883 Cato Institute conservative/libertarian 1,428 Heritage Foundation conservative 1,419 American Enterprise Institute conservative 1,263 Council on Foreign Relations centrist 1,231 Center for Strategic and International Studies conservative 1,205 RAND Corporation centre-right 950 The editor of the Heritage Foundation’s journal observed that by the end of the 1980s, editorial pages were dominated by conservatives. Media commentator and progressive columnist Norman Solomon also notes that the mainstream media in the 1990s tends to offer either experts who support the status quo or “populists of the right-wing variety”.

ref1–ref2 pharmaceutical industry ref1 Philip Morris Companies Inc ref1, ref2 Phillips Petroleum Company ref1 Pinchot, Gifford ref1–ref2 Pizza Hut ref1 Placer Dome ref1, ref2–ref3 Planet Central Television ref1–ref2 Plant, Christopher and Judith ref1 plastics ref1, ref2, ref3 Plastics and Chemical Industries Association (PACIA) ref1 Plastics World ref1 Poland ref1 Policy Review ref1 politics corporate shareholdings ref1–ref2 grassroots campaigns ref1 influence of PR ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 in the media ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6 think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9, ref10–ref11, ref12, ref13 Pollak, Michael ref1 pollution air ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 industrial ref1 limits ref1 prevention ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 public concern ref1 tradeable rights ref1, ref2 water ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6 Polystyrene Packaging Council ref1 Porter/Novelli ref1, ref2 positive spin ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 PR see public relations PR Newswire ref1 PR Watch ref1, ref2 press releases ref1–ref2 Price, Stuart ref1 Pring, George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Prism Communications ref1 Private Property Protection Act (1992) ref1, ref2 privatization ref1, ref2 Procter & Gamble ref1–ref2 Progress and Freedom Foundation ref1 Project Learning Tree ref1 propaganda corporate funding ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 grassroots ref1 media ref1 by PR industry ref1, ref2–ref3 in schools ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 of think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9 treetops ref1–ref2 property rights ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8 protests ref1, ref2 Prudential Securities Inc ref1 pseudo-environmentalism in advertising ref1–ref2, ref3 in education ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 of front groups ref1–ref2 of PR industry ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 of Wise Use Movement ref1,54 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Public Interest Profiles ref1 public opinion crisis communication ref1–ref2 environmental concern ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7 of government ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 influencing ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9 media influence ref1–ref2 PR influence ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9–ref10, ref11 risk communication ref1–ref2 TV influence ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 see also opinion polls public participation ref1–ref2 public relations anti-environmentalism ref1–ref2 background ref1–ref2 campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7, ref8–ref9, ref10,217, ref11 see also public relations, Sydney’s Olympic Games chlorine industry ref1–ref2 corporate clients ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 corporate philanthropy ref1–ref2 crisis communication ref1–ref2 ‘cross-pollination’ ref1 cultivating trust ref1–ref2, ref3 dioxin defence ref1, ref2–ref3 dirty tricks campaigns ref1–ref2 Earth Summit ref1–ref2 educational campaigns ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 environmental ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9–ref10 environmental activism ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 environmental problems ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8 experiments ref1–ref2 ‘experts’ ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 front groups ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 government employs ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4 grassroots organising ref1–ref2 ‘green’ ref1–ref2 ‘greenwash’ ref1–ref2 income ref1, ref2 intelligence gathering ref1–ref2, ref3 journalism influenced ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 lobbying ref1–ref2 media as a tool ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 news coverage ref1–ref2, ref3 newspaper campaigns ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 political influence ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5 positive spin ref1, ref2–ref3 press releases ref1–ref2 propaganda ref1, ref2–ref3 pseudo-environmentalism ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 public campaigns ref1–ref2 public opinion influenced ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8, ref9–ref10, ref11 re-imaging ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 ‘revolving door’ syndrome ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 risk communication ref1–ref2 strategies ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4 Sydney’s Olympic Games ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6 technological tools ref1–ref2 think-tanks ref1–ref2, ref3 tools ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 using Earth Day ref1 versus public opinion ref1 video news releases (VNRs) ref1–ref2 Wise Use Movement employs ref1, ref2 Public Relations Journal ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Public Relations Management Ltd ref1–ref2 public support see grassroots organising publications, corporate-sponsored ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5 Puget Sound Fund ref1 Pusey, Michael ref1–ref2, ref3 Putnam, Todd ref1 PVC Defence Action Fund ref1 PVCs ref1, ref2 Quayle, Dan ref1 Queensland Timber Board ref1 radicalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 radio ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7–ref8 rain-forests ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 rallies ref1, ref2 Rampton, Sheldon ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 Ramsey, Stephen ref1 RAND Corporation ref1 Rauber, Paul ref1, ref2 Ray, Dixy Lee ref1 Raymond, Jonathan ref1 re-imaging ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4–ref5 Reagan, Ronald election campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 General Electric employee ref1 as President ref1, ref2 recycling ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 refrigerator industry ref1 Regional Environmental Plan (REP) ref1 regulation of advertising ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 environmental ref1, ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5, ref6–ref7, ref8–ref9, ref10–ref11 Reilly, William ref1, ref2, ref3 Rensberger, Boyce ref1 Republican party ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 research ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4–ref5, ref6 resource extraction industry ref1 Resources for the Future ref1 Responsible Care programme ref1, ref2 ‘revolving door’ syndrome ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7–ref8 Ricci, David ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 Richardson, Graham ref1 Ridley, Matt ref1–ref2, ref3 Riley, Tom ref1 Ringland, Bill ref1 Rio Summit see Earth Summit risk assessment ref1–ref2, ref3–ref4, ref5–ref6, ref7 Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Act (1995) ref1–ref2 risk communication ref1–ref2 Roberts, Paul Craig ref1 Rockefeller, David ref1 Rockefeller, Laurance ref1 Rohm and Haas ref1 Romania ref1 Rose, Merrill ref1 Rowell, Andrew ref1, ref2 Royal Dutch Shell see Shell Group RTZ ref1 Ruckelshaus, William ref1, ref2 Russia ref1 Ryan, Charlotte ref1, ref2 Ryan, Teya ref1 Ryan, William ref1–ref2 Saatchi and Saatchi ref1, ref2 Sahara Club ref1 Saltzman, Joe ref1 Sandberg, Steve ref1 Sandman, Peter ref1–ref2 Sanjour, William ref1 Saro-Wiwa, Ken ref1 Savage, J.A. ref1 Scaife, Richard Mellon ref1 Schauerhammer, Ralf ref1 Schneider, Keith ref1–ref2, ref3, ref4 Schulman, Beth ref1 Science and Environment Policy Project (SEPP) ref1, ref2, ref3 Scientific American ref1 scientists opposed to environmental regulation ref1–ref2 Searles, Mike ref1 Sefchek, Dixie ref1 Seitel, Fraser P. ref1 Selcraig, Bruce ref1 Sellafield ref1 Selover, Barbara ref1 Sethi, Prakash ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4 Shabecoff, Phil ref1, ref2 Shanahan, John ref1, ref2–ref3, ref4, ref5 Share Movement ref1, ref2 Shaw, David ref1 Shell, Adam ref1 Shell Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Sherrill, Robert ref1 Short, Kate ref1, ref2 Sierra ref1 Sierra Club ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Silas, C.J. ref1 Silent Spring (Carson) ref1 Simon, Julian ref1 Simon, William ref1 Singer, S.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

We asked those who responded to our survey this question: “Do you think that if there was a universal basic income of $13,000 a year (with no strings attached) you would stop working or stop looking for work?” Eighty-seven percent said they would not.50 All the evidence scattered through this book suggests most people actually want to work, not just because they need the money; work brings with it a sense of purpose, belonging, and dignity. In 2015, the Rand Corporation conducted an in-depth survey of the working conditions of about three thousand Americans.51 Those surveyed were asked how often their work provides them with the following: “satisfaction of work well done,” “feeling of doing useful work,” “sense of personal accomplishment,” “opportunity to make positive impact on community/society,” “opportunities to fully use talents,” and “goals to aspire to.”

Preliminary Results,” Reports and Memorandums of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 2019, 9. 50 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Me and Everyone Else: Do People Think Like Economists?,” MIMEO, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019. 51 Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Till von Wachter, and Jeffrey B. Wenger, “Working Conditions in the United States: Results of the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey,” Rand Corporation, 2017. 52 “The State of American Jobs: How the Shifting Economic Landscape Is Reshaping Work and Society and Affecting the Way People Think about the Skills and Training They Need to Get Ahead,” ch. 3, Pew Research Center, October 2016, accessed April 21, 2019, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/#fn-22004-26. 53 See Steve Davis and Till Von Wachter, “Recession and the Costs of Job Loss,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2011, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/2011b_bpea_davis.pdf, and references therein. 54 Daniel Sullivan and Till Von Wachter, “Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 3 (2009): 1265–1306. 55 Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, “Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007): 969–100. 56 Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Erik Hurst, “Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” NBER Working Paper 23552, June 2007. 57 “American Time Use Survey—2017 Results,” news release, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, June 28, 2018, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm. 58 Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst, and Loukas Karabarbounis, “Time Use During the Great Recession,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1664–96. 59 Daniel Kahneman and Alan G.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

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

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

But these achievements have led to many inappropriate applications of seemingly similar techniques. 14 TELLING STORIES THROUGH MODELS All models are wrong, but some are useful. —GEORGE BOX 1 I n 1950, Albert Tucker, chair of the Mathematics Department at Princeton University, was asked to give a seminar to a general audience of social scientists. Tucker was collaborating with Melvin Drescher and Merrill Flood of the Rand Corporation on the foundations of game theory. Realising that his listeners would not welcome a blackboard covered with equations, Tucker invented the story of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a fabricated account of two felons incarcerated in separate cells. 2 Only by trusting each other not to spill the beans could the criminals hope to avoid a long jail sentence.

., 293 , 294 Paulson, John, 422–3 Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 25 , 26 , 218–19 , 266 , 279 pensions, 312–13 , 328–9 , 405 , 424 ; index-linked, 330–1 ; interference with indices, 330–1 ; search for illusory certainty, 330 , 423 Pentagon Papers, 135 , 282 Perry, Captain, 420 perspective in art, 142–3 Petty, Sir William, 56 pharmaceutical companies, 243–5 , 284 Phillips, Bill, 339 , 340 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 137–9 pigeons, 274 Pitt, Brad, 273 plague, 56 , 57 , 166 Planck, Max, 285 , 386 , 387 , 388 , 411 , 429 planetary motion, 18–19 , 35 , 373–4 , 389 , 391–2 , 394 Plato, 54 Poisson, Siméon-Denis, 199 , 235 poker, 263 , 268 , 273 policing, 208 Polybius (Greek historian), 54 , 186 , 187 Popper, Karl, 36 ; falsificationism, 259–60 poverty, 389 , 390 practical knowledge, 22–6 , 195 , 255 , 352 , 382–8 , 395–6 , 398–9 , 405 , 414–15 , 431 pragmatist philosophy, 137 Prescott, Edward, 352–4 , 356 presidential election, US (2016), 241–2 Príncipe, island of, 259 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 248–9 , 252 , 393 probabilistic reasoning: as absent from pre-modern thought, 54–5 ; Bayes’ theorem, 60–7 , 70–1 , 114 , 117–20 , 127 , 179 , 196 , 203 , 204 , 210 , 420 ; Bortkiewicz model, 235–6 ; Central Limit Theorem, 234 ; compound probability , 59–60 , 197 , 198 , 200–4 ; conditional probabilities , 61 , 66–7 , 70 , 204 ; and confidence, 8–9 , 71–2 , 86 , 87–9 , 96–7 , 403 ; ‘dependent’ and ‘explanatory’ variables, 246–7 ; disguising of uncertainty by, 374 ; and economic variables, 6–7 , 12 , 15 , 34 , 45–6 , 58 , 72–4 , 83 , 95–6 ; expected value , 60 , 106–9 , 114–16 , 124–5 ; and Friedman, 74 , 400 , 420 ; and games of chance, 37–8 , 42 , 53–4 , 57–8 , 59–60 , 64–5 , 69 , 83 , 420 ; and imperfect information, 12 , 41–4 , 65–8 , 80–2 , 92–4 , 98 , 118–19 , 129 , 155 , 277 , 320–1 ; Indifference Principle, 63–6 , 107 ; infinite regress issue, 443 ; Keynes on, 105 ; and known distribution of outcomes, 14 , 16 , 37–8 , 43 , 57–65 , 69–70 , 87 ; and the law, 196 , 197 , 198–203 , 206–7 , 210–12 , 214 ; and likelihood, 86–7 , 89–91 , 96–7 , 206–7 , 403 ; the ‘Linda problem’, 90–1 , 98 ; and markets in risk, 55–7 ; models as contingent and transitory, 235–6 ; the Monty Hall problem, 62–3 , 64–6 , 98 , 100 , 113 , 139 , 203 , 204 ; mortality tables and life insurance, 56–7 , 69 , 232–3 ; non-stationary nature of social sciences, 235–6 ; Pascal and Fermat, 53 , 56 , 57 , 59–60 , 106 ; Pascal’s wager, 64 , 80 ; posterior distribution, 100 ; ‘probabilistic turn’ in human thought, 20 , 49 , 53–4 , 55–68 ; probability theory, 42–3 , 55 , 58 , 59–68 , 69–70 , 71–2 , 105 ; the problem of points, 59–60 , 61 , 64–5 , 106 , 113 ; puzzle-mystery distinction, 20–4 , 32–4 , 48–9 , 64–8 , 100 , 155 , 173–7 , 218 , 249 , 398 , 400–1 ; and reinsurers, 326 ; and risk-uncertainty distinction, 12–17 , 20 , 22 , 23 , 26 , 305–6 , 355 , 420 ; ‘rodeo problem’, 206–7 ; scope of, 37–8 ; and screening for cancer, 66–7 , 206 ; spurious application to uncertainty, 8–10 , 15–16 , 20 , 34 , 70 , 74–84 , 85–94 , 197–204 , 246–7 , 320–1 , 372 , 435–44 ; ‘St Petersburg paradox’, 114–16 , 199 ; statistical discrimination, 207–9 , 415 ; and Taleb’s ‘black swans’, 14 , 38–40 , 42 ; tension with mutualisation, 328–9 ; Tetlock and Gardner’s ideas, 294–5 ; two-envelope problem, 107–8 ; and unique events/projects, 23–6 , 38–40 , 57 , 70 , 71–2 , 96–7 , 138 , 174 , 177 , 188 , 192–5 , 338–9 ; see also axiomatic rationality; statistics; subjective probabilities productivity, 347 public sector organisations, 183 , 355 , 415 puerperal fever, 282–3 quantum mechanics, 233 Quebec Bridge collapse (1907), 33 Quetelet, Adolphe de, 233 racial discrimination, 208 , 209 radical uncertainty, xv–xvi ; definition of term, 14–15 ; disappearance from mainstream, 73–4 , 351–2 , 356 , 357 ; triumph of subjective probability over, 20 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; see also decision-making under uncertainty; uncertainty railways, 48 , 49 , 315 ; HS2 proposals, 364 , 372 Rainwater, Richard, 288 Rajan, Raghuram, 317 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 432 Ramsey, Frank, 73 , 80 , 84 Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged , 226 ; The Fountainhead , 288 Rand Corporation, 248 Ranke, Leopold von, 187–8 rationality: Aristotle’s view of, 137 , 147 ; biases in context, 141–8 , 162 ; ‘bounded rationality concept, 149–53 ; cognitive illusions, 141–2 ; and communication, 265–8 , 269–77 ; communicative , 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; and cooperation/collective intelligence, 155 , 162 , 176 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 343 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; evolutionary, 16–17 , 47 , 152–3 , 154–5 , 171–3 , 272 , 401 , 428–31 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110–14 ; invisible gorilla experiment, 140 ; Kahneman’s dual systems, 170–1 , 172 , 271 ; legal reasoning, 194–5 , 196–8 , 205–7 , 210–14 , 410 , 415 , 416 ; meaning of as contested, 79 , 80 , 136 ; and nudge theory, 148–9 ; optimism and confidence, 167–70 , 330 , 427–8 ; ordinary usage of term, 136–7 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; reasoning as not decision-making, 268–71 ; styles of reasoning, 137–9 , 147 ; technical meaning in economics, 12 , 16 , 436 ; von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, 435–6 ; ‘wisdom of crowds’, 47 , 413–14 ; ‘in the zone’ phrase, 140–1 ; see also axiomatic rationality; narrative and contextual reasoning; reference narrative concept Rees, Martin, 39 , 40 reference narrative concept, 123–4 , 160–2 , 294–300 , 305–7 , 330 , 334 , 336 , 358 ; and Abbottabad raid (2011), 122–3 , 277 , 298 ; and business strategy, 286–90 , 296–7 ; changes to, 155 ; and collective intelligence, 155 , 160–1 ; and definition of risk, 123–4 , 306 , 307 , 332 , 355 , 421 ; definition of term, 122 ; and first-rate decision-making, 285 , 424 ; and gambling, 125–6 ; and insurance markets, 125 , 126 , 160–1 ; and regulators, 313 ; robustness and resilience, 123 , 294–8 , 332 , 335 , 374 , 423–5 ; secure reference narratives, 127 , 426–31 , 432 reflexivity , 35–6 , 309 , 394 regulators, 310–12 , 313–14 ; pension models, 312–13 , 405 ; prescribed risk models, 9 , 312–13 ; and probabilistic reasoning, 38 , 49 , 311–12 ; Solvency II directives, 312 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 religion, 220 Renaissance artists, 143 , 147 , 418 , 419 , 421 , 428 resolvable uncertainty, 14 , 37 , 42 Retail Motor Federation, 252 , 254 retail prices index, 330–1 retirement planning, 10–12 Ricardo, David, 249–50 , 252 , 253–4 , 255 , 382 risk: anticipating, 128–30 ; as asymmetric, 121 ; and causes of 2007–08 crash, 422–3 ; as central dynamic of capitalism, 170 ; certainty as not same as absence of, 329–30 ; definition in finance theory, 420–1 ; dictionary definition, 120–1 , 306 , 332 , 421 ; as different to uncertainty, 12–14 , 15–16 , 17 , 74 , 305–6 , 355 , 420 ; and expectations narrative, 121–2 , 341–2 ; and financial regulation, 9 , 38 , 49 , 310–12 ; intergenerational sharing of, 328–9 ; ‘market risk’–‘market specific risk’ distinction, 308–9 ; models of diversification, 304–5 , 307–9 , 317–18 , 334–7 ; mutualisation of, 160 , 162 , 192 , 325–6 ; as not a characteristic of an asset, 332 ; ordinary usage of term, 123–4 , 306 , 324 , 421 ; pension models, 312–13 , 405 ; pre-crisis models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 339 , 407 ; priced as a commodity, 124 , 420–1 ; as product of a portfolio as a whole, 332 ; quantification of, 6–7 , 8–10 , 12 , 15–16 , 68 , 124–5 , 311–12 , 326–7 , 332–3 , 420 ; ‘risk as feelings’ perspective, 128–9 , 310 ; risk weights, 310 , 311 ; and securitisation, 311 , 316 – 18 , 366–7 , 401 ; social risk-sharing, 159–61 ; technical meaning in economics, 12 , 305–6 , 307 , 333 , 421 ; tension between different meanings of, 305–12 , 332 , 334 , 415 , 420 , 421 ; ‘training base’ (historical data series), 406 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; and volatility, 124–5 , 310 , 333 , 335–7 , 421–3 ; see also reference narrative concept risk aversion , 117 , 124–5 , 127–8 , 306 , 420–1 RiskMetrics, 366 Rittel, Horst, 22 Ritz casino, London, 38 , 83 rocket technology, 373–4 Rome, classical, 142 Romer, Paul, 93 , 95 , 357 , 394 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 25 , 26 , 167 , 218–19 , 240 , 266 , 269 , 390 , 411–12 Rosling, Hans, Factfulness , 389 Royal Bank of Scotland, 257 Royal Shakespeare Company, 217 Royal Society, 55 , 56 Royal Statistical Society, 197 , 203 Rumelt, Richard, 30 , 178–80 , 184 , 296 ; Good Strategy/Bad Strategy , 10 , 407 Rumsfeld, Donald, 7–8 , 295 , 413 Russell, Bertrand, 421–2 Russian roulette, 438–9 Ryle, Gilbert, 192 Sala, Emiliano, 265 Salem witch trials, 230 Samuelson, Paul, xv , 42 , 108–9 , 110–11 , 125 , 130 , 135 , 285 , 304 Sandemose, Aksel, 430 San Francisco, 48 ; earthquake, 32–3 Sargent, Thomas, 342 sat nav systems, 395–6 Saudi Arabia, 363 Savage, Jimmie, 111–12 , 113–14 , 125 , 133 , 135 , 249 , 309–10 , 345 , 392 , 400 ; and Allais paradox, 442–3 ; billiards analogy, 257–8 ; von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 435–6 , 437 ; The Foundations of Statistics (1954), 112–13 , 443 Schelling, Thomas, 281 Schoemaker, Paul, 137 science fiction, 219 scientific reasoning, 18–20 , 32–3 , 219 , 233 , 239 , 383 ; and narratives, 283–5 , 388–9 ; Newtonian mechanics, 259 , 260 , 392 ; observation as trumping theory, 389 ; search for unified theory of everything, 219 ; and stationarity, 18–19 , 35 , 236 , 373–4 , 388 , 392 , 429–31 ; string theory, 357 ; Thales of Miletus, 303–4 ; validity of research findings, 242–7 Scott, James, 167 Scott, Rick, 189 Scottish Enlightenment, 163 , 187 Scottish Widows Fund, 325 , 328 Sears, 287–9 , 292 Second World War, 24–6 , 119 , 168 , 169 , 187 , 218–19 , 266 , 292 , 293 ; D-Day, 266 , 294 securities trading, 55 , 82–3 , 268–9 , 316–18 , 366–7 , 401 , 411 ; derivative markets, 318 , 422–3 ; price volatility, 310 , 336 , 422–3 seismology, 32–3 Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 And All That , 426 Selvin, Steven, 62 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 283 , 306 Seward, William, 290 Shackle, George, 109 , 188 Shakespeare, William, 217 , 218 , 225 , 226 , 304–5 , 307 , 393 shareholder value, xiv–xv , 41 , 228 , 305 , 409 Sharpe, William, 318 Shell, 222–3 , 295 Sherlock (BBC series), 147 Shiller, Robert, 229 , 230 , 252 , 314 , 320 Shockley, William, 438 Silicon Valley, 49 , 228 , 276 , 335 , 427 Silver, Nate, 74–6 , 202 , 241 Simon, Herbert, 135 , 136 , 149–51 , 175 Simons, Daniel, 140 Simons, Jim, 269 , 319–20 , 336 Simpson, O.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

There are organizations that are trying to change prisons as we know them, such as Critical Resistance and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. As human beings, we need to insist on the humane treatment of prisoners and the rehabilitation and education of prisoners. Prisoners who are mentally ill need treatment, not paralyzing drugs and 23 hours a day in a cell. Prisoners who are uneducated need education. The RAND Corporation has published study after study showing that educating prisoners who lack basic academic and vocational skills reduces future criminal behavior. RAND research has shown that every dollar invested in correctional education creates a return of four to five dollars in the reduction of future criminal justice costs.

Paul, 291 Picou, Leon, 128, 138–39, 226 “pigs,” 71, 81–82, 106, 171, 216, 242, 309 pimps, 26, 32, 44, 94–95, 391 “playing draft,” 43 plea deals, 53–54, 78, 149, 233–34, 275, 399–400 police brutality accepted as way of life, 16 interrogation techniques, 54 K-9 dogs “give ‘em the bite,” 18 Panthers standing up against, 58, 67–69, 92 post-Katrina killings, 342 repercussions for rioting, 75–78 superficial changes in the system, 406–07 political prisoners, 88, 99, 238, 263, 284, 306, 409 “Power to the People” (rallying cry/song), 71, 91, 284, 372 Pratt, Ashaki, 240 Pratt, Elmer (“Geronimo Ji-Jaga”), 237–38, 240, 341–42 pride, maintaining a sense of, 63, 81, 92–93, 208, 290, 367 Prince, Howard, 363–65 Prison Legal News (social media site), 412–13 Prison Radio (radio station), 326 prison reform, 82, 99, 119–20, 374 prison-industrial complex, 236, 412 private prisons, 410, 412 Promise of Justice Initiative, 350, 354 prostitution, 5, 58, 92, 94, 97 Pruden, Anne, 261–63 Quandt, Katie Rose, 354 Queens House of Detention (New Queens), 76–78 racism. See also institutionalized racism, 8, 71, 106, 162, 195, 241, 309–11, 407–09, 411 rag men, 197–98 Rahim, Malik (aka Donald Guyton), 80, 83, 126, 196–97, 236–40, 261, 263, 369, 403 Rainbow Coalition, 68 RAND Corporation, 413 Randle, Michael, 341 rape attempt on AW, 28 AW allegations/charges, 217, 318–26, 349, 375–76 AW “antirape squad,” 93–94, 155, 238 being “turned out,” 25–29 Brotherhood protection from, 389 creating a sex slave, 93–95 “fresh fish day,” 25–26, 43, 94 gal-boys (“sissies”), 26, 97, 391 imprisonment for, 128, 216, 226–27, 292 pimps, 26, 32, 44, 391 “rape artists,” 26, 155 ratting out/snitch, 32, 49, 95, 97, 128–29, 133, 390–91 read, learning how to, 163–64 Reagan, Ronald, 69, 372 Reb (6th Ward neighbor), 46–47 Reception Center (RC), 25–27, 41–43, 84–85, 94, 103 reclassification (“reclass”) board.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Robert’s worm didn’t just cripple the Cornell network; it was barreling through the internet, trouncing everything in its path. Just a few minutes after its release at MIT, the worm’s first known infection occurred at the University of Pittsburgh. From Pittsburgh, the worm zoomed cross-country and hit rand.org, the network for the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, at 8:24 p.m. Within the hour, computer managers at RAND noticed their network slowing; several nodes were at a standstill. At 9:00 p.m., the worm was spotted creeping around the Stanford Research Institute. By 9:30 p.m., it was at the University of Minnesota. At 10:04, it infiltrated Berkeley’s gateway machine, the computer that served as the university’s portal to the internet.

$600 billion to $6 trillion: Compare James Lewis, “Economic Impact of Cybercrime—No Slowing Down,” February 2018, 6 (“$445 billion to $600 billion”), https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/economic-impact-cybercrime.pdf, to Steve Morgan, “Global Cybercrime Damages Predicted to Reach $6 Trillion Annually by 2021,” Cybercrime Magazine, October 26, 2020, https://cybersecurityventures.com/annual-cybercrime-report-2020/. These are global estimates. See also Paul Dreyer et al., “Estimating the Global Cost of Cyber Risk,” RAND Corporation, January 14, 2018, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2299.html (“the global cost of cyber crime has direct gross domestic product [GDP] costs of $275 billion to $6.6 trillion and total GDP costs [direct plus systemic] of $799 billion to $22.5 trillion [1.1 to 32.4 percent of GDP].”).


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The men who pursued the grail of Cold War rationality, as Theodore White wrote approvingly in Life in 1967, constituted “a new priesthood, unique to this country and this time, of American action intellectuals.” Despite their commitment to abstract thought, they were “husky, wiry, physically attractive men who, by and large, are married to exceptionally pretty women.” The most prominent action intellectuals clustered at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Among them was Albert Wohlstetter, who coined the phrase “the delicate balance of terror” in a RAND policy paper of 1958, and who consulted with John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The man who most fully elaborated the balance of terror was the RAND analyst Herman Kahn.

.; evolution and; quantification and; refutation of; religion and; technology and; vitalism as counter to; vitalism’s reinforcement of Progressive Era Protestantism; Anglican; Baptist; Beecher’s vitalist; Calvinist; Dissenters; ecumenical; Episcopalian; evangelical rationality of; evangelical revivalism in; Methodist; muscular; occult beliefs reconciled with; Pentecostal; Pietist; Presbyterian; rejection of; Unitarian psychedelic drugs psychology: behavioral; psychoanalytic; see also mental health public works Puritans; legacy of Putnam, Jackson quantitative thinking; as algorithmic; in economics; about subjective experience; about time; see also technocratic rationality qi Quick, Herbert Quicksand (Larsen) Quimby, Phineas Rabinowitch, Eugene race; essentializing of, see primitivism; power and, see white supremacy Radio Corporation of America Raguet, Condy Railroaded (White) railroads Rand, Ayn RAND Corporation Rasmussen, Dennis rationality; in Enlightenment; evangelical; reason vs.; see also positivism; quantitative thinking; science; technocratic rationality Reagan, Ronald Redding, Saunders Reed, John Reeve, Arthur Reflections on Violence (Sorel) Reid, Thomas “Relic, The” (Donne) religion, benefits of; Eastern; see also animism; Christianity; Protestantism Renouvier, Charles Republicans; see also specific presidents Rice, Condoleezza Richardson, Samuel Riesman, David Riis, Jacob risk; attempts to quantify; success and; uncertainty vs.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Mind Children: The Future ofRobot and Human Intelligence (Harvard: Harvard University Press). Moravec, H . (2000). Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (OX: Oxford University Press). Mussington, D . (2002). Conceptsfor Enhancing Critical Infrastructure Protection: Relating Y2K to Cip Research and Development (Washington, DC: Rand Corporation). Naquin, S. ( 1 976). Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1 8 1 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Nash, D . (2000). The failed and postponed millennium: secular millennialism since the enlightenment. ]. Religious History, 24( 1 ) , 70-86. National I nstitute of Allergy and I nfectious Diseases. (2006).

The group, however, 'would have to include, at a minimum, a person capable of researching and understanding the literature in several fields, and a j ack-of-all trades technician' (U.S. Office ofTechnology Assessment, 1 977, p. 30) . Two other influential authors during the 1 970s were David Rosenbaum, a consultant who challenged the adequacy of AEC regulations to prevent nuclear theft (Rosenbaum, 1 977) and Brian Jenkins, an analyst at the Rand Corporation. Best known for his assertion that 'Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead . . . ' , Jenkins, probably more than anyone else, encouraged the notion that terrorists were unlikely to employ weapons of mass destruction (WM D) in pursuit of their objectives (Jenkins, 1 977).

Catastrophic nuclear terrorism: a preventable peril 419 solipsistic individuals than organized groups in this world, 29 this situation would indeed be deserving of the label of a nuclear nightmare. This and other similar capability related issues are discussed in the following section. 1 9.4.2 The s u p p ly side: how fa r have terrorists p rogressed? As a recent briefing by the Rand Corporation points out, 'On the supply side of the nuclear market, the opportunities for [non-state] groups to acquire nuclear material and expertise are potentially numerous' (Daly et al., 2005, p. 3). These opportunities include huge global stocks of fissile material, not all of which are adequately secured; tens of thousands of weapons in various sizes and states of deployment and reserve in the nuclear arsenals of at least eight states; and a large cadre of past and present nuclear weaponeers with knowledge of the science and art of weapons design and manufacture.


pages: 182 words: 56,961

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbus A320, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, index card, John Snow's cholera map, megacity, RAND corporation, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

Bradley et al., “Strategies for Reducing the Door-to-Balloon Time in Acute Myocardial Infarction,” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (2006): 2308–20. 10 “Studies have found”: E. A. McGlynn et al., “Rand Research Brief: The First National Report Card on Quality of Health Care in America,” Rand Corporation, 2006. 11 “You see it in the 36 percent increase”: American Bar Association, Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims, 2004–2007 (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008). 1. THE PROBLEM OF EXTREME COMPLEXITY 15 “I read a case report”: M. Thalmann, N. Trampitsch, M. Haberfellner, et al., “Resuscitation in Near Drowning with Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation,” Annals of Thoracic Surgery 72 (2001): 607–8. 21 “The answer that came back”: Further details of the analysis by Marcus Semel, Richard Marshall, and Amy Marston will appear in a forthcoming scientific article. 23 “On any given day”: Society of Critical Care Medicine, Critical Care Statistics in the United States, 2006. 23 “The average stay”: J.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

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

As predicted, Russia responded by increasing its own military capacity, followed later by China. Ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs are a particular threat. Ballistic missile defense is understood on all sides to be a first-strike weapon, perhaps capable of nullifying a retaliatory strike and thus undermining deterrent capacity. The quasi-governmental Rand corporation describes BMD as “not simply a shield but an enabler of U.S. action.” In journals across the political spectrum, military analysts write approvingly of ballistic missile defense. In the conservative National Interest, Andrew Bacevich writes, “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 80. 39. Kelly Pike, interview by the author on Skype, March 10, 2016. Chapter 6 1. Stephen Sigei, interview by author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10, 2016. 2. Larry Hanauer and Lyle J. Morris, Chinese Engagement in Africa: Drivers, Reactions, and Implications for U.S. Policy, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2014), 30–31. 3. Dinah Jerotich Mwinzi, remarks at the Africa Tech Challenge 2016 Opening Ceremony, Nairobi, Kenya, July 12, 2016. 4. Stephen Sigei, interview by author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 10, 2016. 5. Additional locally owned firms are entering the clothing industry, most notably Seshoeshoe, purportedly an approximately 50-person firm producing traditional clothing.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

For example, between 1990 and 2000 the number of 64–75-year-olds living in downtown Chicago rose by 17 percent. One reason is that elderly people can feel trapped in rural areas or suburbia, whereas in cities there is always a lot to stimulate the brain and body. A report by the US thinktank the RAND Corporation, for instance, found that suburbanites spend longer in cars, thus reducing fitness and life expectancy. But a far larger force is what’s happening in Asia and Africa, where both cities, and their brethren, megacities, are being built and rebuilt. A very old idea The oldest company in the world is around 700 years old.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Belgin, Of Human Wealth: Beyond Greed and Scarcity (unpublished manuscript, 2004).   70   “state of nature” … “absolute dominion” : John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1948).   73   invisible population of rich people : Since 1975, according to a study by RAND, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have diverted $50 trillion from the rest of us. Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” RAND Corporation, 2020, https:// www .rand .org /pubs /working _papers /WRA516 -1html.   73   extracting wealth from the poor : Jon Evans, “GrubHub/Seamless’s Pandemic Initiatives Are Predatory and Exploitative, and It’s Time to Stop Using Them,” TechCrunch , April 5, 2020, https:// techcrunch .com /2020 /04 /05 /its -time -to -stop -using -grubhub -seamless -forever /.   73   This is not creative destruction : Lachlan Carey and Amn Nasir, “Something for Nothing?


pages: 522 words: 162,310

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

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

McNamara was infatuated with “systems analysis,” the shiny new computerized approach, made possible by Von Neumann’s mathematical work, that presumed to solve complex problems—especially military ones—by reducing them to quantitative data. The most important of McNamara’s whiz-kid assistant secretaries had been a senior figure at the RAND Corporation, the original postwar think tank and the fountainhead of systems analysis. The problem was that the crunched data and equations made systems analysis look like pure science, and its self-confident brainiac practitioners and their clients certainly believed it was a form of perfect superrationality.

And everybody has been in on it—“the Jesuits, the Masons…the Nazi Party, the Communist Party…the Council on Foreign Relations…the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group,…the Vatican…Skull & Bones…they are all the same and all work toward the same ultimate goal, a New World Order” that “is beating down the door.” Plus the Rockefellers, the RAND Corporation, the Federal Reserve, the CIA, and the United Nations. In fact, as Cooper noted, the masks were coming off—President Bush had started speaking openly about the plan to realize the Illuminati “dream of a new world order.” — THE NEW WORLD Order. At that moment, it was becoming the all-encompassing catchphrase for people who believed in a sinister conspiracy running the world, those elite entities named by Cooper as well as the ones—banks, news media, show business—McCarthyists and the John Birch Society had identified decades earlier.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Meg Leta Jones, Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 1. 41. Leta Jones, Ctrl + Z, 9–11. 42. Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016), 11. 43. Walter Perry et al., Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2013). 44. Siegel, Predictive Analytics, centrefold (table 5). 45. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society:The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015), 23–6. 46. Josh Chin and Gillian Wong, ‘China’s New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything’, Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2016 <http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-tool-for-socialcontrol-a-credit-rating-for-everything-1480351590> (accessed 1 December 2017); Economist, ‘China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State’, 17 December 2016 <http://www.economist.com/news/ br iefing/21711902-worrying-implications-its-social-creditproject-china-invents-digital-totalitarian> (accessed 1 December 2017). 47.

<http:// www.nationalreview.com/article/207925/facts-are-facts-timothy-jpenny> (accessed 9 Dec. 2017). OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 474 Bibliography Perry, Walter, Brian McInnis, Carter Price, Susan Smith, and John Hollywood. Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2013. Perzanowksi, Aaron, and Jason Schultz. The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2016. Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Peterson, Andrea. ‘Holocaust Museum to Visitors: Please Stop Catching Pokémon Here’.


pages: 615 words: 175,905

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, South China Sea

Since February General LeMay had pressed for the use of American air power against North Vietnam,15 arguing that the Gulf of Tonkin retaliation should serve as a starting point for sustained air strikes which would destroy all ninety-four targets on the JCS list. On August 17 LeMay sent General Wheeler a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, whose thesis was that “the total commitment of Hanoi to the success of the insurgency is the key to the strength of the Viet Cong.” The study argued that Hanoi provided the Viet Cong with leadership, a sophisticated political-military apparatus, a compelling ideological theme, and a secure military base.

See covert operations OPLAN 37–64, 93, 94 Palmer, Bruce, 114, 225, 246 Pathet Lao, 7–8, 98, 103 Pell, Claiborne, 283 Phan Huy Quat, 228, 288 Phan Khac Suu, 165, 288 Phan Ngoc Thao, 228 Phuc Yen MIG fighter base, 192, 222, 250, 257, 285, 286 Pleiku airfield, attack and reprisal, 215–20, 230–31 Quang Khe, 234 Qui Nhon, 303 Qui Nhort attack, 221–22 Raborn, William, 280, 284, 285, 287, 293, 295 Radford, Arthur, 35 RAND Corporation study, 143 Reedy, George, 291, 293, 295 Ridgway, Matthew, 9, 35 Rivers, L. Mendel, 309, 310 Rockefeller Foundation, 3 Rogers, Bernard W., 42, 47, 182 Rolling Thunder. See air strikes Roosevelt, Franklin D., 13, 33, 331 Rostow, Walt, 59, 71, 88, 89, 156, 160, 162, 203–4 Rusk, Dean, 7, 104, 113, 151, 186, 188, 206, 280, 285, 295 and Cuban missile crisis, 25–26 and Gulf of Tonkin, 123–24, 127, 128, 130, 133–34, 136 Honolulu conference, 99–103 and Johnson, 47, 48, 66, 69, 88–89, 255, 284, 293 Kennedy appointment of, 3–4 and negotiated settlement, 94 rivalry for Johnson’s favor, 208 and Taylor, 111–12, 123–24, 144–45, 150, 200–201, 208, 251–52, 258 and Vietnam policy, 38, 39, 47, 114, 140, 174, 181, 190, 191, 200, 202, 207, 213, 231, 248, 258, 289, 300–301 and war games, 156 Russell, Richard, 52, 55, 125, 165, 293, 294 Saltonstall, Leverett, 131 Sather, Richard C, 133 Schlesinger, Arthur, 28 Schnapper, M.


pages: 548 words: 174,644

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

Alvin Toffler, desegregation, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joseph Schumpeter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman

New York: Orion Books, 1988. ———. Thud Ridge. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Burton, James G. “Desert Storm: A Different Look.” Briefing. June 21, 1995. ———. The Pentagon Wars. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1993. Carter, Gregory A. “Some Historical Notes on Air Interdiction in Korea.” Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, September 1966. Casti, John L., and Werner DePauli. Godel. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2000. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Coulam, Robert F. Illusions of Choice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

“Harry Hillaker: Father of the F-16.” Code One. (July 1991). Fort Worth: General Dynamics. “Harry Hillaker: Father of the F-16. Part II. ” Code One. (July 1991). Fort Worth: General Dynamics. Higgins, J. W. “Military Movements and Supply Lines as Comparative Interdiction Targets.” Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, July 1970. Hooker, Richard D. Jr., ed. Maneuver Warfare. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1993. Kaplan, Fred. “Beast of Battle.” Boston Globe Magazine (July 21, 1991): 12. Keaney, Thomas A., and Eliot A. Cohen. Gulf War Air Power Survey. Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press. Keegan, John.


pages: 649 words: 172,080

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

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

He was a skilled orator and obsessively quoted U.S. newspapers and magazines, think-tank studies, and government reports to emphasize key points. In a particularly invidious lecture, “Battle for the Hearts and Minds,” he cited articles from U.S. News & World Report, a study by the U.S.-based RAND Corporation, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review to support his claim that the United States was engaged in a clandestine effort to destroy Islam. Abdulmutallab graduated from University College London in August 2008 as a satisfactory, though not academically outstanding, student.47 Several months later he enrolled at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for a master’s degree in international business.

., 134, 230 “Possible Hijacking Tactic for Using Aircraft as Weapons” (FBI bulletin), 6 Predators, 54, 69, 184, 225, 228 proms, 347–48 Prozak, Spinoza Ray, 488n Puerta del Sol, 162 Pulman, Liza, 208–9 Punjab Province, Pakistan, 92, 179 Qadir, Hanif, 3 Qa’ida, see al Qa’ida Qala-e-Jangi, 68 Qamari, Esam al-, 34 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 279 Qasr al-Ayni Hospital, 32, 34 Qatar, 311 Qissa Khwani, 36 Quadrennial Defense Report, 350 Qudoos, Ahmed Abdul, 81 Quetta, Pakistan, 116 Qur’an, 40, 131, 167, 192, 219, 295, 334–35, 341, 348, 352, 358, 360, 369, 374, 399, 403, 412 Qureshi, Abdul Ghani, 124 Qutb, Sayyid, 43–45, 114, 256, 268, 273, 294, 349, 399 Rabanni, Mohammad Ahmad Ghulum, 101 Rabi’a, Hamza, 176, 177–78, 183, 229, 309, 421 Radisson hotels, 90–91 Rahman, Umar Abd al-, 113, 274, 435 railways, 109 Ramadan, 259 Ramadi, Iraq, 239–41, 243, 245, 247, 253, 254, 255, 259 Rana, Tahawwur, 369, 376 RAND Corporation, 350 Ransom-Monroe, Dionne, 356 Rapoport, David, 22 Rasooli, Habib, 335 Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World (Sharif), 262–63, 264, 270, 272, 275, 276 Rauf, Rashid, 1–2, 4, 13–14, 268, 318, 322 arrest of, 17–18 CIA’s tracking of, 2 killing of, 18 Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 79–80, 104, 199 Razor 01, 62 Rehman, Abdur (Pasha), 382–86 Reid, John, 15, 16, 17 Reid, Richard Colvin, 123–29, 133, 136, 467n, 468n background of, 123–24 in shoe bomb plot, 125–29, 136, 318, 357 Relatively Clean Rivers (Pearlman), 237 Ressam, Ahmed, 91–92, 125 Rhatigan, Wayne, 394 Rhyme, 197 Rice, Condoleezza, 51, 91, 157 Rishawi, Ahmad Bezia Fteikhan al-, 247, 252 Rishawi, Thamir Mubarak Atrouz al-, 141, 145 Riyadh, bombings in, 87, 174 “Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Cairo, The” (Zawahiri), 45 Roberts, Neil C., 47 Robertson, Pat, 306 Robinson, Wayne, 394 Rockwood, Paul, 343, 344 Rose, Flemming, 382, 389 Roth, Kenneth, 96 Rumsfeld, Donald, 66, 146, 148, 439 Russia, 165, 168, 292 Ryder, Art, 112 Sabah, Sheikh, 246–47 Sacranie, Iqbal, 211 Sadat, Anwar, 34, 261–62, 280, 383 Sadr, Muqtada al-, 156 Saeed, Hafiz, 373, 374 Sahawa al-Anbar, see Anbar Awakening Saif al-Adel, 229 Salafism, 30, 114, 131, 145, 220–21, 242, 257, 278, 341, 374 Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, 171, 434 Salah ad-Din, Iraq, 260 Salamé, Ghassam, 143–44 Salameh, Mohammad Amin, 183 Saleh, Abdullah, 338 Saleh, Mohamed, 182 Sana’a, 97, 116 Sana’a Institute for the Arabic Language, 348, 349 Sanchez, Enrique, 169 Sarkovsky, Dan, 329, 330, 331 Sarwar, Assad Ali, 9, 11–12, 14, 15 conviction of, 20 Saudi Arabia, 39, 75, 87, 104, 130, 142, 146, 147, 154, 156, 248, 278, 319, 340 Savant, Ibrahim, 22, 93 Sawt al-Jihad, 155 Sayyida Zeinab Hospital, 36 Schelling, Thomas, 438 Schmults, Edward, 157 Schnewer, Hnan, 291 Schnewer, Mohamad, 289, 290, 291, 292, 296, 299–300, 303 Schroen, Gary, 49–50, 66, 421–22 Schuringa, Jasper, 355, 357 Sears Tower, 310 Senor, Dan, 156 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 3, 6, 7, 8, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29, 46, 51, 64, 82, 86, 92, 94, 97, 99, 118, 132, 175, 177, 216, 262, 264, 290, 293, 305, 313, 316, 330, 334, 354, 360, 369, 373, 390, 394, 415, 419, 420, 437, 439, 443 al Qa’ida’s failure to plan for aftermath of, 7, 106 casualties of, 76, 77 conspiracy theories on, 72 Islamic condemnation of, 72–75, 155 KSM’s hard drive with information on, 103 martyrdom videos from, 296 purpose of, 75–76 response to, 52, 53–55, 76 Shabwah, Yemen, 338–39, 339, 340, 351–52 Shabwah Governorate, 441 Shackleton, Ernest, 65 Shafi, Abu Abdullah al-, 257 Shah, Jamil, 10 Shah-i-Kot Valley, Afghanistan, 53–55, 57–58, 60–61, 68, 75 Shahzad, Faisal, 393–413, 436, 439, 442 radicalization of, 398 training of, 403–4, 405–6 Shakai Agreement, 233, 234 Shakespeare, William, 443–44 Shamia’a, 115 Shamsi, Pakistan, 84 Shapiro, Nick, 413 Sharbi, Ghassan al-, 94 Shareef, Derrick, 310 sharia, 33, 244, 256, 263, 272, 276, 278 Sharif, Sayyid Imam Abd al-Aziz al-, 72–73, 182, 280, 293 al Qa’ida attacked by, 262–69, 270–71 background of, 31 deported from Pakistan, 39 efficacy of violence questioned by, 41 Iraq war opposed by, 155–56 nom de guerre of, 37 in Pakistan, 35–36 in Sudan, 40 Zawahiri’s cell joined by, 34, 36–37 Zawahiri’s edits to work of, 42 Zawahiri’s friction with, 29–31, 33, 40–42, 52, 262, 265, 266–67, 269, 270–76, 277–79 Sharqawi, Abdu Ali al Haji, 104 Shaybani, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-, 72–73 Shepherd’s Bush Underground Station, 209–10 Sherzad, Mohammed, 316 Shibh, Ahmed al-, 97 Shihri, Said al-, 340 Shi’ite Islam, 86, 141, 151, 153, 156, 244, 248, 279, 304 Shirzai, Gul Agha, 70 Shoaib, Muhammad, 398, 401, 403, 404–5, 406–7, 408 shoe bomber, see Reid, Richard Colvin Shukrijumah, Adnan el-, 117–18, 306, 313, 318–21, 322, 325, 435, 442 Shukrijumah, Gulshair Muhammad el-, 319–21 shunning, 268 Siba’i, Hani al-, 275, 276 Siddiqi, Musammil, 220 Sidqi, Aref, 41 SIGINT, 62 Signposts on the Road (Qutb), 43 Silk Road, 36 SIM cards, 100, 166, 168, 351 60 Minutes II, 156 Siyar A’lam Al-shuhada’, 155 Socialist Party, Spain, 167, 171 Sofia, Queen of Spain, 161 Somali, Saleh al-, 315–16, 318, 322, 414 Somalia, 23, 114, 126, 210, 297, 338, 343, 429, 439 South Korea, 343 South Waziristan, 88, 178, 231, 234, 236, 316, 325, 395, 400 Soviet Union: Afghan invasion of, 36, 37, 38, 39, 56, 90, 106, 115, 145, 311, 329, 374, 383 Cold War ideology of, 270 Spain, 231 bombings in, see Madrid bombings election in, 167, 170–71 Iraq war supported by, 166, 167, 173–74, 175 police added in, 182–83 Spanish National Police, 171–72, 175–76 Spann, Johnny “Mike,” 68 Special Activities Division (CIA), 68 Special Independent Commission for the Convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga, 71 special operations teams, 66, 67, 77 Special Services Group, 88, 234 State Department, U.S., 48, 49, 50–51, 270, 441 Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 148 Steinberg, James, 50 “Story of Ibn al-Aqwa, The” (Awlaki), 294, 342 “Story of the Afghan Arabs, The: From the Entry to Afghanistan to the Final Exodus with the Taliban” (Masri), 75 Story of the Malakand Field Force, The (Churchill), 199 Stultz, Cherie Maria, 113 subways, 109 Sudan, 26, 42, 147, 178, 383 coup in, 39 Sufi House, 200 suicide bombers, 150, 154, 157, 197–98, 242, 244–45, 250, 316, 342, 352 see also London, July 7 terrorist attacks in; Madrid bombings Sulayman, Majed Abd al-Razzaq Ali al-, 251 sulfuric acid, 126 Sunnah, 399 Sunni Islam, 32, 141, 242, 244, 245, 255, 256, 257, 279, 441, 443 Suri, Abu Mus’ab al-, 75, 289, 435 Syria, 146, 147, 154, 240, 252 Tablighi Jamaat, 3, 189, 400 Taher, Yasein, 130, 132, 133 Taiwan Straits, 439 Tajikistan, 68 Tajiks, 84, 179 Taj Mahal Palace, 370, 377–82 takfir, 43, 266–67 takfir wal hijra doctrine, 165 Takur Ghar mountain, 56, 62 Taliban, 26, 42, 49, 77, 235–36, 253, 315, 316 air defense of, 66–67 al Qa’ida’s relationship with, 48, 50–51 in battle with Northern Alliance, 125 collapse of, 68, 70, 72, 76, 77, 78, 82, 84, 238 in hiding after 9/11, 53 Operation Anaconda and, 62 Pakistan’s cutting off support to, 84 Pashtun, 68 training camps of, 227 tribes allied with, 65 U.S. rocket attacks on, 53–55 Tamimi, Nabihah al-, 52 Tang, 5, 11 Tanweer, Shehzad, 184, 190–91, 193, 207, 212 bomb-making by, 205 in Leeds underground, 194 London attacks planned by, 205 MI5’s lack of surveillance of, 198 threat by, 204 training of, 201–3, 204 Tanzania, U.S. embassy bombed in, 24, 47–48, 51, 52, 74, 274, 437 tanzime.org, 397 Tanzim Qa’idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, see al Qa’ida in Iraq Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, 70 Tarnak farms, 69, 421 Tartusi, Abu-Basir al-, 276 Task Force 64, 59 Task Force Anvil, 59 Task Force Hammer, 59 Task Force K-Bar, 59 Task Force Rakassan, 59 Tatar, Muslim, 291 Tatar, Serdar, 289, 290, 291–92, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303 Taveras, Steve Francis, 304–8 Tawhid wa’l Jihad, 145, 146, 147, 151 Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), 226 Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, 391, 395, 397, 400–401, 404, 409, 436 Tenet, George, 48, 91, 102, 421 Bush briefed on Afghanistan operation by, 65–66 KSM’s informant congratulated by, 1–2 10th Mountain Division, 61 Terrorism Is Part of Islam (Sharif), 276 terrorist attacks: media coverage of, 13 rising number of, 264 Sharif’s questioning of efficacy of, 41 waves of, 22, 23–26, 23, 51–52, 110, 136, 144, 184, 186, 210, 231, 241, 260, 283, 310, 333, 337–38, 372, 394, 434–35, 437–38 Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), 357 Thailand, 104 Thawar al Anbar, 255 Thomas Danby College, 191 Time, 234 Timergara, Pakistan, 200 Times Educational Supplement, 189 Times Square, 409 Times Square plot, 392–413, 436 Togo, 345 Tora Bora, 59, 70, 88, 416–17, 422, 428 transatlantic airlines plot, 1–20, 216, 268, 309, 310, 325, 354, 403 British surveillance of, 1–2, 8–9, 13 codes used in, 13 Transportation Security Administration, 354 Treatise on the Exoneration of the Nation of the Pen and Sword of the Denigrating Charge of Being Irresolute and Weak, A (Zawahiri), 271 triacetone triperoxide (TATP), 10, 11, 126, 210, 318, 322, 325, 326, 328, 355 Trinidad, 318 “Triple Nickle” (ODA 555), 66 “Truth About the New Crusade, The: A Ruling on the Killing of Women and Children of the Non-Believers” (bin al-Shibh), 100 Tura prison, 261–62, 271, 277 Turkey, 110, 160, 282, 443 Twitter, 425–26, 427 Umayyad Caliphate, 440, 175, 230 Underground, 186 underwear bomber, see Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk United Airlines, 13 United Arab Emirates, 35, 87, 103, 132, 146, 240 United Kingdom, 175, 275–76, 279, 443 Ali/Hussain cell in, see transatlantic airlines plot Iraq war as leading to increased radicalization in, 149–50 Pakistani immigrants in, 1, 3, 186, 187 rail and subway system in, 184 worries about increasing radicalization in, 186 see also London, July 7 terrorist attacks in United Nations, terrorist attack against Iraq headquarters of, 141, 142–44 United States, 24, 132, 273, 277 as alleged enemy of Islam, 44–46 counterterrorism strategy of, 25, 48–49 Iraq war as leading to increased radicalization in, 149 Pakistan’s agreement with, 82–84, 88–89 United States Air Force, 61 United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), 270 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 165 University College London, Islamic Society of, 347 Up in the Air (film), 403 uranium, 118, 119 “Using Special Forces on ‘Our Side’ of the Line” (Wolfowitz), 66 U.S.


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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

The same themes were nevertheless woven together in rather different patterns. America had the benefit of more variety than Britain: meritocratic educational initiatives were sponsored by companies and think tanks as well as governments, meritocratic government reforms were spearheaded by think tanks, particularly the Rand Corporation, as well as government departments. America did not suffer from the same agonies of class guilt as Britain (though it suffered from worse agonies of racial guilt, agonies that were suppressed during the 1950s but transformed politics in the 1960s). In post-war America the meritocratic revolution was all about delivering the promise of American life, as codified in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution, rather than overturning an unjust social order.

B. 137 Pius II, Pope 47 Plato 16, 59–71, 106 Academy 66, 67 and criticism of Athens 64–6 on democracy 63–4 and duty 392 legacy and influence 66–71 and men of gold 59–60 and philosophers 61, 62, 65, 66 Republic 18–19, 59–66, 219 and training for guardians 61–2 Plomin, Robert 381 plutocracy and meritocracy 21–2 see also merito-plutocratic elites Poland 37, 91 rise of nationalism 329 political corruption America 188, 190, 195–6, 200–202 China 361–2 political dynasties 46, 318–19 political meritocracy 383–6 China 22, 357–63 limits of 360–63 political parties and 18th-century patronage 51–2 and changing class appeal 331, 332–3, 346 professional membership 341 political parties, US and election campaigns 331–2 and patronage 202 spoils system 188, 195–6, 200–202 political radicalism 147–8 politicians and academic qualifications 340–41 changing relations with electorate 332–3 and intelligence 3 move to private sector 343–4 and patronage 48, 231 see also populism Pollock, Frederick, History of English Law 38 polygamy 36 Pompidou, Georges 137 Popper, Karl 59 The Open Society and Its Enemies 70 populism and choice of leaders 334 and criticism of meritocracy 6, 22, 333 future of 345–9 and nationalism 344–5 Plato on dangers of 63–4, 71 and political flashpoints 344–5 rise of 329–30, 333 Port Huron Statement (1962) 297 Porter, Michael 254 Portugal, expulsion of Jews (1495, 1497) 93 positive discrimination see affirmative action post office, women employees 271–2 poverty, and IQ 4 Powell, Anthony 246 Powell, Enoch 335 power of knowledge 76 and prejudice 347–8 press and Black Lives Matter 348 cable news channels 386 cosmopolitan bias 334 phone-hacking scandal (2011) 338 and rise of populism 333–4 role in meritocratic government 385–6 tabloid 333 see also journalists Price, J St Clair 285 Price, Richard 178 primogeniture 36 Private Eye 236 professions, talent-based 142 property, and monarchy 38, 48–9 Protestant Reformation 111–12, 177 Protestantism, ethic of hard work 112, 177 Prussia aristocracy 127 defeats by Napoleon 139 October Edict (1807) 139–40 standing army 126–7 Psychological Corporation 214 psychologists 280 psychometrists and IQ testing 206–7 and women’s mental tests 271 Pu Songling, on examination system 83–4 Pu Yi, emperor of China 42 public schools, British 8, 21, 68–9, 70 and abolition of grammar schools 299–300 and access to universities 307, 309 competition from grammar schools 234 facilities and sports 310 foundations to provide education for poor 102–3, 311 and gaming the system 310–311 for girls 268 overseas campuses 309 places for poorer children 378–9 post-war crisis 237–8 and prep schools 237–8 transformation 309–311 Pulitzer prizes 86 Punch magazine 270 Puritanism 112, 114 in America 175–7 Quakers 152 Quesnay, François 82 race classifications 207 and criticism of meritocracy 5–6 and fear of degeneration 215 and group rights 297–8, 347–8 inequality in America 283, 302–5, 346–8 and social inequality 325 race theory critical 5–6 and Jews 87 Racine, Jean 54 racism, and power 347–8 Radford, Ada, Before the Bluestockings 268 Rae, John, headmaster 311 Raleigh, Walter, History of the World (1614) 28–9 Ramsay, Agnata 268 Ramsay, David 19, 178 Rand Corporation 238, 240 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice 290–92 and praise 371 on talent 370 Rayburn, Samuel 290 Rayner, Olive Pratt (pen name of Grant Allen) 271 Reagan, Ronald 1–2, 335 referendums 384, 385 Reform Bill (1867) 165 Regents of the University of California v Bakke (1978 US Supreme Court) 303 Renaissance and ideal of aristocracy 106–11 and Plato 68 Republican Party, anti-intellectual appeal 331–2 republics hereditary 108 open (Machiavelli) 108–9 Revolution of 1848 134 Rhodes, Cecil 69, 320 Ricci, Matteo 77–8, 113 History of the Introduction of Christianity to China 73 in Peking (Beijing) 72–3, 77–8, 81 Richelieu, Cardinal 125 Rickett, Mary Ellen 269 Right, political changing appeal of 332, 346 and communitarianism 294–5 populist 333–5 revolt against merito-plutocratic elite 329–35 335–8 see also populism rights American Revolution and 179 French Revolution and 117 group 297–8, 347–8 political 140 and social contract theory 146 UN Declaration 26 of women 257, 262, 264–5, 274 ritual, and hierarchy 30 Rivera, Lauren 318 robber barons, United States 17, 193, 196–7 Roberts, Margaret see Thatcher Robespierre, Maximilien 118 Robinson, James 397 Rockefeller, David 320 Rockefeller, John 193, 196 Roman Republic, dominant families 48 Romanticism 141–3, 295 Romany gypsies 94 Romney family 255 Romney, George 255, 319 Romney, Mitt 255, 319, 331 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 42, 194 New Deal 201 and robber barons 196–7 Roosevelt, Theodore 17, 196 Rorty, Richard 336 Roth, Philip 92 Rothkopf, David 342 Rothschild, Mayer Amschel 96 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 82 Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of Inequality among Men 121, 375 Émile 121, 264 on talent 130, 141 Royal, Ségolène 312 Royal Societies 114 Rudolf II, emperor 43 Rudolf III, king of Burgundy 41 Rugby (school) 104, 158 Rush, Benjamin 178 and Adams 183, 185 Ruskin, John 68, 395 on Venice 397–8 Russell, Bertrand 213 Russell, Lord John 158, 161 Russia 133 and absolutist contradiction 128–9 Communist, Jews in 86–7 support for IQ testing 228 Table of Ranks 128–9 V.


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

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

Its tens of thousands of eager recruits, most drawn from Syria, Iraq, and Tunisia, had grown up with smartphones and Facebook. The result was a terrorist group with a seventh-century view of the world that, nonetheless, could only be understood as a creature of the new internet. “Terrorism is theater,” declared RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins in a 1974 report that became one of terrorism’s foundational studies. Command enough attention and it didn’t matter how weak or strong you were: you could bend populations to your will and cow the most powerful adversaries into submission. This simple principle has guided terrorists for millennia.

Images, videos, livestreams, and ever-improving online translation make it simple to strike up conversations across the globe. Any of these connections can be observed or joined by audiences from yet other parts of the world. In 1990, a generation after Licklider and Taylor made their prediction about computer communication, two political scientists with the Pentagon’s think tank at the RAND Corporation started to explore the security implications of this emerging internet. Many of John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt’s colleagues considered their line of investigation into computers used mostly by geeks a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But an important few realized that it was game-changing. The first time Arquilla and Ronfeldt put their thoughts into a short memo, the Pentagon immediately classified it.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

He had intended it to spread slowly and quietly, but Morris had made a couple of critical programming errors and instead thousands of computers at universities, government offices, military bases, and medical facilities ground to a halt as the worm replicated itself at a rate far faster than expected, clogging the system and forcing many users to disconnect their computers from the main network. Panic set in at computer labs across the country, as systems administrators noted the program deluging them. At 6:30 p.m., the RAND Corporation noted its presence; then, an hour later, MIT’s AI Lab saw the worm. Soon, it was infecting computers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then Stanford, and dozens of others.48 By midnight, it hit the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory and the army made the decision to sever its connection to the internet entirely.

See 2008 presidential election; 2016 presidential election Presidential Policy Directive 41, 176n price dumping, 263 Privacy Act of 1974, 39 Prodigy, 96 profilers, 328 propaganda broadcasts, 5 Putin, Vladimir, 51–53, 71, 252, 382–383, 385, 387–388, 398 Putter Panda, 195, 271 Pwdump3.exe, 123, 124 al-Qaeda, 4–8, 17–18, 57, 140, 142, 195 al-Qaeda in Iraq, 5, 13 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), 5, 10, 12 Qassam Cyber Fighters. See Cyber Fighters of Izz Ad-Din Al Qassam Qiu, Jack Linchuan, 165 Quds Force, 213–216, 224 Radio Shack TRS-80, 34, 87 Radware, 357 Rahim, Usaamah Abdullah, 21 RAND Corporation, 91 randoms, 81 ransomware attacks, 56, 291–292, 387, 392, 401 Rasch, Mark, 94 RasGas, 221 Rasmussen, Nick, 373 RATs. See remote access tools Rattray, Greg, 38, 244 Rawls, Lee, 138, 141, 146, 147, 149, 262 RBN. See Russian Business Network Reagan, Ronald, 86, 90 Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), 318–319, 319n, 340 Red Notices, 304 Reese, Ron, 237 Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), 121 remote access tools (RATs), 162, 193, 356 remote shells, 91 Reno, Janet, 109, 187 Resler, Brian, 202, 203, 267 Rezakhah, Mohammed Reza, 232 RGB.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

Health-care insiders, pioneering technology companies, and policy makers have been discussing a digital alternative to paper-based medical records since the 1950s. Besides the obvious benefit of improved safety, studies show a gain of nearly 30 percent efficiency through the reduction of paperwork (the average physician fills out more than 20,000 forms each year) and unnecessary or redundant tests. Ultimately, according to senior researchers at the RAND Corporation, “the adoption of interoperable EMR [electronic medical record] systems could produce efficiency and safety savings of $142–$371 billion.” For the health IT sector, the successful implementation of electronic health records is an enormous opportunity. Over the years players big and small have devoted massive resources to finding a way to implement EHR in the health-care industry—but have mostly left a wreckage of false starts.


pages: 218 words: 67,330

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Clarence L. Johnson

Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

Hibbard, with typical generosity, let her leave his office and work for me because he knew it would help me in my new position to continue to work with the secretary we had shared. She stayed with me for 18 years, until her retirement. When Skunk Works principles really are applied, they work. An example of their successful application was development of the Agena-D launch vehicle. The Rand Corporation has recorded it in a report available to anyone interested. The satellite that was to become this country’s workhorse in space was in trouble in terms of design and cost but especially in reliability, which stood at an incredibly low 13.6 percent. I was drafted, in effect, to go up to the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and fix it.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

This would free up “abundant scope for recreation,” enthused an English professor, “by immersion in the imaginative life, in art, drama, dance, and a hundred other ways of transcending the constraints of daily life.”9 Keynes’ bold prediction had become a truism. In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report projected that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just 14 hours, with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed.10 Working would soon be reserved for the elite. In the summer of 1964, The New York Times asked the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov to take a shot at forecasting the future.11 What would the world would be like in 50 years?


pages: 222 words: 50,318

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

.: Island Press, 2003). 37. Lawrence Frank and Barbara McCann, “Driving, Walking, and Where You Live: Links to Obesity,” http://www.choices4health.org/resource Files/82.pdf. 38. Deborah Cohen et al., Park Use and Physical Activity in a Sample of Public Parks in the City of Los Angeles (Arlington, Va.: Rand Corporation, 2006). 39. See Active Living Research, “What We Are Learning,” http://www.active livingresearch.org/index.php/What_We_are_Learning/117, for the latest research. NOTES | 187 40. Reid H. Ewing, R. Pendall, and D. Chen, “Measuring Sprawl and Its Transportation Impacts,” Transportation Research Record no. 1828 (2003): 175–183. 41.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

For details on the exchange rate for Hugonot shares, see “Mesa Petroleum Corporation” by the Texas Historical Association, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dom04, accessed February 6, 2014. 33. Isaacson, Steve Jobs. 34. Cuban, How to Win at the Sport of Business. 35. See Will Jennings, Olympic Risks (London: Palgrave, 2012), and Edward Merrow, “Understanding the Outcomes of Mega-Projects,” (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1988). Chapter 6: The Producer-Performer Duality 1. Unless otherwise noted, all details and quotes pertaining to John Paul DeJoria are drawn from an in-person interview with the authors conducted on March 27, 2013. The detail about John Paul DeJoria’s early professional experiences working for other companies in the hair industry came from http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/24/smallbusiness/paul_mitchell_dejoria.fortune/index.htm. 2.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

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

Merrill has shoulder-length brown hair, a silver stud earring in his right ear, and on his left forearm, past the elbow, a sinuous tattoo of a peacock. ZestFinance is based in Los Angeles, but we talked over lunch in New York during a conference on big data, where Merrill spoke and I moderated a panel. Merrill’s résumé testifies to his intellectual range—a PhD in psychology from Princeton and stints as a researcher at the Rand Corporation and as a senior vice president at Charles Schwab, in addition to Google. His company’s creation story starts with a call from his sister-in-law, Victoria, who needed new snow tires to get to work and was out of cash. Merrill asked what she would have done if she had not been able to reach him, and he recalls that she told him that she would have taken out another “payday loan.”


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

For a long‐term societal issue you're interested in, try developing a theory of change and portfolio of strategies. Notes 1  Hugh Courtney et al., “Strategy Under Uncertainty,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2000. 2  Hugh Courtney, “A Fresh Look at Strategy Under Uncertainty: An Interview,” McKinsey Quarterly, December 2008. 3  Uncertainty, Chapter 5 by Albert Madansky in Systems Analysis, Quade and Boucher, RAND Corporation, 1968. 4  James C. Morgan and Joan O'C. Hamilton, Applied Wisdom: Bad News Is Good News and Other Insights That Can Help Any Anyone Be a Better Manager (Chandler Jordan Publishing, November 2016). 5  Adam Brandenberger and Barry Nalebuff, Co‐Opetition (Currency Doubleday, 1996), 156. 6  Michael Lewis, The Big Short (W.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

Small wonder that, according to the American Automobile Association, “Seniors are outliving their ability to drive safely by an average of seven to ten years.” Often experiencing visual impairments and delayed reaction times, the elderly tend to adjust their driving patterns to less congested areas and daylight hours. This results in a dangerous situation not just for the user but everyone around them, as research from the RAND Corporation suggests drivers over 65 are 16 percent likelier to cause a crash. The lost autonomy that comes with a loss of driving isn’t limited to North America, either. Chris recalls when his grandfather—who lived in a midsized city in Warwickshire, England—had his driver’s license revoked, causing him to go into a minor state of depression.


pages: 403 words: 67,459

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

RAND corporation

For their review of relevant chapters of the manuscript, and for their technical corrections and suggestions, I wish to thank Christian P. Lewis, Goddard Space Flight Center; Herbert Stanch, Avco, Inc.; James P. Baker, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Carlos N. Sandos, California Institute of Technology; Dr. Brian Stack, University of Michigan; Edgar Blalock, Hudson Institute; Professor Linus Kjelling, the RAND Corporation; Dr. Eldredge Benson, National Institutes of Health. Lastly, I wish to thank the participants in the Wildfire Project and the investigation of the -so-called Andromeda Strain. All agreed to see me and, with many, my interviews lasted over a period of days. Furthermore, I was able to draw upon the transcripts of their debriefing, which are stored in Arlington Hall (Substation Seven) and which amounted to more than fifteen thousand pages of typewritten manuscript.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

From 1979 to 2020, the economy-wide income resulting from an average hour of work (that is, productivity) shot up by more than 60 percent. But average compensation—wages and benefits—for the typical worker increased by less than 18 percent over those four decades, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Put simply, Americans stopped being rewarded for their labor like they once were. Analysts at the RAND Corporation have documented the same phenomenon. Their findings, published in 2020, show that a full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median—with half the population making more and half making less—now pulls in about $50,000 a year. Yet had the dividends of the nation’s economic output been shared over the past 45 years as broadly as they had been from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, that worker would instead be making about $100,000.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Suddenly, US diplomacy in Asia began to focus on “moderating” the views of the rising DPJ, which US embassy officials saw correctly was about to take over. The US arrogance toward the party—and the millions of Japanese citizens voting for the change it represented—is illustrated in a May 2009 cable from the US embassy to Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, a former analyst with the RAND Corporation. It includes an intriguing section entitled “DPJ: Friend or Foe?” The answer is clearly the latter: Significant ideological differences within the party make it difficult to predict the impact on bilateral relations under a DPJ government. Your meeting with DPJ President Hatoyama will continue the process begun by the Secretary of building stronger ties to the party and helping to moderate its views.

Sanger, “Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal with the Aid of North Korea,” New York Times, November 28, 2010. 11The most authoritative analysis of the North Korean missile program confirmed that it was only in October 2010—ten months after the joint assessment meeting—that North Korea first displayed what appeared to be a B-25 or “Musadan” missile in a military parade. And a close examination of the photographs of the missile showed clearly that it had been a crudely constructed mock-up rather than a real missile. Markus Schiller, Characterizing the North Korea Nuclear Missile Threat (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), p. 87. 12Reuters, “UAE First Mideast Buyer of PAC-3 missile—Lockheed,” December 23, 2008; Antonie Boessenkool, “UAE to Buy Raytheon’s Patriot Missiles,” Defense News, December 18, 2008. 13Adam Entous, “Saudi Arms Deal Advances,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2012; Michael Knights, Rising to Iran’s Challenge: GCC Military Capability and US Security Cooperation, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Forum 177, June 2013, p. 9; Arthur Bright, “Eyeing Iran US Details $60b.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

., Computer-Mediated Work (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, 1985). 7. David Terrie, Senior Office Systems Analyst, International Data Corpora- tion, quoted in IIHow Computers Remake the Manager's Job," Business Week, 25 April 1983, 68-70. 8. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Automation of America's Offices, OTA-CIT -287 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, De- cember 1985), 15. 9. Tora K. Bikson and B. A. Gutek, II Advanced Office Systems: An Empirical Look at Utilization and Satisfaction" (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, February 1983). 10. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Automation of America's Offices, 307. 11.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

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

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

The clock was switched off from 2000 to 2002 when the national debt briefly fell. Subsequently, as the debt started to rise, the clock was restarted. By 2009, the debt exceeded $10 trillion, requiring Douglas Darst, Seymour’s son, to arrange for a new clock with extra capacity. In the 1950s, Herman Kahn, a strategist at the RAND Corporation, and Ian Harold Brown, a risk analyst, proposed a doomsday machine. It consisted of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. In Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, there is speculation about whether the Russians possess this technology.

See also currency Quayle, Dan, 95 Queen, 157 Queen Elizabeth, 278 R Rabbit Is Rich, 363 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 150 Radaker, Byron, 134 Rain Man, 153, 166 rainbows, 211 Raines, Sylvain, 309 Rains, Claude, 77 Rajaratnam, Raj, 244 Ralphie’s Funds, 191, 204 Ramones, The, 79 RAND Corporation, 35 Rand, Ayn, 294, 296 random walks, 118 rands, 21 Range Rover, 346 Ranieri, Lewis, 170 Rapid American, 143 Rappaport, Alfred, 124 Raskob, John, 97 Ratergate (2008), 285 ratings agencies, 141 bonds, 282-285 CDOs, 285 credit, 282 Rational Man, 119 Rattner, Steven, 274 Raynes, Sylvain R., 196 re-re-securitizations, 191 re-securitizations, 191 Reagan, Ronald, 65-66, 97, 101, 298, 364 real estate, 179-182 adjusted rate mortgages (ARMs), 183-184 reals, 21 recessions, 350 recovery, 359-360 rates, 171 recruitment of finance candidates, 310 recycling in Japan, 39 Red Force, 264 Redline, 186 Reed, John, 71, 75 reflexivity, 327 Regnault, Jules, 118 regulations, 81 banks, 65-67 Basel 1, 74 Basel 2, 200 central banks, 279-281 self-regulating markets, 102 synthetic securitization, 176 regulators preparation for financial crises, 264-278 understanding of securitization, 282 regulatory arbitrage, 75 Reid, Harry, 299 relative value funds arb (arbitrage) market inefficiencies, 242 religious prohibitions on usuries, 32 remote risk of loss, 220 renminbi, 21 rentiers, 33 repackaging corporate debt, 173 repos (repurchase agreements), 288 reserves banking, 32 gold, 30 resources, financial news, 89-99 restructures, corporations, 57 retirement, 20, 46, 48 Japan, 49-50 pension plans, 50 self-funded savings, 180 returns benchmarking, 123 on capital, 57 hedge funds, 243-244 private equity, 162 Revco drug stores, 150 Reykjavík, Iceland, 275 as a financial center, 84 Reynolds, Glenn, 283 Reynolds/Tube, 58 Rhodesia.


pages: 614 words: 174,633

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Alistair Cooke, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, British Empire, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, haute couture, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The question of how to depict cosmic immensity preoccupied Kubrick, and he devoured the space art illustrations of Chesley Bonestell and Czech artist Luděk PeŠek—which arrived at Central Park West in the form of lavishly illustrated large-format books—as well as hard-core technical reports of the kind produced by the US Air Force–affiliated RAND Corporation think tank, NASA, and the scientific journals. Having learned to use a slide rule and absorbed the basics of the celestial coordinate system from his tutor, Kubrick turned his attention to the nature of infinity. At one point in July, he and Clarke suspended their discussion of plot development to engage in a lengthy exegesis of Cantor’s paradox, which is based on the idea that the number of infinite sizes can itself be infinite.

., 125 Pike, Kelvin, 153, 161, 172, 179, 180–83, 197, 198, 209, 210, 255, 259, 314 Planetary and Space Science, 19 Planet of the Apes, 316, 423 Pocket Books, 32 Pohlad, Bill, 433 Polanski, Roman, 226, 306–7, 346 Polaris Productions, 25, 32, 34, 44, 52, 58–59, 61, 62, 76, 80, 88, 89, 91, 98, 103–4, 329–30 Ordway and Adams’s lawsuit against, 408 Pollock, Jackson, 347 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 380 Powell, Aubrey, 143n Powell, Ivor, 153, 159, 160, 201, 217, 225, 322, 380 Powell, Michael, 262 Powers, Stefanie, 160 Preminger, Otto, 140, 159, 190, 191, 243 Pressburger, Emeric, 262 prewar gauze, 381–82 Profiles of the Future (Clarke), 49 Prometheus, 73 Prospect of Immortality, The (Ettinger), 115n psilocybin, 98–99 Psycho, 356 Publishers Weekly, 239–40 Queen Elizabeth, RMS, 397, 405, 406–7 Questar telescope, 27, 29, 46, 56 RAF Spitfire, 117 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 259 Rain, Douglas, 71, 374–78, 399, 442 Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), 98, 99 Ramsey, Clark, 336, 337 RAND Corporation, 76 Randi, James, 415–16 Ran Muthu Duwa, 25, 26 Raven-Hart, R., 17 rear projection, 268 Red Alert (George), 58 Regent’s Park Zoo, 265, 267, 280 Requiem (Ligeti), 9, 360, 361, 363 Residu, 246 Reyes, Benn, 374, 398 Richter, Dan, 246–51, 250, 260–61, 263–68, 279–83, 285–96, 298–303, 305–15, 311, 317, 368, 369, 384, 433 Clarke and, 261, 308 drug habit of, 247, 264, 280–81, 292–94 film credit of, 400–401 as Moonwatcher, 261, 268, 281, 282, 289, 291, 293, 299, 306–15, 311, 401 as Polka Dot Man, 383–86, 387 Richter, Jill, 247, 261, 306 Riordan, Eugene, 126, 127 Road to the Stars, 252 Robards, Jason, 90 Robocop, 423n Rocket Publishing Co., 17, 204 Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, 411 Ross, Alex, 360 Rossiter, Leonard, 139 Rothko, Mark, 347 Royal Albert Hall, 246, 247 Rubinger, Bob, 24–25 Ryan, Robert, 90 Ryder, Winston, 380 Saarinen, Eero, 118 Sagan, Carl, 11, 18–21, 64–66, 84, 213–14, 385 Saint Laurent, Yves, 140 Sands of Mars, The (Clarke), 32 Sarris, Andrew, 419 satellites, 56–57, 125 Saturn, 136–38, 144 Saving Private Ryan, 259 Scheider, Roy, 442 Schurmann, Gerard, 356 science fiction, 8, 19, 28–29, 36–39, 69, 79, 84–86, 94, 108–9, 264–65, 269, 433–34 Scientific American, 344 Scotchlite, 269, 295 Scotland, 243–45, 245, 395, 396 Scott, George C., 90, 186 Séance on a Wet Afternoon, 35 Segal, Mort, 333 Selassie, Haile, 232 Seldes, Gilbert, 35 Sellers, Peter, 41, 43, 262, 315, 433 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 20–21, 22, 30, 31, 44, 48, 53, 54, 88, 89, 102 Serendib, 26 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 19 Seventh Seal, The, 200 Shadow on the Sun, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 139 Shapiro, Michael, 422 Shapley, Harlow, 69 Shaw, Artie, 35, 38, 62 Shaw, Robert, 90, 91 Shay, Don, 343–44 Shepperton Studios, 111–12, 147–50, 151–57, 153 flies and bats at, 156, 157 Shining, The, 175, 438 Shrimpton, Jean, 284 Sight & Sound, 438–49 Silence, The, 35 Silent World, The (Cousteau), 21 Silverstein, Maurice, 409, 420 Simpson, Roy, 279–82, 292–94 Simpsons, The, 433 Singer, Alexander, 35 Skeleton Coast, 271 Skinner, B.


pages: 564 words: 182,946

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

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

As a leading investment banker, he provided the new Democratic administration with a touch of non-partisan appeal and the much-needed gravitas of an establishment figure who could, as Kennedy recognised, ‘call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names’.5 The tendency in general among Kennedy’s advisers (his so-called ‘brains trust’) was, however, more biased towards academics, including such Ivy League luminaries as J.K. Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris (all Harvard), and the economic historian and expert on ‘overcoming backwardness’, Walt Rostow (MIT). Kennedy’s administration was the first one in which ‘think tanks’—especially the RAND Corporation—came to the fore, and memoranda on every subject from just about every conceivable angle started to flood into the White House’s in-tray. Even Kennedy’s Secretary of State was no toughie Cold War warrior in the mode of the late John Foster Dulles but a conscientious, not especially combative Georgian liberal, Dean Rusk.

., 219, 223 Oelschlegel, Vera, 107 Oelssner, Fred, 101 Office for the Protection of the Constitution, 372 Ohnesorge, Benno, 360 oil, 373-4, 377-8, 409 Olympic Games, 13, 95, 349, 386 Operation Vermin, 76 Orlopp, Josef, 34 Orlov, General Alexander, 142 Oslo, 94-6 Ostalgie, 445 Ostbahnhof, 84, 179, 314 Osrkreuz junction, 182 Otto-Grorewohl-Strasse, 242 Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza, 360 Pakistan, 443 Palestine, 443 Palmerston, Lord, 17 Pankow, 106, 304-5 Pankow-Schönholz, 238 Paris, 13, 206, 214, 434; Communists in exile in, 29; four-power meetings, 67, 152, 156; abandoned summit, 128 Paris Match, 327 Pariser Platz, 178, 428, 449 Paschau, Comrade, 179 Pawel, Colonel von, 157, 249 INDEX / 519 PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), 437, 439, 445, 448 Peking, 118 perestroika, 388 Pervukhin, Mikhail, 121, 126, 138-41 Pérain, Marshal, 398 Peter III, Tsar, 11 Philadelphia, 103 Pieck, Arthur, 35 Pieck, Wilhelm, 29, 31, 33, 35, 70; leads SED, 44; visits Stalin, 52; GDR president, 69, 83, 92, 106; death, 113 Pitsunda, 134 Pittsburgh, 116 Plattenballten, 448 Platz der Republik, 61 Plaza Hotel, 256, 258 Plesetsk, 116 Plzn, 82 Poland, 10, 14, 71, 146; dismantled by Frederick the Great, 12; and Hitler-Stalin pact, 30; post-war, 37, 39; Germans expelled, 45; uprising, 100-1; and exodus from GDR, 148; trade with West Germany, 149; subsidised food supplies, 224; acquires German territory, 343; treaty with West Germany, 368; technology imports, 373; political difficulties, 375; coal exports, 377; Solidarity comes to power, 401-2; economic revival, 444 Polaris submarines, 283 Polish Communist Party, 101 Pomerania, 76 Portugal, 385 potatoes, 11, 23, 54, 348 Potsdam, xxiii, 84, 154, 159, 162, 257; wall, 9; Sans Souci palace, 11-12; grave of Frederick the Great, 13; Cäcilienhof Lodge, 39; military missions, 154, 212; and border escapes, 293-4; demonstrations, 411 Porsdam Agreement, 54, 103, 177, 271, 288, 452 Potsdam Conference, 39, 45, 176 Porsdamer Platz, 84-5, 178, 183, 238, 245; border permanently closed, 234, 241-2, 256; subway station closed, 242; rank craps installed, 286; attack on Wall, 293; new crossing point, 431 520 / THE BERLIN WALL Powell, Sir Charles, 434 Prague, 6, 51, 332; GDR refugees leave through, 404, 406-8, 421; Lobkovic Palace, 406 Prague Spring, 362, 403 Presley, Elvis, 313 prisoners of war, 30-1, 120 Prussia, 3, 70; unification with Brandenburg, 6; army, 8-10,12-14; awarded royal crown, 8; bankruptcy, 9; and Seven Years War, 10-11; staple food, 11; expansion, 11-12, 15; alliance with Britain, 11-12; under Napoleon, 12-14; reforms, 14; and War of Liberation, 14-15; and united Germany, 15-16; war with Austria, 17; GDR and 349-50; see also East Prussia Pullach, 154 punks, 363-4 Puzo, Mario, 75 Quartier Napoléon, 208 Qassem, Brigadier Abd alKarim, 207 radio and television broadcasts, 180-1, 290-1, 425-7 Radio Belgrade, 58 Radio Berlin, 56, 58 RAF, 56 railways, 15, 33; model, 370; see also Berlin rail corridor Rakowski, Mieczyslaw, 409 RAND Corporation, 114 Ransdorf, 182 Raptis, George, 314 Ravensbrück, 450 Rayburn, Sam, 231-2 Readiness Police, 129, 143-4, 175, 239, 294 Reagan, Nancy, 380-1 Reagan, Ronald, 401; visics East Berlin, 380-1, 385; becomes president, 385, 387; visits West Berlin, 396 Red Army, 30, 32-5, 38-9, 92; helmee design, xx, 72; and Berlin arrests, 49; quells workers’ uprising, 85, 87; suppresses Hungarian uprising, 101; cuts in manpower, 116; and border closure, 144-5, INDEX / 521 156; counts American reinforcements, 250-1; and collapse of GDR, 410-11 Red Town Hall, 58-60, 414 Red Wing, Minnesota, 211 Redel, General Siegfried, 144 Reedy, George, 242; refugees, leave GDR, 404-8, 420-1; organizations, 76, 132, 390 Rehfelde cemetery, 294 Reich Chancellery ruins, 189 Reichstag, 29, 61, 86, 256; established, 18-19; socialist deputies, 20, 22, 28; Ulbricht enters, 26; Nazi deputies, 27-8; SAP represetation, 94 Reichstagufer, 295 Reimann, Brigitte, 123 Reinhold-Huhn-Strasse, 318 Reinickendorf, 42, 304 religion, persecution and tolerance, 5-6, 8, 11; Adenauer and, 70-1, 358 Reuter, Ernst, 48-9, 59; mayor of West Berlin, 74, 98; death, 99 Reuters, 425 Rheinsberger Strasse, 324-5 Rhine, river, 399 Rhineland, 15, 42, 53, 98, 177 RlAS (Radio in the American Sector), 58, 87, 167-8, 181, 213, 216 Riesa, 382 Roberts, Sir Frank, 134 Romans, 3 Rommel, General Erwin, xxii Roosevelt, Franklin D., 38-9, 246 Roosevelt, Theodore, 121 Rosinenbomber, 57 Restock, 446 Resow, Walt, 114, 146, 205, 209-11, 246, 336 Rothenkirchen, 389 Royal Corps of Military Police, 65, 170 Rüdow, 172 Rühmann, Heinz, 35 522 / THE BERLIN WALL Ruhr industrial area, 22, 27, 42, 46, 53, 391 Rummelsburg station, 175 Ruppiner Strasse, 239 Rusk, Dean, 114, 152, 205, 214-15, 218, 223-4, 247, 286 Russia, 11-12, 16, 48; Napoleon invades, 14; and triple alliance, 21; 1917 revolution, 24; land reform, 51; Stalin’s, 75, 364, 418; See also Soviet Union Saarland, 42, 91, 93, 391, 430 Sabolyk, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert, 272-3, 280-1 Sachsenhausen, 47, 60, 196 Salinger, Pierre, 205, 224 SALT II arms-reduction treaty, 385-6 San Antonio, 225 San Francisco, 18, 230 Sandanistas, 385 Sanitz, 314 Santiago, 441-2 São Paulo, 441 SAP (Socialist Workers’ Party), 94-5 Sauerbruch, Dr, 34-5 Saxony, 58, 86, 144, 197, 384; invaded by Prussia, 11; socialism in, 22, 27; careerists disliked, 125; industries, 388-9, 443; growing unrest, 410; neo-Nazi parties in, 439 Saxony-Anhalt, 444 S-Bahn, 256, 260, 306, 311, 370; strike, 66-7; cut off at border, 162-168; stations, 179; attacks on trains, 293 Schabowski, Günter, 110, 190, 414; addresses demonstrators, 418-19; announces open borders, 422-5; expelled from SED, 432 Schacht, Dr Hjalmar, 27 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, 13 Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 375-6, 378 Scharnhorst, General, 14 Scharoun, Hans, 35 Schiffbauerdamm, 295 Schiller Friedrich, xxiv INDEX / 523 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 14, 83 Schirdewan, Karl, 100-1 Schlaffke, Horst, 83 Schlesinger, Arthur, 114 Schleswig-Holstein, 17, 371 Schloss Wilkendorf, 161 Schmidt, Helmut, 372, 381, 387 Schmidt, Lutz, 394-5 Schmidtchen, Jörgen, 310 Schmollerstrasse, 264 Schönbrunn Palace, 128 Schöneberg, 58, 123; Town Hall, 167, 176, 227, 244-5, 253; Kennedy's speech at Town Hall, 338, 340 Schönefeld Airport, 139, 146, 266, 394, 442 Schönfliess, 156 Schönhausen Castle, 106 Schönholz, goods station, 305 Schönholzer Strasse, 324-5 Schröder, Gerhard, 396 Schröder, Louise, 49 Schubert, Hermann, 30 Schulte, Fritz, 30 Schultz, Egon, 328, 335 Schulze, Peter, 58 Schulz-Ladegast, Klaus, 184-5, 193-4, 196-9, 234; sentence halved, 199, 360; escapes, 332-3; father released, 376 Schumacher, Kurt, 71 Schumann, Corporal Conrad, 239-41, 265, 292, 447 Schürer, Gerhard, 415-16 Schwander, Rudi, 85-6 Schwedler Strasse, 186 Schwerin, 156, 446 Scott-Heron, Gil, 428 Sebastianstrasse, 316 Second World War, 6, 75, 92, 144; aftermath of, 71, 73, 132, 368, 433, 443 524 / THE BERLIN WALL SED (Communist Party), xxv, 61, 237, 348; creation of43-4, 47, 98; trails in elections, 47; and introduction of Communism in Germany, 51-2; demonstrations, 59; and establishment of GDR, 67-9; purged, 68, 77; and East Berlin administration, 74; admits mistakes, 81; and workers’ uprising, 83-4, 87-9; cultural credibility, 89; Honecker and, 92, 97, 99; Brandt and, 97; lifestyle of élites, 106-11; Mielke and, 142-3; and border closure, 153-4, 158, 178-80, 18990; members escape, 265, 313; establishes links with SPD, 396; leadership and demonstrations, 418-19; members leave, 432; participates in free elections, 432; changes name, 437, 439 Seidel, Harry, 315-16, 322 Seifert, Major-General, 141 Sejna, Jan, 126 Selbmann, Fritz, 83 Selbstschussanlagen, 367, 393 Semenov, Vladimir, 81, 87-9, 140 Seoul, 72 Serov, General Ivan, 33 Sesta, Domenico (’Mimmo’), 322-6 Seven Years War, 11 Shanghai, 69 Shelepin, Alexander, 146 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 437 Showalter, Colonel, 203 Siekmann, Ida, 188 Silesia, 10, 46, 76 Sindermann, Horst, 135 skinheads, 364, 439 Slovakia, 444-5 Smaroda, Major, 195 Smolensk, 116 socialism, 19-21 Solidarity, 401-2, 426 Soloviev Colonel Andrei I., 223, 279, 283-4 Sonnena1lee (film), 445 INDEX / 525 Sonnenallee crossing point, 257-9 Sorensen, Theodore, 340-1 South Korean airliner, shot down, 387 Soviet Military Administration (SMA), 36, 42-3, 47, 61, 69, 85 Soviet Union, 47, 59, 132; defence of, 26; German Communists in, 30; war reparations, 33; and division of Berlin, 36-7; opposes free trade area, 53; and advent of Cold War, 69; nuclear weapons, 72-3, 103, 116-18, 120-1, 145, 282; post-Stalin leadership, 79-81, 85; economy, 79, 127, 275; flag torn down, 85; purges, 95; rocket science, 102, 113, 115-16; relations with China, 118, 122, 282; support for GDR, 135, 149; consequences of border closure, 224, 226, 274; policy on Berlin, 277-8, 282-3; acquires German territory, 343; and Berlin Agreement, 367; oil exports, 373-4, 409; involvement in Afghanistan, 385-6; confrontation with USA, 387; and German unity, 392; and Brezhnev Doctrine, 403; reform of, 434; troops withdrawn from Germany, 437; collapse of, 440; see also Russia Soviet War Memorial, 320 Spain, 142 Spandau, 172, 200, 296 Spandau Ship Canal, 307 Spanish Civil War, 95 Spartakist League, 24 SPD (Social Democratic Party), 20, 22-4, 28-9, 35, 48-9; re-formed, 42; and creation of SED, 43-4, 47, 98; election gains, 47, 270, 344; activists arrested, 47; continues to work in East, 59; under Schumacher, 71; song, 84; Brandt and, 94, 97; in Berlin elections, 99; Stasi and, 143; clandestine network in GDR, 154; American relations with, 244; joins government, 344-5; establishes links with SED, 396; re-forms in GDR, 417; and German reunification, 430, 433, in GDR elections, 433; in all-German elections, 437; coalition with PDS, 448 Speer, Albert, 83 spies, 124, 150, 156, 197-9, 371-2; exchanges, xxiii; SED, 180; tools of trade, 197; positive effects of spying, 213; Guillaume affair, 371-2 Spree, river, 3-4, 7, 168, 257, 260, 293-5 526 / THE BERLIN WALL Springer, Axel, 217, 227, 317-18, 321; hostility towards Ostpolitik, 343; and attack on Dutschke, 360-1; and political prisoners, 376 Sputnik, 102, 113, 275 Sputnik magazine, 403 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The, (film) 333 SS, 168 Stalin, Josef, 26, 30-1, 33, 39, 82, 119; pact with Hitler, 30, 95; and Berlin, 35, 57, 243; and division of Germany, 37-8, 67-8, 70; and nuclear weapons, 40; and creation of SED, 43-4; and introduction of Communism in Germany, 50-2; and Korean War, 72-3; offer on German unification, 75-6; and GDR borders, 76, 78; death, 78, 89; and ’doctors’ plot’, 78; portraits burned, 82; denounced by Khrushchev, 100, 103, 275, 281-2, 346; mocks Khrushchev, 103, 117; personality cult, 123; body removed from mausoleum, 282; Ulbricht rejects, 346; and Baltic states, 401; and mass murder, 443 Stalinallee, 82-3, 90, 346 Stalingrad, battle of, 49, 55, 119, 263 Star Wars project, 386 Starnberger See, 342 Stasi136, 185, 190, 215, 360, 402; leaders, 48; established, 69; ’night and fog’ actions, 76; and SED leaders, 108-9; headquarters, 142; Mielke heads, 142-3; motto, 143; and border closure, 144, 158-9, 206; forbidden area, 194-5, 213, 234; interrogation prison, 196-9, 234, 332; interrogation methods, 198; military arm, 237, 311; and border escapes, 265-6, 294, 296-8, 301, 303-7, 314, 316-17, 324, 329, 332-3, 394-5, 398; counter-espionage, 291; and crossing permits, 335; strength, 346; informers, 346, 420; and sports, 349; and punks, 363; dog-training school, 366; foreign espionage, 371-3; costs of, 374; and KoKo, 374-6; observers at Checkpoint Charlie, 380-1, 385, 396; and Helsinki activists, 382; and exit-visa movement, 384-5; surveys popular opinion, 392; and collapse of GDR, 410, 412, 418-21, 426, 431; Mielke’s apologia for, 432; Hagen Koch’s career, 435-6; aids Chilean dissidents, 441; killings in West Germany, 442; films reveal reveal truth about, 445-6 State Opera, 125, 406 State Porcelain Factory, 252, 255 INDEX / 527 Steel, Sir Christopher, 220 Stegliz, 170, 356 Stoph, Willi, 108, 141, 143, 412, 415, 419 Strasbourg, 403 Strasse des 17.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

But I don’t have that excuse. In late 1969, as a high school sophomore, I visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. There, I had the opportunity to play on a new terminal-based information transfer system called ARPANET—the internet’s precursor. Using a technology called “packet switching” designed by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, ARPANET was designed to link together various government laboratories and academic institutions to essentially send email. I found it overly complex and boring. I didn’t give it a second thought. Even years later, as a cub reporter on the Silicon Valley beat at the San Jose Mercury-News, when I was actually using the pre-web internet, I still didn’t see it as the Next Big Thing.

Despite a relatively parochial career, Hewlett also gathered a distinguished list of awards and credentials, including honorary degrees from Berkeley, Yale, and Notre Dame, among others, and seats on the boards of Chrysler and Chase Manhattan Bank. Where Packard’s activities were political, Hewlett’s were in technology, and ironically, given his scholastic record, in education. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a trustee of the RAND Corporation, and (for 11 years) a trustee of Stanford University. In 1954, Hewlett was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), only the second Westerner to attain that distinction—the first being Fredrick Terman. The loyalty of Hewlett and Packard to Terman is one of the most moving episodes in the Silicon Valley story.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

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

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

A different set of problems is that, even if they cannot guarantee perfect anonymity, cryptocurrencies such as Monero and Zcash might still enable illicit and criminal activities to an extent that is infeasible with cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, that offer weaker pseudonymity. This is a legitimate worry—although a RAND Corporation study in 2020 found little evidence of such behavior, perhaps because these alternatives were technically more complicated and were not in widespread use. The study refers to the “hegemony” of Bitcoin among cryptocurrency users and concludes that “notwithstanding the advent of privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, criminals engaged in illicit activities are still primarily drawn to Bitcoin due to the structural incentives that the widely-used Bitcoin’s critical mass creates for criminals.”

For a more entertaining explanation, see “How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children,” Springer-Verlag, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf. Some of the technical details about the vulnerabilities of Zcash can be found at “What is Zcash? The Anonymity Loving Currency,” skalex, www.draglet.com/what-is-zcash#security-concerns. The RAND Corporation’s 2020 report Exploring the Use of Zcash Cryptocurrency for Illicit or Criminal Purposes is available at https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR4400/RR4418/RAND_RR4418.pdf. See also Deutsche Bundesbank Monthly Report, Distributed Ledger Technology in Payments and Securities Settlement: Potential and Risks, September 2017.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

As the war became more and more unpopular, people in or close to the government began to break out of the circle of assent. The most dramatic instance was the case of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a Harvard-trained economist, a former marine officer, employed by the RAND Corporation, which did special, often secret research for the U.S. government. Ellsberg helped write the Department of Defense history of the war in Vietnam, and then decided to make the top-secret document public, with the aid of his friend, Anthony Russo, a former RAND Corporation man. The two had met in Saigon, where both had been affected, in different experiences, by direct sight of the war, and had become powerfully indignant at what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam.

It was totally useless except in a nuclear war, in which case it would only add several hundred warheads to the tens of thousands already available. That $1.5 billion was enough to finance a five-year program of child immunization around the world against deadly diseases, and prevent five million deaths (Ruth Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1987–1988). In the mid-1980s, an analyst with the Rand Corporation, which did research for the Defense Department, told an interviewer in an unusually candid statement, that the enormous number of weapons was unnecessary from a military point of view, but were useful to convey a certain image at home and abroad: If you had a strong president, a strong secretary of defense they could temporarily go to Congress and say, “We’re only going to build what we need. . . .


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Josef Joffe is a member of the executive committee of The American Interest and editor of Die Zeit. Anne Korin is with the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. 181 2990-7 ch16 notes contribs 7/23/07 12:17 PM Page 182 182 contributors James Kurth is with Swarthmore College. David Landes is an emeritus professor of Harvard University. Robert Lempert is with the RAND Corporation. Bernard-Henri Lévy is an independent journalist and a member of the editorial board of The American Interest. Gal Luft is with the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Walter Russell Mead is with the Council on Foreign Relations. Richard A. Posner is with the University of Chicago School of Law.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

., “The Power of Positive Deviance,” BMJ 329, no. 7475 (November 11, 2004): 1177–79, doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7475.1177. 12 Tina Rosenberg, “When Deviants Do Good,” New York Times, February 27, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/when-deviants-do-good/. 13 David Dorsey, “Positive Deviant,” Fast Company, November 30, 2000, http://www.fastcompany.com/42075/positive-deviant. 14 “Austin Hill—Venture Partner @ Montreal Start Up,” CrunchBase, accessed May 30, 2016, https://www.crunchbase.com/person/austin-hill#/entity. 15 Mathew Ingram, “Austin Hill, Internet Freedom Fighter,” The Globe and Mail, October 4, 1999. 16 Joseph Czikk, “‘A Straight Out Scam’: Montreal Angel Austin Hill Recounts First Business at FailCampMTL,” Betakit, February 25, 2014, http://www.betakit.com/montreal-angel-austin-hill-failed-spectacularly-before-later-success/ 17 Konrad Yakabuski, “Future Tech: On Guard,” Globe and Mail, August 25, 2000, sec. Metro. 18 David Kalish, “Privacy Software Reason for Concern,” Austin American-Statesman, December 14, 1999. 19 Developed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation in 1950, and formalized by Princeton mathematician Albert W. Tucker, the prisoner’s dilemma describes a situation in which two participants must make a decision without consulting each other, but knowing that the outcome of the scenario depends partially on the other participant’s decision. The classic example is that of two prisoners who have been offered a chance to confess.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

[cccliv] Planning We don’t have sufficient information to draw up detailed plans for the way we would like our economies and societies to evolve. But we can, and probably should, be doing detailed scenario planning. Scenario planning has been practised by military leaders since time immemorial. It was given the name by Herman Kahn, who wrote narratives about possible futures for the US military while working for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. (His suggestion that a nuclear war might be both winnable and survivable made him one of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove in the classic 1964 movie.[ccclv]) Scenario planning was adopted by Shell Oil after it (along with the rest of the industry) was disastrously wrong-footed by the rise of the oil cartel OPEC in the 1970s.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

This time he can get out on land if desired. Finally, man and lion return to the far shore. That’s every mammal across in five and a half round-trips. This puzzle is a politically correct update of one that played a role in early artificial intelligence research. In 1957, Allen Newell and J. Clifford Shaw of the Rand Corporation and Herbert Simon of the Carnegie Institute of Technology unveiled the General Problem Solver, one of the first AI problems. Its creators had asked people to solve logic puzzles while narrating their reasoning. The computer scientists then boiled down the techniques and coded them into the General Problem Solver.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

See computing power product keys profile data Project Anvil Project Gutenberg projectors psychological implications of lifelogging public spaces publishing Puffer, Bob Pulse Pen Pulse Smartpen Q quantitative analysis Questia Quicken Quicken Health R radio broadcasts Ramin, Cathryn Jakobson RAND Corporation Rank Xerox EuroParc reality television recall of data recording technology . See also audio recordings and files recycling Red Dwarf (television) Reddy, Raj Remembrance Agent reminders remote servers. See also cloud computing repair services repetition replication of data repressed memories reputation reQall and cell phone logs described as memory aid and MyLifeBits and note taking and storytelling research Rhodes, Bradley Rimmer, Arnold The Road Ahead (Gates) Roy, Deb Rozycki, Vicki RSS news feeds S Safire, William Samsung San Diego County Medical Society Foundation The San Diego Union-Tribune San Jose Sharks Santa Barbara County Sawyer, Robert J.


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

The man who invented the computer : the biography of John Atanasoff, digital pioneer / Jane Smiley.—1st ed. p. cm. 1. Atanasoff, John V. (John Vincent) 2. Computer scientists—United States—Biography. 3. Inventors—United States—Biography. 4. Physicists—Iowa—Biography. 5. College teachers—Iowa—Biography. 6. Electronic digital computers—History—20th century. 7. Sperry Rand Corporation—History—20th century. 8. Patients—United States—History—20th century. 9. Intellectual property—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. QA76.2.A75S64 2010 004.092—dc22 [B] 2010018887 eISBN: 978-0-385-53372-0 v3.1 Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Balmer, J. 2001. “The New Jet Set.” Barron’s, November 19. Bettis, Richard A., and Howard Thomas, eds. 1990. Risk, Strategy, and Management. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc. Birkler, J., et al. 2001. “Assessing Competitive Strategies for the Joint Strike Fighter: Opportunities and Options.” Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Blau, P. M. 1964. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: Wiley. Borzak, L., ed. 1981. Field Study: A Source Book for Experiential Learning. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Breen, Bill. 2002. “High Stakes, Big Bets.” Fast Company, April. Chandler, Alfred. 1962. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise.


pages: 261 words: 79,883

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

From members of Congress to foreign ambassadors, from small businesses to corporations Microsoft and Wal-Mart, from Hollywood to NASA to the Pentagon, those who want to inspire people want to learn about the WHY. His TEDx Talk about WHY is one of the top twenty most viewed talks on TED.com. Sinek is also an adjunct staff member of the RAND Corporation, teaches graduate level strategic communications at Columbia University, and is active in the arts and not-for-profit world. When not living in hotels, he lives in New York City. PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Is groupthink more or less common when we are not physically in a group? Are grievances quashed or more easily aired? Videoconferencing and online interaction means we can apply a group decision-making method with significant power and evidence of success. The Delphi Method, which takes its name from the Greek Oracle of Delphi, was developed by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s.39 It involves treating group members as expert panellists, where each person submits their opinions and reasons anonymously and independently before the discussion is opened up to structured deliberation. Further rounds of submission and debate are hosted by a chair. It is well suited to a process in which we are physically distant.


pages: 250 words: 79,360

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

The common theme in these cases is taking action to reduce risk which is not optimised to a perfect model prediction of the future (although most strategies do, as you would expect, benefit from having better information). There is a literature on robust decision-making that considers these kinds of trade-offs and alternative strategies in the absence of perfect model information. As RAND Corporation scientist and IPCC author Rob Lempert argues: Rather than relying on improved point forecasts or probabilistic predictions, robust decision making embraces many plausible futures, then helps analysts and decision makers identify near-term actions that are robust across a very wide range of futures – that is, actions that promise to do a reasonable job of achieving the decision makers’ goals compared to the alternative options, no matter what future comes to pass.


pages: 694 words: 197,804

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis by Julie Holland

benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, confounding variable, drug harm reduction, intentional community, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, traumatic brain injury, University of East Anglia, zero-sum game

THE GATEWAY THEORY*31 The “gateway” theory suggests that marijuana use inevitably leads to the use of harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin (Kandel 1975; Gabany and Plummer 1990). However, population data compiled by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health et al. demonstrate that the vast majority of marijuana users do not progress to more dangerous drugs (Zimmer and Morgan 1997; Brown and Horowitz 1993; SAMHA 2006; RAND Corporation 2002). The gateway theory was also refuted by the Institute of Medicine and in a study published in the American Journal of Public Health (Joy, Benson, and Watson 1999; Golub and Johnson 2001). The overwhelming majority of marijuana users never try any other illicit substance (Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs 2002).

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Other Motor Neuron Disorders 5 (2004): 33–39. Ramirez, B. G., C. Blázquez, T. Gómez del Pulgar, et al. “Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology by Cannabinoids.” Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2005): 1904–13. Ranalli, P., ed. Advances in Hemp Research. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 1999. RAND Corporation. “RAND Study Casts Doubt on Claims that Marijuana Acts as a ‘Gateway’ to the Use of Cocaine and Heroin” (December 2, 2002): www.ran­d.org/news/pres­s.02/gateway.html. Accessed May 7, 2010. Rätsch, C. Marijuana Medicine. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 2001. Recht, L. D., R. Salmonsen, R.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.” For a translation of Churchill’s biblical rhetoric into the jargon of contemporary social science, one may turn to the testimony of Charles Wolf, senior economist of the RAND Corporation, at the congressional committee hearings cited earlier: I am dubious that China’s fears of encirclement are going to be abated, eased, relaxed in the long-term future. But I would hope that what we do in Southeast Asia would help to develop within the Chinese body politic more of a realism and willingness to live with this fear than to indulge it by support for liberation movements, which admittedly depend on a great deal more than external support … the operational question for American foreign policy is not whether that fear can be eliminated or substantially alleviated, but whether China can be faced with a structure of incentives, of penalties and rewards, of inducements that will make it willing to live with this fear.

George Smith, a special forces sergeant captured by the NLF, reports B-52 raids (in Cambodia, he believes), along with constant and heavy bombing with napalm and high explosives in the free-fire zone where his camp was located, the latter from December 1964 (P.O. W.: Two Years with the Viet Cong [Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971]). Of course, the bombers were no more able to avoid villages than his POW camp. See also Anthony Russo, “Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My Story,” Ramparts, April 1972, on the effects of B-52 raids, as determined from refugee interviews. 16. Bernard Fall, “Vietcong—the Unseen Enemy in Vietnam,” New Society, April 22, 1965, reprinted in Bernard Fall and Marcus G. Raskin, eds., The Vietnam Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 261. 17.


pages: 845 words: 197,050

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

An account of the M-16’s ascension from California curio to the American military’s standard firearm could begin in many places, but the conditions that gave the process its velocity began with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy brought with him Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former top executive at Ford, and a believer in an approach to decision-making called “systems analysis,” which had been conceived in the 1950s at the Rand Corporation. Systems analysis centered on intensive study of problems and options, with examinations of costs, benefits, and risks of potential decisions. Its introduction to the Pentagon, along with a cadre of McNamara’s disciples, who called themselves the whiz kids, was a frontal challenge to the military establishment.

., 360 Philadelphia Polyclinic Hospital, 230 Philippines, 355, 384 U.S. invasion of, 104, 111, 252 Pinchback, Pinckney, 106 PK (Pulemyot Kalashnikova), 16, 166n, 243–44, 436n PLO, 10 PMKM, 16 Poland, 166, 174, 214–15, 348, 399 and AK and AK-type rifle production and distribution, 12–13, 16, 215, 245, 249–50, 390–91 popular uprisings in, 224, 365 Pol Pot, 11 Polte, 162–63 Popular Mechanics, 330 Port Arthur, battle for, 113–16, 122–23, 252 Poznań, popular uprising in, 223 PPSh, 187, 199 AK-type rifle distribution and, 346 in Hungarian revolution, 219 production and distribution of, 168–69, 182, 185, 217, 219, 346, 357 in World War II, 182, 185 Prague, 220, 348 Prague Spring, 348 Pratt & Whitney, 66 Pravda, 237, 239 Pripyat, 359–60 propellants: ball powder and, 293–94, 297, 301, 303–4, 316, 326 smokeless, 74, 92, 122, 135, 196 Prussians, Prussia: in Franco-Prussian War, 44–46, 53–55, 65, 110 Gatling gun test in, 42–43 Krupp field pieces of, 45 mitrailleurs and, 43–46 Puckle, James, 27–28, 38, 390 Pulemyot Kalashnikova (PK), 16, 166n, 243–44, 436n Purdy, Patrick, 14 Putin, Vladimir V., 403–4 Quaku, Sein, 48 Quang Tri province, 263, 333 racism, 105–6, 425n–27n Radom, 399 Rahim, Muhammed, 48–49 Rákóczi Square murder, 227, 240–41 Rákosi, Mátyás, 221–22 Rand Corporation, 271 Raphael Repeater, 36 rapid-fire flintlocks, 27–28 Ras Alula, 81–82 Rattray, George, 86 Raymond, Henry Jarvis, 32 RDS-1, 1–2, 5, 407 Red Horse, 60 Remington rifles, 79, 293 Remington rounds, 276 Reno, Marcus A., 58–59, 61 Requa gun, 28, 36 Research and Proving Grounds for Fire-arms and Mortars, see NIPSMVO Research in Small Arms in International Security, 363 Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia (FARC), 384 Revolutionary War, 311 Rheinmetall-Borsig, 246 Rhodes, Boatswain’s Mate, 80 “Rifle, 5.56MM,XM16E1” (Rottmann), 263 Rifle Testing Commission, German, 139 Riga, 220, 365 Ripley, James W., 36, 37 Gatling gun sales and, 32, 91 in standardizing Union Army’s weapons, 32–33, 419n Ripley gun, 28–29 Rivers, L.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Reporters, desperate to inject some humor into the grim situation, dubbed the pooch “Muttnik.”)2 Then, landing with a thunk on the president’s desk a matter of days later, came the report of a civilian panel commissioned by Eisenhower earlier in the year to assess the nation’s ability to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. The committee, chaired by San Francisco attorney and RAND Corporation co-founder H. Rowan Gaither, had very bad news. Despite the billions spent by the Americans on ballistic missile development since the start of the 1950s, despite the money poured into Eisenhower’s “New Look” military, they’d been outpaced. Despite having a far smaller economy, the Soviets had spent about as much.

Ross, 39, 58, 215, 228, 268–69, 292–93, 336, 387 Personal Computing, 2–3 Personal Computing Expo, 140 Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), 157, 182, 183 Personal Software, 240–41 Pets.com, 360, 361 Polaris, 37 Polese, Kim, 306, 307, 348 Pong, 106–8, 139 Popular Electronics, 113, 115, 135, 136, 144–46 Porat, Dan, 317 Porat, Marc, 317 Porat, Ruth, 317, 393 Portola Institute, 118, 128 Prime Computer, 55 Privacy Act, 124 Processor Technology (Proc Tech), 144–46 Prodigy, 63, 255, 287, 306 Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF), 323–27 Proposition 13, 170, 217, 332 Proposition 211, 334–37 Putin, Vladimir, 403 Quattrone, Frank, 317 Quist, George, 74, 88 Rabois, Keith, 253–54 Radio-Electronics, 131, 154 Radio Shack, 157, 182, 187–88 Ramo, Simon, 63 Rand, Paul, 267 RAND Corporation, 44, 65, 124 Raymond, Eric, 155 Raytheon, 20, 39, 67, 110, 384 Reagan, Ronald, 3–5, 109, 112, 142, 160, 164, 168, 191, 193–98, 211, 213–15, 217, 219, 222–24, 227, 243, 246–56, 259, 260, 262, 263, 270, 287, 293, 295, 311, 351, 388 Reback, Gary, 342–45 Reddit, 368, 374 Regis McKenna Inc.


CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

These ‘new’ attacks target Egypt’s US$6 billion tourism industry, Egypt’s leading source of hard currency. On 7 October 2004, in a co-ordinated attack, three bombs went off almost simultaneously in the Sinai Peninsula resorts of Taba and Ras al-Shitan killing 34 and wounding upwards of 100 individuals. According to RAND Corporation information reported by MIPT TKB: ‘investigators believe the attacks were motivated by the deterioration of the Palestinian situation, rather than the global jihad. Multiple groups claimed responsibility for the attacks, though none were ever substantiated’. One group that claimed A Tour of Egypt 53 responsibility was the Battalion of the Martyr Abdullah Azzam, which also has other aliases such as Al-Qaeda in the Levant and Egypt, and Al-Qaida in Syria and Egypt.


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

For background, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 12. For background, see George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ashley J. Tellis, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2001); and Jasjit Singh, ed., Nuclear India (New Delhi: Knowledge World, 1998). 13. “Report by the Director General on the Implementation of the Resolution Adopted by the Board on 25 February 1993 (GOV/2636) and of the Agreement Between the Agency and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the Application of Safeguards in Connection with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (INFCIRC/403),” April 1, 1993, International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors, www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/Disarm%20GOV2645.pdf. 14.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

While Aum did manage to cause considerable harm, its attempts to unleash mass destruction, thankfully, never came to fruition. “Aum’s failure suggests that it may, in fact, be far more difficult to carry out a deadly bioterrorism attack than has sometimes been portrayed by government officials and the press,” wrote William Rosenau, a Rand Corporation analyst, in a 2001 article for Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. “Despite its significant financial resources, dedicated personnel, motivation, and freedom from the scrutiny of the Japanese authorities, Aum was unable to achieve its objectives.” That was then. Now, two trends have changed the game.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The returns from the complicated models, unimpressive as they are, still overstate the returns investors could expect in the real world, because they exclude the fees that asset managers might charge for active management. One surprising follower of the 1/N rule is Markowitz himself. While working at the Rand Corporation, Markowitz had to allocate his retirement fund across investment opportunities. According to his own theory, he should have calculated the correlations between different asset classes to draw an efficient frontier and rank the asset classes accordingly. Instead, as he later confessed to a financial journalist, he allocated his retirement funds evenly between stocks and bonds and called it a day.


pages: 289 words: 85,315

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

In 1944 John von Neumann co-wrote the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in which he coined the term game theory. Game theory was von Neumann’s attempt to use mathematics to describe the structure of games and how humans play them. He began by studying chess and poker, and then went on to try and model more sophisticated games such as economics. After the Second World War the RAND corporation realised the potential of von Neumann’s ideas and hired him to work on developing Cold War strategies. From that point on, mathematical game theory has become a basic tool for generals to test their military-strategies by treating battles as complex games of chess. A simple illustration of the application of game theory in battles is the story of the truel.


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

So when this new appropriation was passed, there was an amendment proposed by Nancy Pelosi, a representative from California, that some of the money be used for rehabilitation programs here. It was voted down. The Clinton administration has also rejected any emphasis on such programs, though it is well known that they are much more effective than criminalizing drugs, and far more than source-country control, the U.S. Plan Colombia. A famous Rand Corporation study found that rehabilitation programs are seven times as cost-effective as criminalization, eleven times as effective as border interdiction, and twenty-three times as effective as source-country control.51 But that’s not what’s wanted. Policymakers want harsh punitive measures at home, and military helicopters and crop destruction abroad.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

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

For that matter, virtually all the early research leading to the development of the personal computer was paid for from the public purse – from Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect project, funded by the US Air Force, to a whole range of path-breaking government-sponsored computing projects in the 1940s and ’50s, including those at Harvard, MIT, the University of Illinois, the Rand Corporation, the Los Alamos Laboratories, the Stanford Research Institute and ‌the Office of Naval Research.18 More broadly, of course, massive government funding of public education makes possible the advanced society we live in, in which people are literate enough to be able to use a computer. And without government funding of police and fire departments as well as roads and the whole urban infrastructure, our sophisticated economy in which citizens can afford to buy personal computers would not exist.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Nathan Jurgenson, “Silicon Valley’s Anti-Capitalism-Capitalism,” The Society Pages, May 21, 2013, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/05/21/silicon-valleys-anti-capitalism-capitalism. 50. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 427. 51. Matthew Sparkes, “Young Users See Facebook as ‘Dead and Buried,’” Telegraph (UK), December 27, 2013. 52. W. H. Ware, “Future Computer Technology and Its Impact,” paper, Rand Corporation, March 1966; David Colker, “Willis Ware Dies at 93; Pioneer Predicted the Rise of the Computer,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2013. 53. Castells, The Information Age, pp. 300–1. 54. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2013), p. 1. 55. Todd Woody, “Need to Finance a Big Solar Project?


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

(i), (ii) Kerala (India) (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Keynesian theory (i), (ii), (iii) Klemperer, Paul (i) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii) Kydland, Finn (i), (ii) labour (i) in ancient Greece (i) and market clearing (i) women as unpaid (i) labour theory of value (i), (ii) laissez-faire (i) landowners (i), (ii), (iii) Lange, Oskar (i) law of demand (i), (ii) leakage of spending (i) Lehman Brothers (i) leisure class (i) leisured, women as (i) Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (i), (ii) Lerner, Abba (i) Lewis, Arthur (i) Lincoln, Abraham (i) List, Friedrich (i) loss aversion (i) Lucas, Robert (i), (ii) MacKay, Charles (i) Macmillan, Harold (i) macro/microeconomics (i) Malaysia, and speculators (i) Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Malynes, Gerard de (i), (ii) manufacturing (i), (ii) division of labour (i) see also Industrial Revolution margin (i) marginal costs (i), (ii) marginal principle (i), (ii), (iii) marginal revenue (i) marginal utility (i), (ii) market, the (i) market clearing (i) market design (i) market failure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ‘Market for Lemons, The’ (Akerlof) (i) market power (i) markets, currency (i), (ii) Marshall, Alfred (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Marx, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Marxism (i) mathematics (i), (ii), (iii) means of production (i) mercantilism (i), (ii) Mesopotamia (i) Mexico, pegged currency (i) micro/macroeconomics (i) Microsoft (i) Midas fallacy (i) minimum wage (i) Minsky, Hyman (i) Minsky moment (i), (ii) Mirabeau, Marquis de (i), (ii), (iii) Mises, Ludwig von (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) mixed economies (i), (ii) Mobutu Sese Seko (i) model villages (i) models (economic) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) modern and traditional economies (i), (ii) monetarism (i) monetary policy (i), (ii) money (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also coins; currency money illusion (i) money wages (i) moneylending see usury monopolies (i), (ii) monopolistic competition (i), (ii) monopoly, theory of (i) monopoly capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) monopsony (i) moral hazard (i), (ii) multiplier (i) Mun, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Muth, John (i) Nash, John (i), (ii) Nash equilibrium (i) national income (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) National System of Political Economy (List) (i) Nelson, Julie (i) neoclassical economics (i) net product (i) Neumann, John von (i) New Christianity, The (Saint-Simon) (i) new classical economics (i) New Harmony (Indiana) (i) New Lanark (Scotland) (i) Nkrumah, Kwame (i), (ii) non-rival good (i) Nordhaus, William (i), (ii) normative economics (i), (ii) Obstfeld, Maurice (i) Occupy movement (i) oligopolies (i) opportunity cost (i), (ii) organ transplant (i) output per person (i) Owen, Robert (i) paper money (i), (ii) Pareto, Vilfredo (i) pareto efficiency (i), (ii) pareto improvement (i) Park Chung-hee (i) partial equilibrium (i) pegged exchange rate (i) perfect competition (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) perfect information (i) periphery (i) phalansteries (i) Phillips, Bill (i) Phillips curve (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) physiocracy (i), (ii) Pigou, Arthur Cecil (i), (ii), (iii) Piketty, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Plato (i), (ii), (iii) policy discretion (i) Ponzi, Charles (i) Ponzi finance (i) population and food supply (i), (ii), (iii) of women (i) positive economics (i) poverty (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) in Cuba (i) Sen on (i) and utopian thinkers (i) Prebisch, Raúl (i) predicting (i) Prescott, Edward (i), (ii) price wars (i), (ii) primary products (i) prisoners’ dilemma (i) private costs and benefits (i) privatisation (i) productivity (i), (ii), (iii) profit (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and capitalism (i), (ii) proletariat (i), (ii) property (private) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and communism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) protection (i), (ii), (iii) provisioning (i) public choice theory (i) public goods (i) quantity theory of money (i) Quesnay, François (i) Quincey, Thomas de (i), (ii) racism (i) Rand, Ayn (i) RAND Corporation (i), (ii) rate of return (i), (ii) rational economic man (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) rational expectations (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) real wages (i), (ii), (iii) recession (i) and governments (i), (ii), (iii) Great Recession (i) Keynes on (i), (ii) Mexican (i) redistribution of wealth (i) reference points (i) relative poverty (i) rent on land (i), (ii), (iii) rents/rent-seeking (i) resources (i), (ii) revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Cuban (i) French (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Russian (i), (ii) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii) risk aversion (i) Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) (i) robber barons (i) Robbins, Lionel (i) Robinson, Joan (i) Roman Empire (i) Romer, Paul (i) Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul (i) Roth, Alvin (i), (ii) rule by nature (i) rules of the game (i) Sachs, Jeffrey (i) Saint-Simon, Henri de (i) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii) savings (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) Say’s Law (i) scarcity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii) sealed bid auction (i) second price auction (i) Second World War (i) securitisation (i) self-fulfilling crises (i) self-interest (i) Sen, Amartya (i), (ii) missing women (i), (ii), (iii) services (i) shading bids (i), (ii) shares (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also stock market Shiller, Robert (i), (ii) signalling (i) in auctions (i) Smith, Adam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) social costs and benefits (i) Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge) (i) social security (i), (ii) socialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) socialist commonwealth (i) Socrates (i) Solow, Robert (i) Soros, George (i), (ii), (iii) South Africa, war with Britain (i) South Korea, and the big push (i) Soviet Union and America (i) and communism (i), (ii) speculation (i) speculative lending (i) Spence, Michael (i) spending government (fiscal policy) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and recessions (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) see also investment stagflation (i), (ii) Stalin, Joseph (i) standard economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Standard Oil (i) Stiglitz, Joseph (i) stock (i) stock market (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) stockbrokers (i) Strassmann, Diana (i), (ii) strategic interaction (i), (ii) strikes (i) subprime loans (i) subsidies (i), (ii) subsistence (i) sumptuary laws (i) supply curve (i) supply and demand (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and currencies (i) and equilibrium (i), (ii) in recession (i), (ii), (iii) supply-side economics (i) surplus value (i), (ii) Swan, Trevor (i) tariff (i) taxes/taxation (i) and budget deficit (i) carbon (i) and carbon emissions (i) and France (i) and public goods (i) redistribution of wealth (i) and rent-seeking (i) technology as endogenous/exogenous (i) and growth (i) and living standards (i) terms of trade (i) Thailand (i) Thaler, Richard (i) theory (i) Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen) (i) Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Chamberlain) (i) Thompson, William Hale ‘Big Bill’ (i) threat (i) time inconsistency (i), (ii) time intensity (i) Tocqueville, Alexis de (i) totalitarianism (i) trade (i), (ii), (iii) and dependency theory (i) free (i), (ii), (iii) trading permit, carbon (i) traditional and modern economies (i), (ii) transplant, organ (i) Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth, A (Malynes) (i) Tversky, Amos (i), (ii) underdeveloped countries (i) unemployment in Britain (i) and the government (i) and the Great Depression (i) and information economics (i) and Keynes (i) and market clearing (i) and recession (i) unions (i), (ii) United States of America and free trade (i) and growth of government (i) industrialisation (i) and Latin America (i) Microsoft (i) recession (i), (ii) and the Soviet Union (i) and Standard Oil (i) stock market (i) wealth in (i) women in the labour force (i) unpaid labour, and women (i) usury (i), (ii), (iii) utility (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) utopian thinkers (i), (ii) Vanderbilt, Cornelius (i), (ii) Veblen, Thorstein (i), (ii), (iii) velocity of circulation (i), (ii) Vickrey, William (i) wage, minimum (i) Walras, Léon (i) Waring, Marilyn (i) wealth (i) and Aristotle (i), (ii) and Christianity (i) Piketty on (i) and Plato (i) Smith on (i) Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) (i), (ii) welfare benefits (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) welfare economics (i) Who Pays for the Kids?


pages: 280 words: 85,091

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Ponce de León, Bernard Vandermeersch, and François Lévêque, “Evidence for Interpersonal Violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal,” PNAS 99, no. 9 (2002): 6444–48, doi:10.1073/pnas.082111899. 12 the whole purpose of the Prisoner’s Dilemma … The Prisoner’s Dilemma was originally conceived at the RAND Corporation in 1950 by the mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. Later that same year, the game was first formulated with prison-sentence payoffs by Albert Tucker and given its official title. 13 Instead, the screen of life is densely populated with millions upon millions of individual pixels … In a world of “repeated interaction” (such as everyday life), a psychopathic strategy does indeed have its shortcomings.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Nearly two million Americans abuse prescription drugs: From the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the Office of Applied Studies. More than a million hospitalised every year: From a 2009 report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). New York City linked teacher pay to pupil performance: From A Big Apple for Educators, a 2011 report from Rand Corporation. Downsizing is negative: Franco Gandolfi, “Unravelling Downsizing – What Do We Know about the Phenomenon?” Review of International Comparative Management, Volume 10, Issue 3 (July 2009). Football management as a revolving door: Annual figures compiled in 2012 by Sue Bridgewater of Warwick Business School for the League Managers Association.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Bullying has become as big a problem for adults at work as it is for kids at school and “is clearly an epidemic,” says Gary Namie, a psychologist who conducted a 2014 survey in which 27 percent of respondents said they had been bullied at work and another 37 percent said they had witnessed it happening to a co-worker. The stress of being bullied can cause a host of physical ailments and even brain damage, Namie says. In 2017, researchers from RAND Corporation and Harvard Medical School surveyed three thousand workers and were taken aback to find that one in five reported facing verbal abuse, threats, humiliation, or unwanted sexual advances—on a monthly basis. “I was not expecting to see numbers that high,” says Nicole Maestas, an associate professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School, who worked on the report.


pages: 271 words: 82,159

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

And he was one hundred percent right. They turned on us. And the curfew was the start of it.” 2. The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists—Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.—wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies. Leites and Wolf worked for the RAND Corporation, the prestigious think tank started after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years, when the world was exploding in violence, everyone read Leites and Wolf. Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

On August 17, 1961, the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s most graphic image of the division between East and West, was constructed overnight by the German Democratic Republic’s communist regime. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked a terrifying contest of nuclear brinksmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Nuclear war, once unthinkable, was being reimagined as a logistical challenge by game theorists at military research institutes like the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica, California–based think tank set up by the US Air Force in 1964 to “provide intellectual muscle”23 for American nuclear planners. By the late 1950s, as the United States developed hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could be launched in a matter of minutes, it was becoming clear that one of the weakest links in the American military system lay with its long-distance communications network.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Describing “a new stage of human history,” Linda Fried, Dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, referred to “the only natural resource that’s actually increasing: the social capital of millions more healthy, well-educated adults.” A growing body of knowledge from very different schools of thought—including the Rand Corporation and Chicago, Belfast, Harvard, and Yale Universities—now acknowledges that health, along with the longevity it brings, are important economic drivers that generate wealth, by affecting health care costs, labor-force participation rates (given the appropriate incentives), worker productivity, and the financing of pension systems.9 Yet there’s more hand-wringing than back-patting going on A little less worried about the tug of time on your own prospects?


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

[7] Nuremberg Tribunals, Trials, vol. 7, pp. 793-803 (Hitler's Four Year Plan); Borkin, /. G. Farben, p. 72; Hayes, /. G. Farben, pp. 196-202, 183. USSBS, Oil Division Final Report, pp. 15-27, figures 22, 23; Krammer, "Fueling the Third Reich," pp. 398-403; USSBS, German War Economy, p. 75; Anne Skogstad, Petroleum Industry of Germany During the War (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1950), p. 34; Homze, Luftwaffe, p. 148; War Cabinet, Committee on Enemy Oil Position, December 1,1941, Appendix 10, POG (L) (41) 11, CAB 77/18, PRO. [8] Norman Stone, Hitler (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 107-8 ("life's mission"); Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 25 ("little worms"); Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1939-1945, trans.

Cooper, The Lion's Last Roar (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 12 ("Great Engineer"), 16,18 ("highway"), 20; Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), pp. 584-85 (Disraeli). [2] Office of Intelligence Research, Department of State, "Traffic and Capacity of the Suez Canal," p. 10, August 10, 1956, National Security Council records; Harold Lubell, "World Petroleum Production and Shipping: A Post-Mortem on Suez," P-1274 (Rand Corporation, 1958), pp. 1718. [3] Selwyn Lloyd, Suez 1956: A Personal Account (New York: Mayflower Books, 1978), pp. 45,69, 24, 2-19; Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes the United States into the Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 83 (CIA profile); Anthony Nutting, Nasser (New York: E.

He would lay out his thinking in a slow, spare, emphatic manner that sometimes seemed to suggest that his auditors, be they generals or senators or even presidents, were first-year graduate students who had failed to understand the most self-evident theorem. Richard Nixon had plucked Schlesinger from the Rand Corporation for the Bureau of the Budget, then to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, then made him director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but soon after switched him to Secretary of Defense. On a fine Saturday or Sunday morning, however, he could be found in the countryside around Washington, binoculars in hand.


The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Several days later the Shah told Tehran’s English-language newspaper Kayhan International that Brown’s comments were “truly hilarious” and that Brown had passed on an apology and regrets. The Defense Department was digesting the results of its own intelligence assessment on U.S.-Iran relations, this one in the form of a survey of arms sales undertaken by David Ronfeldt, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. Ronfeldt set himself the task of answering two very basic questions—questions that no one at CIA or State had so far thought to ask: How did we get here? Where do we go from here? The United States, Ronfeldt concluded, had stumbled into a strategic trap of its own making by surrendering its leverage over its ally.

., 388–89 Parsa, Nadina, 62 Parti Québécois, Canadian, 346 Patterson, Donald, 455n Peace Corps, 60, 216, 256 peak oil, 139 Peres, Shimon, 225–26, 243 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 175, 330–31 Perle, Richard, 248 Persian Book of Kings, The (Ferdowsi), 1, 15, 17, 197 Persian Gulf, 59, 90 British pullout from, 19, 21, 44 oil of, 19–20 see also specific countries Peru, 315, 316 Peter I (the Great), Czar of Russia, 63 Peterson, Peter, 81, 89 Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, 383 Philippines, 46 Phillips, Mark, 135 Pickering, Thomas, 320 Plan and Budget Organization, Iranian, 141, 181, 185, 264, 271, 295, 355, 372, 386 Planet Oil and Minerals, 35 Poland, 160 Politburo, Soviet, 103 Pompidou, Georges, 145, 165–66, 280 Porter, William, 328–29 Portugal, 8, 159, 180, 194, 195–96, 243, 310, 357, 361, 363 coup attempts in, 167–68, 246 1976 economic crisis in, 333, 346, 350–51, 356 1976 political crisis in, 309 Powers, Thomas, 88 Pravda, 215 Presidential Succession Act of 1792, 118 Prince, Harold, 63 Project Independence, 144, 353 Propeller Club, 114 Puerto Rico, 310 Qaddafi, Muammar al-, 52, 109–10, 112, 116, 123, 132, 240 Qatar, 124, 189, 275 Quinn, Sally, 254, 413n Rabin, Yitzhak, 196, 225–26, 228–29, 243–44 Radford, Charles, 57–58 Radji, Parviz, 384 Rainier, Prince of Monaco, 53 Ramsbotham, Peter, 149 RAND Corporation, 337 Rappleye, Willard, Jr., 176 Rastakhiz, 360 Razavi, Hossein, 186 Reagan, Ronald, 28, 231, 288, 289, 323–24 Reagan Revolution, 392 Republican Party, U.S., 231, 268, 319, 323–24, 328, 375, 392 Resurgence Party, Iranian, 375, 378 Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran, 100, 142, 304, 391 Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 21, 63, 219 reforms of, 63–64 Rhodesia, 159 Richard Nixon Presidential Archives Foundation, 392 Richard R.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

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

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

Although traditional data of the sort that Brookings used are not available for many other places, it’s possible to put together some rough estimates for a larger number of cities, including the poorest and most rapidly urbanizing. Working with Tim Gulden, a computational geographer now at the Rand Corporation, I developed a proxy measure for economic activity and urban productivity for every city and metro across the world using the nighttime lights that are tracked in satellite images by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other scientific agencies.16 Combining this light-emissions metric, which we dubbed light-related regional product, with population statistics, we were able to develop urban productivity ratios comparing the productivity of cities and metro areas to national averages (including the metro area in question).


pages: 335 words: 95,280

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Marshak was also the originator of the Rochester conferences and probably felt it would show favoritism to allow his own student to speak. In addition, since Sudarshan’s idea required at least some of the experimental data to be wrong, Marshak may have decided it was premature to present it at the meeting. That summer Marshak was working at the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles and invited Sudarshan and another student to join him. The two most renowned particle theorists in the world then, Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, were at Caltech, and each had become obsessed with unraveling the form of the weak interaction. Feynman had missed out on the discovery of parity violation by not following his own line of questioning, but had since realized that his work on quantum electrodynamics could shed light on the weak interaction.


pages: 282 words: 92,998

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

When General Robert Elder was commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command he told reporters that although his command has a defensive responsibility, it planned to disable an opponent’s computer networks. “We want to go in and knock them out in the first round,” he said. This is reminiscent of another Air Force general, Curtis LeMay, who in the 1950s, as commander of Strategic Air Command, explained to RAND Corporation analysts that his bombers would not be destroyed on the ground by a Soviet attack because “we’re going first.” That kind of thinking is dangerous. If we do not have a credible defense strategy, we will be forced to escalate in a cyber conflict very quickly. We will need to be more aggressive in getting our adversary’s systems so that we can stop their attacks before they reach our undefended systems.


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The risk of coronary heart disease increases nearly 60 percent in men and 179 percent in women, and risk for diabetes increases five-fold for men and eight-fold in women as weight increases from normal to very obese. The poor diet and inactivity causing obesity contribute independently to many of the same outcomes. Rand Corporation economist Roland Sturm has shown that obesity’s health effects now surpass those of smoking, and that it carries the same risk as aging two decades.4 Since poor diet and inactivity can affect health, they are likely to have other powerful impacts. Lost productivity, a less alert work force, and declining school grades are some.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

The acronymic utopias enabled by internet technologies such as TCP/IP aren’t so different from those offered by LSD: equality, connectedness, awareness of life as a sum greater than its parts. In the early 1960s, American computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, and, later, Britain’s Donald Davies, a physician at the UK’s National Physical Library in Teddington, independently conceived of the same way to send data around a telephone network efficiently by splitting it into chunks and routing it through nodes around the network to later arrive, reassembled, in the right place.


pages: 287 words: 44,739

Guide to business modelling by John Tennent, Graham Friend, Economist Group

book value, business cycle, correlation coefficient, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, G4S, Herman Kahn, intangible asset, iterative process, low interest rates, price elasticity of demand, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, risk free rate, shareholder value, the market place, time value of money

So an alternative approach to forecasting is required, which must be flexible and able to accommodate drastically different operating environments. 20 4. UNCERTAINTY, SCENARIO PLANNING AND MODEL INPUTS A SCENARIO-BASED FORECASTING APPROACH Scenario-based forecasting provides a structured approach for thinking about uncertainty. The development of scenario planning can be attributed to Herman Kahn, who worked for the rand Corporation in the 1950s. The approach was formalised by Shell during the 1970s, and its use has become increasingly pervasive in recent years in response to the dramatic changes that many industries and businesses must now contend with. For a more detailed understanding of scenario-based forecasting techniques, Learning from the future: Competitive Foresight Scenarios is an excellent reference.1 Scenarios are pictures, painted in words, of vividly different, contrasting and relevant environments in which the business may have to operate.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Historically, the search for computational models of human cognition is intimately intertwined with the history of artificial intelligence itself. Only a few years after Norbert Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, Logic Theorist, the first computational model of human cognition and also the first artificial-intelligence system, was developed by Herbert Simon, of Carnegie Tech, and Allen Newell, of the RAND Corporation. Logic Theorist automatically produced mathematical proofs by emulating the strategies used by human mathematicians. The challenge in developing computational models of human cognition is making models that are both accurate and generalizable. An accurate model, of course, predicts human behavior with a minimum of errors.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Interview with Dr Johannes Beermann, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Figures on global financial crime, lower estimate, taken from US Treasury (2018): https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/2018NMLRA_12-18.pdf; upper estimate taken from RAND Corporation’s annual survey: www.rand.org/news/press/2019/08/20.html For cocaine on bank notes, see: www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/17/cocaine-dollar-bills-currency-us For large denomination bank notes and their use in the underground economy, see: K.S. Rogoff (2016). The Curse of Cash. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

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

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

If we listen to the proselytizers of ed tech, Silicon Valley, and politicians who openly want to dismantle the public school system, the future is still going to be digital and virtual. The pandemic proved it could work, they say, and next time will be better thanks to improvements in technology and teacher training. In a survey conducted by the RAND Corporation during the pandemic, a fifth of US school districts planned to make remote learning a permanent option. Some were already making it a mandatory component of school. Lower costs, economies of scale, and the veneer of innovation were too attractive for politicians and administrators to dismiss digital school overnight.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

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

The seriousness of concern over use of drugs was illustrated again when a House Committee was considering the Clinton Colombia Plan. It rejected an amendment proposed by California Democrat Nancy Pelosi calling for funding of drug demand-reduction services. It is well known that treatment and prevention are far more effective than forceful measures. A widely cited Rand Corporation study sponsored by the US Army and Office of National Drug Control Policy found that funds spent on domestic drug treatment were 23 times as effective as “source country control” (Clinton’s Colombia Plan), 11 times as effective as interdiction, and 7 times as effective as domestic law enforcement.48 But the inexpensive and effective path will not be followed.


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

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

The technique is an understandable one; it is not easy to think of an alternative, given the acknowledged inability to ‘appeal directly to the masses’ and ‘get control of mass movements’ as the ‘Communists’ can do, using the unfair advantages they gain from ‘defending the interests of the poor’—‘Communist’ here used in the technical sense that covers also militant anti-Communists with the wrong priorities. The Problem Solved By the early 1960s, US experts were urging their contacts in the Indonesian military to ‘strike, sweep their house clean’ (Guy Pauker of the Pentagon-sponsored RAND Corporation in a study published by Princeton University Press); ‘if the officer corps appreciated its historic role, it could be the nation’s salvation’, he wrote in a University of California study. University of Pennsylvania specialist William Kintner, formerly of the CIA and then at a CIA-subsidised research institute, advised that with Western help, ‘free Asian political leaders—together with the military—must not only hold on and manage, but reform and advance while liquidating the enemy’s political and guerrilla armies’.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

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

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

A soft-spoken Asian-American, with an academic manner and conservative views, Fukuyama was thirty-six in 1989. He had done his doctorate on Soviet foreign policy. After a period working in the State Department during the Reagan administration, he returned to the study of Soviet politics at the RAND Corporation, a think tank just outside Los Angeles. As he followed the course of Gorbachev’s reforms in 1988, Fukuyama realized that Soviet communism had collapsed as an ideological system. The West had won. So when Professor Bloom contacted him, he pushed back against his mentor’s instinctive pessimism.


pages: 308 words: 98,729

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte

Alan Greenspan, clean water, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, working poor

According to a June 1986 federal report entitled “Organized Crime’s Involvement in the Waste Hauling Industry,” “there is a substantial body of evidence that organized crime controls much of the solid waste disposal industry in New York State and elsewhere.” Of the $1.5 billion taken in each year by New York carters, estimated Peter Reuter, author of the 1987 report Racketeering in Legitimate Industries, commissioned by the Rand Corporation, “about 35 percent was excess sucked out of the customers by illegal activities.” Still, Benjamin Miller’s Fat of the Land, a rich history of garbage in New York City, runs for nearly four hundred pages without mention of organized crime. William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, in Rubbish!, also ignore the topic, as did Robin Nagle when she taught a class called “Garbage in Gotham” to her anthropology students at New York University.


pages: 571 words: 105,054

Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Lopez de Prado

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, G4S, Higgs boson, implied volatility, information asymmetry, latency arbitrage, margin call, market fragmentation, market microstructure, martingale, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, traveling salesman

One implication is that it is rarely optimal to allocate all assets to the investments with highest expected returns. Instead, we should take into account the correlations across alternative investments in order to build a diversified portfolio. Before earning his PhD in 1954, Markowitz left academia to work for the RAND Corporation, where he developed the Critical Line Algorithm. CLA is a quadratic optimization procedure specifically designed for inequality-constrained portfolio optimization problems. This algorithm is notable in that it guarantees that the exact solution is found after a known number of iterations, and that it ingeniously circumvents the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions (Kuhn and Tucker [1951]).


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

., The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007). This report is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11919. Stephen H. Dole and Isaac Asimov, Planets for Man (New York: Random House, 1964). A condensed and popularized version of Dole’s RAND Corporation Research Study, Habitable Planets for Man. L. Kaltenegger, S. Udry, and F. Pepe, “A Habitable Planet around HD 85512?” arXiv preprint (2011). James Kasting, How to Find a Habitable Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). I recommend this excellent book to those readers wishing to seek out the scholarly papers mentioned in Chapter 7, as well as any readers wishing for a readable-yet-rigorous take on planetary habitability.


pages: 371 words: 101,792

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

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

Few airline chiefs in the early 1950s believed they could make money with the newly invented, fuel-guzzling, screamingly noisy jet-engined airliner. At a quarter of the cost, nearly half the speed and twice the range, propeller-driven transports like the Douglas DC-6 and DC-7 and the Lockheed Constellation made far more sense than dangerous vehicles like the jet. Several authoritative studies, including one by the Rand Corporation, declared that the jet did not—and for many years would not—possess the range to cross the ocean nonstop. Nor could its seats be sold at reasonable fares to guarantee a profit for the operator. Further, to carry both a payload and the great store of fuel required to fly any distance, the jet would require impossibly long runways both to take off and to land.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Treasury, with Treasury secretaries often recruited following a period at the helm of one of the major U.S. banks and returning afterward to a chairmanship or other lucrative advisory position in the financial services industry. Treasury secretaries since 2001 with links to finance and industry include Paul O’Neill (Alcoa, Rand Corporation), John Snow (CSX Corporation, Cerberus Capital Management Group), and Henry Paulson (Goldman Sachs). In addition, U.S. authorities had substantially deregulated loan products by means of the Depository Institutions and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act of 1982. 37.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Price changes modeling Bachelier in Mandelbrot with Price/earnings (P/E) ratio Principles of Economics (Marshall) Probability Bachelier on Cauchy law of coin toss conditional crash economics with fat tails of Feller on infinite variance in Kolmogorov on language frequency with Lévy on mild form of radiation of randomness in scaling patterns in stochastic view in tool of Puget Sound currents of Pulitzer Prize R/S. See Rescaled-range statistic Railroad stock scaling patterns in RAND Corporation Random walk model author’s path with Bachelier and contradiction of dependence v. early reference to martingale condition with price chart in stock price movements in three claims of The Random Character of Stock Market Prices (Cootner) Rayleigh, Lord Recursion fractal geometry with Rescaled-range statistic (R/S) Research deterministic v. random systems in economics investment analysis need for options valuation portfolios building risk management Richardson, Lewis Fry Richter scale Risk.


pages: 296 words: 87,299

Portfolios of the poor: how the world's poor live on $2 a day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford

behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, failed state, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, M-Pesa, mental accounting, microcredit, moral hazard, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, transaction costs

Morduch (1995, 1999) gives a broad frame on the academic work with an eye to policy interventions. 4. The study, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2007), pools World Bank household surveys from across the world to present a broad view of the economic lives of the poor. The paper reports on detailed survey data, culled largely from World Bank and Rand Corporation surveys conducted between 1988 and 2005, representing the expenditures of tens of thousands of poor households in 13 developing countries. 5. The general problem is framed in Morduch’s (1999) essay on the strengths and weaknesses of informal risk sharing. He asks: “does informal insurance patch the safety net?”


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

., Lauriault, T.P. and McArdle, G. (2014) ‘Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards’, Regional Studies, Regional Science 2(1): 6–28. Lee, D.B. (1973) ‘Requiem for large-scale models’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 39: 163–178. Lowry, I.S. (1964) A Model of Metropolis. RM-4035-RC, Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, available from: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM4035. html [accessed 24 November 2016]. O’Brien, O., Batty, M., Gray, S., Cheshire, J. and Hudson-Smith, A. (2014) ‘On city dashboards and data stores’, a paper presented to the Workshop on Big Data and Urban Informatics, 11–12 August, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, available from: http://urbanbigdata.uic.edu/proceedings/ [accessed 24 November 2016].


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

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

American Economic Review 107 (2017): 2565–99. Nicas, Jack. “How YouTube Drives People into the Internet’s Darkest Corners.” The Wall Street Journal. February 7, 2018. Paul, Christopher, and Miriam Matthews. The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2016. https://www.rand.org/​pubs/​perspectives/​PE198.html. Postman, Neil. “Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection.” Paper presented at the National Convention for the Teachers of English, Washington, D.C., November 28, 1969. Qin, B., D. Strömberg, and Y. Wu. “Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media?


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

David Lyon, “Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, Consequences, Critique,” Big Data & Society 1, no. 2 (2014): 1–13. 64. Walter Perry, Brian McInnis, Carter C. Price, Susan Smith, and John Hollywood, “Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations,” RAND Corporation, 2013, www.rand.org. 65. Jeremy Gorner, “Chicago Police Use Heat List as Strategy to Prevent Violence,” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2013, http://articles.chicagotribune.com. 66. Anthony Braga, Andrew Papachristos, and David Hureau, “The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Justice Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2012): 633–663. 67.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Ballotopedia, August 16, 2017, https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journalist_donations_go_to_Democrat. 32 Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites, 35–37. 33 Kathleen McLaughlin, “The big journalism void: ‘The real crisis is not technological, its geographical’,” Guardian, January 30, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/30/the-big-journalism-void-the-real-crisis-is-not-technological-its-geographic. 34 Jennifer Kavanagh et al., News in a Digital Age (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2019), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2960. html; Kalev Leetaru, “A Small Number of Fact-Checkers Now Define Our Reality,” Real Clear Politics, August 24, 2019, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/24/a_small_number_of_fact-checkers_now_deine_our_reality_141087.html. 35 Jonathan Chait, “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is on Your Screen,” New York Magazine, August 17, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/features/chait-liberal-movies-tv-2012-8/. 36 Jeremy Barr, “Top Hollywood Execs Give Overwhelmingly to Democrats for Midterms,” Hollywood Reporter, October 12, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/top-hollywood-execs-give-99-percent-political-donations-democrats-midterms-1151392; Joanna Piacenza, “Putting a Number on Hollywood’s Perceived Liberalism,” Morning Consult, March 1, 2018, https://morningconsult.com/2018/03/01/putting-number-hollywoods-perceived-liberalism/; Tom Jacobs, “Why Is Hollywood So Liberal?”


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), 2016 Report, 13, ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. 13.  Ibid., 12. 14.  J. Lehman, J. Clune, and S. Risi, “An Anarchy of Methods: Current Trends in How Intelligence Is Abstracted in AI,” IEEE Intelligent Systems 29, no. 6 (2014): 56–62. 15.  A. Newell and H. A. Simon, “GPS: A Program That Simulates Human Thought,” P-2257, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. (1961). 16.  F. Rosenblatt, “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain,” Psychological Review 65, no. 6 (1958): 386–408. 17.  Mathematically, the perceptron-learning algorithm is the following. For each weight wj: wj ← wj + η (t − y) xj, where t is the correct output (1 or 0) for the given input, y is the actual output of the perceptron, xj is the input associated with weight wj, and η is the learning rate, a value given by the programmer.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

When Sandberg and Couric got onstage, they continued their easy rapport, poking fun at their promotional cartoon avatars beamed onto a large screen high up behind their chairs. But once the interview began, the tenor changed. Wouldn’t Zuckerberg’s new policy on political ads directly undermine efforts to counter election interference? Couric asked. “The Rand Corporation actually has a term for this, which is ‘truth decay.’ And Mark himself has defended this decision even as he expressed concern about the erosion of truth online,” she added. “What is the rationale for that?” For nearly fifty minutes, the former news anchor pressed Sandberg with a wide range of tough and intense questions.


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

The Pentagon Papers were drawn from forty-seven volumes’ worth of classified history, commissioned by Robert McNamara, and called “U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam, 1945–1968.” It was based on the primary documents—memos, letters, speeches, minutes—that all good histories are, and it was written by a team, one of whom was a Pentagon consultant and an analyst at RAND Corporation, a federal research center like IDA. The RAND analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, was one of the few people who had read all forty-seven volumes and who could therefore, he said, “learn the lessons of the entire sweep of that period.” What he learned, he said, was that five presidents in a row had been given realistic advice about the undesirability of an “indefinitely prolonged guerrilla war” in Vietnam and that all five had ignored the advice.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The women’s movement and the civil rights movement could have united behind a simplified program that actually eradicated poverty among children, the way expanded Social Security and the new Medicare program were beginning to do for the elderly. But in the 1970s, something else was on the rise. What the feminist economist Claudia Goldin called in a famous 2006 paper of the same title: “The Quiet Revolution.” Kathryn Anne Edwards, an economist at the RAND Corporation, is the one who filled me in on this, so I’m going to let her take over for a bit: “Her thesis of a quiet revolution is that with very little outward change to policy, women completely revolutionized the way that they approached [paid] work. And they did so on three levels, in how they viewed career as part of their identity, in the time horizons for making decisions about their job, and how they saw their earnings fitting into the household.”


pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Two of the world’s biggest dams; the world’s longest aqueduct; the world’s highest pump lift, surmounted by the world’s most powerful pumps—five full batteries of pumps; a chain of smaller dams and reservoirs strung out to receive the water—all of this would be incredibly expensive. The Department of Water Resource’s feasibility report, known as Bulletin 78, offered an estimate of $1,807,000,000, but an economist for the RAND Corporation, Jack Hirschleifer, immediately tore it to shreds. Reading between the lines, Hirschleifer noticed that though the report mentioned Oroville Dam at length, it failed to include the expense of building it. It was an extraordinary omission, to say the least. The DWR explained that the dam wouldn’t be needed right away and might be built later.

Instead of trying to justify the project by weighing costs against benefits—which is what the Bureau of Reclamation did, or went through the motions of doing—it compared the cost of the project to the most expensive alternative: desalinating seawater. On that basis, it concluded that the project made sense. But as Jack Hirschleifer disdainfully commented in his RAND Corporation report, you can justify anything if you compare it to a more expensive alternative. The critics were too few and too late. On Friday, November 4, 1960, just four days before the referendum was scheduled, the Metropolitan Water District capitulated and signed the contracts that indicated its support.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

De Gaulle was particularly determined to shut down the secret “stay-behind army” that Dulles had organized in France—a network of anti-Communist militants with access to buried arms caches who were originally recruited to resist a potential Soviet invasion but were now aligned with the rebellious generals and other groups plotting to overthrow French democracy. De Gaulle ordered his young security adviser, Constantin Melnik, to shut down the murky, stay-behind network of fascists, spooks, and criminals, which Melnik agreed was “very dangerous for the security of France.” But Melnik, who was trained at the RAND Corporation, a leading think tank for the U.S. national security complex, was another admirer of Dulles, and the stay-behind underground continued to operate in France. Melnik—who was the son of a White Russian general and the grandson of Czar Nicolas II’s personal physician, who was executed along with the imperial family—was as passionately anti-Soviet as his U.S. security colleagues.

Fletcher, 251, 366, 408 Puhl, Emil, 26 Pullach, Germany, 269–73, 276–79, 281, 283 Pumpkin Papers, 172–73 QJ-WIN, 380, 502 Quemoy, 244 Quiet American, The (Greene), 517 Rackets Committee, 564–65 Radford, Arthur, 243 Radio Free Europe, 148 Radio Liberty Committee, 522 Raikin, Spas, 519 RAND Corporation, 416 Rankin, J. Lee, 513, 576–81, 594 Rascher, Sigmund, 84–85 Rasenberger, Jim, 399 Rauah, Joe, 491 Rauff, Walter, 103, 106–7, 109 Rayburn, Sam, 491 Reagan, Ronald, 265, 603, 617 Red Army, 29–30, 57, 76–80, 82, 282, 521 Red Book (Jung), 10–11 reduction in force (701) program, 411 Registration Act, 329 Reichsbank, 18, 26 Reichsreferat (German neofascist party), 92 Republican Party, 23, 145–46, 159, 161, 164–65, 170, 179, 181–82, 185–86, 200, 208, 214, 352–53, 431, 446, 450, 552–53, 557, 576 Reston, James “Scotty,” 407, 415, 491 Reuther, Victor, 466 Reuther, Walter, 466 Reynolds, Don, 492 Reynolds Tobacco, 199 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 59–60, 103 Ricardo, Bienvenida, 317–18 Richardson, Sid, 524, 573 Riefenstahl, Leni, 58 Riegner, Gerhart, 51 Rimini POW camp, 105 Roberts, John, 194 Rocca, Raymond, 111, 578–80, 594, 615 Rocca, Renzo, 475 Rockefeller, David, 551–58, 560 Rockefeller, John D., 528, 552 Rockefeller, Laurance, 554 Rockefeller, Nelson, 551–59, 585 Rockefeller Commission, 296, 585 Rockefeller family, 131, 199, 459 Rockefeller Foundation, 330, 374, 553, 574 Rolling Stone, 497, 499 Roman, Howard, 450, 486, 613, 615–16 Roman, Jane, 450 Roman Catholic Confederation, 420 Romania, 18, 144, 188–89 Romanian refugees, 186, 187, 190, 192 Rome, 94, 96–99, 102–4, 106, 109, 103, 335, 619 CIA station, 468–69, 473–78, 502–4, 508 U.S. embassy, 236–37 Rome, Open City (film), 103 Rommel, Erwin, 79 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 25, 43, 208, 350 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 4–5, 15, 17–18, 20–30, 35, 42–47, 51–52, 54, 56, 68, 106, 108, 145, 149, 353, 431, 435, 440–41, 484, 552, 555 AWD and, 20, 25–29, 77, 90, 98, 146 Chambers on, 174 coup attempts vs., 25 death of, 66, 183 JFD and, 146 Hiss and, 167, 171 Holocaust and, 42–47, 51–52, 54, 56 Nuremberg trials and, 57, 62, 66–67 power elite and, 23–25, 29, 163, 197–98 Soviets and, 175, 178 unconditional surrender and, 29–30, 33, 35, 77 World Bank and, 177–78 Roosevelt, Kermit “Kim,” Jr., 144, 233–36, 238–40 Roosevelt, Theodore “Teddy,” 63, 233, 352 Root, Elihu, Jr., 352 Rosalba, Duchess, 99–100 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 511 Rosselli, Johnny, 347, 471, 476, 534 Rossellini, Roberto, 103 Rothko, Mark, 331 Rovere, Richard, 438 Rowe, Jim, 493 Rubirosa, Porfirio “Rubi,” 318–19 Ruby, Jack, 564–65, 574 Rumsfeld, Donald, 450, 617 Rush to Judgment (Lane), 593 Rusk, Dean, 374, 427, 437–38, 574 Russell, Bertrand, 588 Russell, Richard, 576–78, 585 Russian Review, 522 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 151 Sachsenhausen, Wolff and, 82 Safehaven, Project, 27–28 Salandria, Vincent, 589, 591 Salinger, Pierre, 419 Salter, Michael, 102 Salvemini, Gaetano, 465 Sander, Fritz, 48 Sanford, Terry, 492 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 218, 345 Saturday Evening Post, 430, 569, 593 Saudi royal family, 325 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 331 SAVAK, 240 Schact, Hjalmar, 59–61, 68–70, 113–14 Schine, David, 217–18, 224–25 Schlesinger, Alexandra, 603–4 Schlesinger, Andrew, 604 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 6, 153, 170, 196, 331, 363, 371–72, 399, 407–8, 412, 429–46, 452, 465–67, 476, 481–82, 484, 490, 598–604, 610 Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr., 432 Schlesinger, Marian, 433 Schmeling, Max, 342 Schmitz, Hermann, 26 Schroder, J.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Our Twitter accounts are: @cburniske @JackTatar For more resources, please visit: http://www.BitcoinandBeyond.com. Notes Introduction 1. http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/. 2. Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1964), http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html. 3. http://www.Internetsociety.org/Internet/what-Internet/history-Internet/brief-history-Internet. 4. http://www.Internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/. 5. https://www.textrequest.com/blog/texting-statistics-answer-questions/. 6. https://www.lifewire.com/how-many-emails-are-sent-every-day-1171210. 7. https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-impact-of-the-blockchain-goes-beyond-financial-services. 8. https://dailyfintech.com/2014/08/28/hey-banks-your-fat-margin-is-my-opportunity/. 9. http://www.coindesk.com/microsoft-blockchain-azure-marley-gray/. 10. http://fortune.com/2016/08/19/10-stocks-beaten-googles-1780-gain/. 11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#cite_note-40. 12. https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20161225/. 13. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/12/25/buffettbooks.aspx.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

But by 1977 its GDP per head was 57 per cent of the USA’s – which put it on a par with Italy. From 1928 until the early 1980s, the average growth in the USSR, according to a CIA-commissioned survey, was 4.2 per cent. ‘This clearly qualifies as a sustained growth record,’ concluded analysts at the RAND Corporation.10 But Soviet growth was never driven by productivity. The RAND study found only a quarter of the USSR’s growth was driven by better technology, with the rest by rising inputs – of machinery, raw materials and energy. After 1970, there was no growth at all in productivity: if you needed double the number of nails produced, you built a new nail factory alongside the old one – productivity was off the agenda.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

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

Apple Is NOT the World’s Most Valuable Company,” LondonlovesBusiness, August 21, 2012, http://www.londonlovesbusiness.com/business-news/finance/stop-the-press-apple-is-not-the-worlds-most-valuable-company/3250.article. If a cyberattack could happen: Bronk and Tikk-Ringas, “Hack or Attack?” It is perhaps ironic that: “Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet,” Rand Corporation, http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html. Whether motivated by politics: “Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime: Economic Impact of Cybercrime II,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 2014, http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/reports/rp-economic-impact-cybercrime2.pdf.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

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 real problem, though, was the rise of a new kind of radical individualism. Even "Be all that you can be" was too authoritarian for the times. Young people perceived the army as a place where they'd have to follow a lot of rules and would lose their individual identity, so they didn't join. The army commissioned dense studies of young people by the Rand Corporation, the California think tank best known for its work in the 1960s about how the U.S. could "prevail" in a thermonuclear exchange. The army also hired Dan Yankelovich's polling firm, as well as pricey consultants from McKinsey & Company. The findings from all this research convinced the army that it needed to dispense with "Be all that you can be" and develop a much more hard-edged appeal to individualism.


pages: 316 words: 105,384

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Cass Sunstein, high batting average, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, systematic trading, the new new thing, the scientific method, upwardly mobile

“The fact that the formulas work with the accuracy that they do is a way of saying there are essentially stable relationships between batting average, home runs, walks, other offensive elements—and runs,” wrote James. This kind of talk was catnip to people whose lives were devoted to discovering stable relationships in a seemingly unstable world: physicists, biologists, economists. There was a young statistician at the RAND Corporation, a future chair of the Harvard statistics department, named Carl Morris. “I’d been thinking about advanced ideas in baseball analysis,” said Morris, “and was impressed that someone else was, too, who wrote about it in a very interesting way.” Morris counted the days until the next Baseball Abstract appeared.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

He was the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War. He served in the Economic Cooperation Administration in Europe, and has held positions in the White House and Executive Office of the President, Yale University; the RAND Corporation; and the Department of Economics and Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. He has published on military strategy and arms control, energy and environmental policy, climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, organized crime, foreign aid and international trade, conflict and bargaining theory, racial segregation and integration, health policy, tobacco and drugs policy, and ethical issues in public policy and in business.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

“Mathematics Achievement Gaps Between Suburban Students and Their Rural and Urban Peers Increase Over Time,” The Carey Institute, University of New Hampshire, http://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1171&context=carsey. GRANT, Jonathan. (2005). “Population Implosion? Low Fertility Rates and Policy Responses in the European Union,” Rand Corporation, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9126.html. GRANT, Michael. (1969). The Ancient Mediterranean, New York: Scribner. GRATZ, Roberta Brandes. (1995, November). “Americans Want What Czechs Have,” Association for Thrifty Transport, http://doprava.ecn.cz/en/Amerika.php. GREEN, Emma. (2015, March 27).


pages: 375 words: 105,067

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

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

Financial literacy has also morphed into an academic powerhouse, an excellent field for ambitious professors seeking accolades, research grants, and tenure. For example, Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell, the two academics who have done the most in recent years to promote the concept, with multiple books, surveys, papers, speeches, and media quotes, head up efforts such as the Financial Literacy Center, a joint effort of the RAND Corporation with Dartmouth College and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. For-profit companies have also moved into the space, including EverFi, a Washington, DC–based education technology company that has raised $11 million in venture funding. EverFi gives its financial literacy materials to schools for free—provided, that is, they can find a corporation or nonprofit to sponsor the offering.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

, 7. www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2011/WEO2011_GoldenAgeofGasReport.pdf. 2.6 million oil and gas wells: Wilderness Society, “Oil and Gas Drilling: Some Key Facts,” April 2011. beyondoil.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/drilling-in-america-february-2011.pdf. (OPEC) wells total: OPEC, Annual Statistical Bulletin 2012, 27. www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_Project/media/downloads/publications/ASB2010_2011.pdf. 27 and 30 billion barrels of reserves: Richard Nehring, Linking U.S. Oil and Gas Reserve Estimates. RAND Corporation, September 1984, 3. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2009/N2049.pdf. US proven oil reserves at 29 billion barrels: US Energy Information Administration, “U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil,” 2014. www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=A. 45–46 “an implied cost”: ExxonMobil, The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040, 2014, 32.usaans1.usaa.com/en/energy/energy-outlook.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Compared with casualty figures from urban combat in recent years—such as the fighting in Chechnya, where Russia’s army lost at least 1,500 soldiers during its first assault on Grozny—these numbers are astonishingly low.8 A cover story in the June 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly by a leading terrorist expert for the Rand Corporation also focused on the “lessons” America must learn from how Israel deals with terrorism. A lead story in the “Ideas” section of the Boston Globe analyzed the ethical training received by Israeli soldiers and concluded, “The IDF army offers a model for us and other coalition forces.”9 It described the Israeli concept of “purity of arms,” which “requires that soldiers put their own lives at stake in order to avoid harming non-combatants.”


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

Of course the problems are not limited to publicly funded services. Elderly people in the US have recently had that sinking feeling when trying to choose between various extremely complex drug plans offered through Medicare ‘Part D’, provided by private insurance companies.9 And a classic US study by the Rand Corporation found that if people pay medical expenses directly (rather than having insurance) they spend less overall, but this is not the result of setting sensible priorities — people simply cut back across the board.10 Lack of training to understand, sift and interpret information is one reason; another is our emotional response to important but difficult decisions.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, predicted that eventually four hours work per day would be enough. The remaining hours would be for “leisure and pleasure.” Later, the playwright George Bernard Shaw outdid this prediction. In 1900 he suggested that by the year 2000 workers would be putting in just two hours a day. Decades later, the influential think tank, the RAND Corporation, forecast that in the future 2 percent of the population would be able to produce everything that society needed. The work/life balance And yet, as we shall see in a moment, a good deal of modern work does not fit into the drudgery model at all. Indeed, many people seem actively to like their jobs.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

The payoff to Alice is UA = 0.25pq + 0.70 p(1 − q) + 0.65 (1 − p)q + 0.10(1 − p) (1 − q), while Bob’s payoff is UB = −UA. At equilibrium, ∂UA/∂p = 0 and ∂UB/∂q = 0, giving p = 0.55 and q = 0.60. 25. The original game-theoretic problem was introduced by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation; Tucker saw the payoff matrix on a visit to their offices and proposed a “story” to go along with it. 26. Game theorists typically say that Alice and Bob could cooperate with each other (refuse to talk) or defect and rat on their accomplice. I find this language confusing, because “cooperate with each other” is not a choice that each agent can make separately, and because in common parlance one often talks about cooperating with the police, receiving a lighter sentence in return for cooperating, and so on. 27.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Bottom 50% down $900 Billion,” People’s Policy Project, June 14, 2019, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/06/14/top-1-up-21-trillion-bottom-50-down-900-billion/. If the level of inequality: Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018” (Working Paper WR-A516-1, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2020), https://doi.org/10.7249/WRA516-1. 1: SHAREHOLDER AND STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM Like 1.6 million Americans: “Statistics about Diabetes,” American Diabetes Association, accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.diabetes.org/resources/statistics/statistics-about-diabetes. Nearly a century earlier: “The History of a Wonderful Thing We Call Insulin,” American Diabetes Association, July 1, 2019, https://www.diabetes.org/blog/history-wonderful-thing-we-call-insulin.


pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

The Seattle plane maker surprised: Richard Witkin, “Boeing Says Repairs on Japanese 747 Were Faulty,” New York Times, September 8, 1985. “the most honest, reputable”: Author interview with Gordon Bethune, December 2019. “We are fighting”: Quoted in Mark A. Lorell, “Multinational Development of Large Aircraft: The European Experience,” Rand Corporation, July 1980. “the biggest foreign penetration”: Richard Witkin, “Eastern Accepts $778 Million Deal to Get 23 Airbuses,” New York Times, April 7, 1978. When a McDonnell Douglas: John Newhouse, The Sporty Game, 206. “went to the White House”: Author interview with C. Fred Bergsten, December 2017.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Jacquelyn Ottman, “The Four E’s Make Going Green Your Competitive Edge,” Marketing News 26, no. 3 (February 3, 1992): 7. 41.  Bruce Watson, “The Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing,” The Guardian, August 20, 2016. 42.  See John F. Pane, “Strategies for Implementing Personalized Learning While Evidence and Resources Are Underdeveloped,” Perspective (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, October 2018), 7, doi.org/10.7249/PE314. 43.  Alfie Kohn, “Four Reasons to Worry About ‘Personalized Learning,’” Psychology Today, February 24, 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-homework-myth/201502/four-reasons-worry-about-personalized-learning. 44.  See Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Learn and Schools Should Teach (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 45.  


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

He later called his years in the Corps “the happiest time in my life.”34 Ellsberg left the Marines in 1957 to assume a prestigious fellowship at Harvard and continue his graduate studies. Eventually, in 1962, he would complete his PhD. By then, he had already been working for three years at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the nation’s leading defense think tank, where intellectual heavyweights such as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, and Harry Rowen were becoming famous for applying social science methods to the study of nuclear deterrence. Even at RAND, where genius was common, Ellsberg stood out as a “supergenius,” possibly a future Nobel Prize winner.35 He was also a super-womanizer who openly bragged to colleagues about his conquests—and even passed around the RAND office nude photos of women he had slept with.36 His family, including two young children, did not command the same level of attention.

., 113 desire to kick out EGL, 147–48 in election of 1953, 159, 161 as ineffective leader, 107 Magsaysay’s authority clarified by, 123 at Magsaysay’s inauguration, 165 Quirino, Tony, 155, 161 Quirino Gonzalez, Vicky, 141–42 racism, 5, 14 Radford, Arthur W., 190, 241, 603 Radio Free Europe, 127 Radio Liberty, 127 Ramparts, 576 RAND Corporation, 467, 468, 544 Rasputin, Grigori, 145, 159, 284 Reader’s Digest, 224, 323 Reagan, Ronald, 472, 589 Recto, Claro, 142, 285 Redford, Robert, 164 Redgrave, Michael, 292 Redick, Joseph P., 219, 240, 247, 261, 343, 357, 358, 465, 466, 494, 605 and Battle of Saigon, 265–66 at EGL’s funeral, 595 on Hong Kong trip, 496, 497 in meeting with Thé, 256–57 in return to Saigon, 339 and uprising against Diem, 262 Vietcong investigated by, 345 Red Scare, 301 Red Star over China (Starr), 76 re-education camps, 571 Regional Force, 566 Reilly, John, 451 Reinhardt, G.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

According to Steven Metz, a professor at the United States Army War College, “We will see if not identical technologies, then parallel technologies being developed [outside the United States], particularly because of the off-the-shelf nature of it all. We’ve reached the point where the bad guys don’t need to develop it; instead they can just buy it.” A RAND Corporation report even suggested in 2001 that “the U.S. and its military must include in its planning for possible military conflict the possibility that China may be more advanced technologically and militarily by 2020.” The United States will probably be the first nation to develop a functional antimissile shield, as well as robots and nanoweapons that render human combatants obsolete, cybertechnology that can neutralize or seize control of enemy computers and robots, and satellites that militarize space.

., 362 Philip II, King of Macedon, 268 Philip II, King of Spain, 447–49 Philippines, 127, 421, 462, 535 Philistines, 217, 218 Phoenicia, 234, 239–42, 244, 250, 365 Phrygia, 277 Picasso, Pablo, 74 Pillow Book, The, 360 Ping, King, 243 Pinker, Steven, 85 Pinnacle Point (South Africa), 63, 64 pirates, 363, 408, 431, 442, 443, 445, 462–63, 485 Pires, Tomé, 431–33, 435 Pisa, 371 Pistorius, Oscar, 594 Pitman, Walter, 81n Pitt, William, 486, 488 Pizarro, Francisco, 460 plagues, 217, 296–97, 301, 309, 399–400, 412; see also bubonic plague; epidemics Plato, 148, 256, 260, 325, 589 Pliny the Elder, 273 Plotinus, 324 Poitiers (France), 352 Poland, 112, 353, 368, 419, 455, 458, 549 Politics (Aristotle), 260 Polo, Marco, 384–85, 387, 392, 427 Pol Pot, 16 Polybius, 263–64, 270 Polynesia, 421n Pomeranz, Kenneth, 18, 20–21, 40, 158, 159, 168, 169 Pope, Alexander, 470 Popper, Karl, 157 population, 19, 20, 139, 150n, 237–39, 365, 467, 528, 538–40, 561, 565–66, 577–79, 612 aging, 551, 586, 617 of Britain, 505, 509 of Byzantium 347 of China, 17, 19, 201, 206, 237, 238, 242, 243, 286, 289, 298, 307, 355, 377, 392, 440, 484, 544, 547, 585 of Egypt, 185, 200, 296 epidemics and, 217, 295–96, 305, 308, 310, 347, 396, 437, 438, 455 farming and, 100, 103, 108, 319, 320, 600–601 global warming and, 601, 603 Greek, 219, 239 indigenous, American, 430, 464, 529 of Japan, 406, 440, 483 of Mesopotamia, 188 Muslim, 363 prehistoric, 66, 72, 76 of Roman Empire, 286, 291, 298, 312, 328, 335 urban, 149, 151, 338 Porphyry, 324 Portugal, 33, 414, 416, 419, 427, 430–32, 435, 440, 442, 460 Potosí (Bolivia), 460 Prester John, 414, 416 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 582 Priestley, Joseph, 568 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 419 Princess Taiping (ship), 413 Principia Mathematica (Newton), 470 privateers, 462 Procopius, 345 “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (Spencer), 135 Project Kittyhawk, 596 Protagoras, 261 Protestantism, 20, 448 Prozac, 594 Puabi, Queen, 189 Punjab (India), 271 “Pure Land School,” 322 Puritans, 574 Puyi, Emperor, 528 Pylos (Greece), 216, 217 Qermez Dere (Iraq), 94, 96, 97, 102 Qi (China), 233, 244, 251, 253, 262, 265n Qiang people, 213, 221, 299–305, 307 Qianlong, Emperor, 484, 515 Qicunzhen (China), 382 Qi Jiguang, 442–43 Qin (China), 244, 251, 253, 259, 262–70, 275, 277, 279, 281–85, 292, 528, 610 First Emperor, 279, 282, 284–85, 289, 292, 293, 421n, 567 Qing dynasty, 458–59, 473, 476, 484, 499–500, 518, 520, 523, 528, 573, 574, 587 Qiying, 517 Qiying (ship), 6, 7 Quaid, Dennis, 92 Quanzhou (China), 379 Quebec, 463, 465 railroads, 12, 507, 509, 515, 523–24 Railway Children, The (Nesbit), 182 Raleigh, Walter, 463 Ramses II, Pharaoh, 199, 214, 215, 218, 220 Ramses III, Pharaoh, 216–18 Ramses XI, Pharaoh, 219 RAND Corporation, 615 Ranters, 452–53 Ravenna (Italy), 344 Red Cliffs, battle of, 304 Red Guards, 546 Red-Head Shiites, 444 Red Turbans, 404, 405 Reindeer Cave (France), 69 Rembrandt, 148 Renaissance, 417–22, 426, 433, 469, 474, 476, 569, 575, 589 Renfrew, Colin, 110, 112 Republic, The (Plato), 256, 260 Revivification of the Sciences of Religion (al-Ghazali), 367 Richardson, Lewis Fry, 608 Richardson, Samuel, 503 Riesman, David, 540 Rifkin, Jeremy, 591 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The (Kennedy), 248 Rites of Zhou (Confucian handbook), 204 Roanoke Colony, 463–64 Roberts, Richard, 496 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 486 Rollo, King, 371 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The, 303, 304 Roman Empire, 136, 149, 159, 267, 280, 284–93, 320, 325, 341, 354, 370, 373, 403, 457, 482 China and, 273, 276 Christianity in, 263, 323, 326–28 collapse of, 14, 312–17, 533, 576, 611, 621, 569, 574 democracy made redundant in, 260 economy of, 288–91, 311–12, 335, 393, 499, 500, 564 Egypt and, 273, 283–84, 287, 311 energy use in, 157, 287, 380–81 environmental impacts of, 287–90 founding of, 284, 285 frontier wars of, 308–11, 323, 349 Greeks in, 280, 286 Han dynasty compared with, 285, 289, 291, 298, 307 Justinian and, 343, 345–48 literacy in, 379 Persia and, 308, 310–14, 328, 360, 361 plagues in, 296, 297, 307 Renaissance fascination with, 418–20 social development in, 168, 169, 307, 332, 382, 455, 469, 481, 607 Romania, 290, 312 Romanovs, 459, 499–500, 528, 551 Romans, ancient, 228, 263–64, 269–71, 376, 444 armies of, 265, 277, 289, 292 civil wars of, 281, 283 mythology of, 244, 263 Parthians and, 292–94 Spanish mines of, 155 trade of, 273–76 waterways of, 334–35, 337, 563; see also Roman Empire Roman Warm Period, 290, 297, 299, 599 Rome, city of, 320 medieval, 363, 369 papacy in, 398, 404 population of, 148–49 Silk Road linking China to, 125 Rome (television series), 148 Rong people, 242–44, 263, 278 Royal Astronomical Society, 145n Ruan Ji, 320–21 Russia, 368, 445, 455–60, 482, 488–89, 511, 518, 530, 550, 574, 601, 604–606, 608 Communist, see Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 528 Russo-Japanese War, 17, 525–26, 528 Ryan, William, 81n Sacrifice to Heaven, 340 Sagan, Carl, 613–14, 617 Sahara Desert, 116, 117, 119 Sahlins, Marshall, 106–107, 109, 140 Sakya (India), 262 Salem witch trials, 470 Sandy Creek (Australia), 77 San Francisco–New York railroad, 507 Sanxingdui (China), 214 Saracens, 353, 363 Sardinia, 198, 200, 220, 240 Sargon, 189, 192 Sassanid dynasty, 310 Saudi Arabia, 605n Sautuola, Don Marcelino Sanz de, 73–74 Sautuola, Maria Sanz de, 74–75 Scandinavia, 363, 371 Schechter, Solomon, 365 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 124 Schöningen (Germany), 57 Schularick, Moritz, 585 Science Fiction Writers of America, 93 Scientific American (magazine), 125, 154 Scorpion King, 185, 187 Scotland, 353, 451, 472n Scythians, 278, 279, 292, 294 Secret History, The (Procopius), 345 Segestans, 241, 244 Self-Help (Samuels), 503 Seljuk Turks, 363, 366, 367, 372, 374 Sennacherib, King, 247–48 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 551 Serbia, 605 Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, 320–21 Seven Samurai, The (film), 440n Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 603 Severin, Tim, 421n Sexual Politics (Millett), 540 Shakespeare, William, 436 Shalmaneser, King, 247 Shamshi-Adad V, King, 239 Shandong (China), 202, 203, 206, 207, 215 Shang, Lord, 259, 260, 265 Shang dynasty, 123, 124, 209–15, 220–22, 229–31, 235, 285, 610 Shanghai (China), 501n, 503, 524, 548 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 606 Shangshan (China), 105 Shanidar Cave (Iraq), 57, 59, 60 Shanks, Michael, 141 Sharkalisharri, King, 192, 193 Sheba, Queen of, 234 Sheklesh (Sicilians), 217, 218 Shen, 243 Shen Fu, 514 Shen Kuo, 419–20, 589 Sherden (Sardinians), 217, 218 Sheshonq I, King, 235 Shihuangdi, 267 Shiites, 358, 364, 367, 444–45, 449, 574 Shklovskii, Iosif, 613–14, 617 Shulgi, King, 193–94 Shunzhi, Emperor, 478 Siberia, 79, 125, 455–58, 460 Sicily, 198, 200, 220, 268, 277, 345, 360, 365, 368, 371 archaeological sites in, 95, 240–41, 365–66 Sic et Non (Abelard), 371 Sidonius, 314, 319 Sierra Leone, 146, 147 Silk Roads, 125, 275, 297, 396, 427, 429 silver, 7, 188, 275, 348, 405, 411, 454, 463, 515–16 mining and processing of, 19, 155, 268, 287, 460–62 Sima Qian, 211, 214, 242–43, 250, 282 Singapore, 534, 588 Singularity, the, 592–96 Sistine Chapel, 493 Six Million Dollar Man, The (television show), 594, 597 Six Records of a Floating Life (Shen Fu), 514 “Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians,” 306 slaves, 286, 290, 310, 372, 439, 474 in ancient world, 191, 194, 197, 199–200 in colonial Americas, 19, 461–66, 468 in China, 264, 273, 299, 342 Christian, 403, 444 of Portuguese, 414, 416 of Romans, 263–64, 269, 273, 283, 312 Turkic, armies of, 358, 361, 366 in United States, 497 Smalley, Richard, 593 Smerdis, 249 Smil, Vaclav, 608 Smiles, Samuel, 503, 514 Smith, Adam, 39–40, 490, 501, 511 Smith, Grafton Elliot, 222 Socrates, 14, 255, 256, 260, 262 Solomon, King, 234, 235 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 457 Somalia, 604 Song dynasty, 373–83, 389, 421, 482, 543, 575, 576, 590 collapse of, 386–87, 392, 611, 621 Confucianism in, 423 economy of, 378n, 377–80, 386, 499, 500, 564 social development in, 167, 168, 455, 473, 481, 607 Song Jian, 201 Sons of Heaven, 236, 239, 245 Sophists, 261 South Africa, 47, 61, 63, 519 South Korea, 534, 543, 588, 597 Soviet Union, 526, 530–35, 540–44, 546–51, 553, 578–80, 587, 604, 616 Spain, 287, 309, 311, 347, 353, 365, 404, 466, 472 American colonies of, 413, 460–64, 467, 485 ancient, 33, 159, 189, 193, 215 archaeological sites in, 55, 73 Germanic tribes in, 314–15 Habsburg, 446, 448–49, 460, 462 Muslim, 360, 362, 370, 371, 396 prehistoric, 54, 55, 69, 73, 74, 77 Romans and, 155, 270, 289 Spanish Armada, 316, 573–74 Spanish Inquisition, 574 Sparta, 268, 524 Special Economic Zones, 548 Speer, Albert, 579 Spencer, Herbert, 135, 138, 139, 142, 148, 544 Spice Islands, 379, 431, 575 Springs and Autumns of Mr.


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

“not about demonizing”: PBS NewsHour 2010. One in four Americans: NIDDK 2014b. A conservative estimate: The CDC estimates the direct and indirect costs for heart disease and stroke at $315 billion each year, cancer at $157 billion, diabetes at $245 billion, and obesity (in 2008) at $147 billion (CDC 2016a). The Rand Corporation has estimated the total monetary cost of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, at between $157 and $215 billion (Hurd et al. 2013). Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes: See, for instance, Guthrie 2007. “We are to admit”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Isaac_Newton. “Everything should be”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Albert_​Einstein.


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

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

At the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Johnson was directed to the staffers on the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management. There were two staffers. One covered military construction. The other, who covered everything else, had just arrived on Capitol Hill. Her name was Maren Leed, and though she was only thirty years old, she was a former fellow at RAND Corporation, the defense-oriented think-tank, with a doctorate in quantitative policy analysis. As it happened, she’d also worked as an analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and was hunting for a signature issue for the new ranking member on the committee. That was Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii—a state very much victimized by military corrosion.


pages: 423 words: 115,336

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The NSC study Consideration of Policy on Continental Defense (NSC 5606), finished in the summer of 1956, called for shelters.15 In January 1957, Holifield introduced a bill to establish a Department of Civil Defense and to require it to construct “group shelters” in every target zone. A panel organized at the President’s behest, the Gaither Committee, proposed in November 1957 a fallout shelter program costing approximately $25 billion. In early 1958, both the RAND Corporation and a panel headed by Nelson Rockefeller published reports calling for national shelter programs. Shelter advocates shared two assumptions: one, Americans had nowhere to go if Soviet nuclear weapons found their targets; and two, shelters had considerable deterrence value. As the Gaither report put it, shelters would discourage “the enemy from attempting an attack on what might otherwise seem to him a temptingly unprepared target.”16 Eisenhower didn’t agree.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

The theory was invented in the 1950s by Harry Markowitz, and for his contribution he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990. His book Portfolio Selection was an outgrowth of his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago. His experience has ranged from teaching at UCLA to designing a computer language at RAND Corporation. He even ran a hedge fund, serving as president of Arbitrage Management Company. What Markowitz discovered was that portfolios of risky (volatile) stocks might be put together in such a way that the portfolio as a whole could be less risky than the individual stocks in it. The mathematics of modern portfolio theory (also known as MPT) is recondite and forbidding; it fills the journals and, incidentally, keeps a lot of academics busy.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

The celebration lasted less than two years. In 1953 and 1954, three unexplained midair explosions of Comets killed all passengers on board. The government grounded the entire fleet. The Comet explosions scared most of the industry off jets. In case there were any more doubts, a report by the Rand Corporation, the premier national policy and security consulting firm, said that jet travel could never be made economically feasible (BOAC jets flew at a loss). The presidents of American Airlines and Trans World Airlines (TWA) announced they would not pursue jet aircraft. People say, “There’s no way that could ever work.”


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

After he received his PhD in economics that year, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a professor in 1958. Solow spent his academic career at this leading economics faculty, though he was also visiting professor at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1960s. Solow was active in public policy from the start. After obtaining his PhD, he took on consulting assignments for the RAND Corporation in 1952. During his time working with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1962–68, Solow helped draft the Keynesian-influenced economic policies that were the hallmark of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. In 1965–69, he served on President Johnson’s Committee on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, and then on President Richard Nixon’s Commission on Income Maintenance from 1969–70.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

Since the beginning of the escalating nuclear-arms race, the two superpowers had been seeking a method to monitor the progress of their opponent’s weapons programs and their compliance with international agreements. Rather than using a high-altitude spy aircraft, which ran the risk of being shot down, the influential global-policy think tank, the RAND Corporation, proposed a space-age alternative: an unpiloted orbiting observational satellite that would either transmit video images or return exposed film reels via automated reentry capsules. President Eisenhower believed that if a scientific research satellite was placed in an orbit that passed over the airspace of a Soviet Eastern Bloc country, this action would establish a precedent for orbital overflight, thus opening up space for observational reconnaissance.


pages: 420 words: 119,928

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past) by Cixin Liu

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cosmic microwave background, Deng Xiaoping, game design, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, information security, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Norbert Wiener, Panamax, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Von Neumann architecture

The most shocking conclusion of all was that the impact would have nothing at all to do with the degree and type of contact (unidirectional or bidirectional), or the form and degree of advancement of the alien civilization. This was the theory of “contact as symbol” proposed by sociologist Bill Mathers of RAND Corporation in his book, The 100,000-Light-Year Iron Curtain: SETI Sociology. Mathers believed that contact with an alien civilization is only a symbol or a switch. Regardless of the content of the encounter, the results would be the same. Suppose that the nature of the contact is such that only the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is confirmed, with no other substantive information—what Mathers called elementary contact.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

He’s a rare legal mind that knows how to write perl and python code, and continues to do so regularly. Ohm came to legal scholarship in something of a roundabout way. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University, earning dual degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, before going on to be a programmer and network administrator at the RAND Corporation for several years. Then, he decided to go to law school, and was accepted at nearby UCLA. Upon graduating from law school in 1999, Ohm had two clerkships with two different federal judges in California, and finally, by 2001, he served as a DOJ trial attorney, specializing in computer crime and intellectual property.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Mark Seal, “An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga,” Vanity Fair, February 4, 2015. 3. “DPRK FM Spokesman Blasts U.S. Moves to Hurt Dignity of Supreme Leadership of DPRK,” Korean Central News Agency, June 25, 2014. 4. Sony Pictures executives sought advice from a North Korea expert at RAND Corporation. As part of his response, that analyst referenced a conversation with the State Department’s special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, saying the envoy was not particularly worried about the threat because it sounded like “typical North Korean bullying.” Seal, “An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga.” 5.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Many of the Wikileaks documents cited here were first reported in “Cables Released by Wikileaks Reveal Saudis’ Checkbook Diplomacy,” NYT, June 20, 2015, and “Wikileaks Shows a Saudi Obsession With Iran,” NYT, July 16, 2015. For background on the Houthis, I consulted “Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: the Huthi Phenomenon,” RAND Corporation, 2010. pilgrimage to Mecca: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks, Jan. 22, 2012. https://wikileaks.org/​saudi-cables/​pics/​5357859a-e321-4088-9137-4b69e0a87f30.jpg hand out as he saw fit: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks document: #80451. Undated. https://wikileaks.org/​saudi-cables/​doc80451.html “the kingdom asks of him”: Saudi diplomatic cable, Wikileaks document #53032.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

David Castlevecchi, “Can We Open the Black Box of AI?,” Scientific American, October 5, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-we-open-the-black-box-of-ai/. 52. Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html; Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data and Society, 2017), https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf. 53. On the distinction between speech and conduct, see, for example, Claudia Haupt, “Professional Speech,” Yale Law Journal 125, no. 5 (2016): 1238–1303. 54.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

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

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

When he arrived, on January 20, he saw about ten people in the city wearing face masks; a week later, as he departed, nearly everyone was wearing one. Had he waited one more day to return to the U.S., he would have been quarantined. Then he traveled to Europe, and Covid was there to greet him. In February, he taught a course at the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles, and by early March the restaurants were empty and it was getting hard to find a place to eat. He flew back to New York on March 14, six days before the city shut down. All along he was one step behind the virus, “a lagging indicator,” he said. Strongin was sixty-two, thin, tousled, with rimless glasses that gave him a kind of nineteenth-century European intellectual look—Henrik Ibsen without the sideburns.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

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

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

a staggering 42 percent: Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” programs sharply reduce recidivism: Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” and save governments money: Lois Davis et al., “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education,” Rand Corporation, 2013, https://bit.ly/2O2HbL2. “allocated to food stamps”: Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” “8 to 10 times higher”: Nicholas Freudenberg, “Jails, Prisons, and the Health of Urban Populations: A Review of the Impact of the Correctional System on Community Health,” Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 78, no. 2 (June 2001): 316–34.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

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

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

and reporting fifty-two days of sobriety, according to Nolan via e-mail on November 8, 2021. Three months later, Brenda had another job with decent benefits and was sober, and Mary Jo was hosting hep C–testing gatherings for Tim again and trying to win back custody of her daughter, as Tim was proud to report in an e-mail to the author, November 29, 2021. $1 trillion per year: RAND Corporation, “Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking,” RAND.org, February 7, 2022. In 2018, that figure was $696 billion. The new trillion-dollar cost estimate is equivalent to nearly half of America’s economic growth in 2021. teenage overdose deaths: Joseph Friedman, “Trends in Drug Overdose Deaths Among U.S.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

In Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, a comprehensive drug prevention program reduced drug-related low-birthweight births by more than 80 percent, and the number of drug-related crimes by 37 percent.100 Project DREAM in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which focused on teen drinking, resulted in a 45 percent decrease in the number of people under 21 arrested for drunk driving.101 Drug-prevention programs not only work but are also cheap, especially in relation to the enormous costs they prevent. A Rand Corporation study, for example, estimated that every $1 spent on cocaine prevention and treatment programs results in a $7 savings in law-enforcement and health-care expenses.102 Yet consistently we say we cannot afford these programs. The patterns we see in the United States are different in degree but not in kind from those that have begun to emerge in Europe and elsewhere.


pages: 370 words: 114,741

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

23andMe, Adam Curtis, air freight, company town, desegregation, index card, indoor plumbing, life extension, medical malpractice, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, white picket fence

Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. When you go to the doctor for a routine blood test or to have a mole removed, when you have an appendectomy, tonsillectomy, or any other kind of ectomy, the stuff you leave behind doesn’t always get thrown out. Doctors, hospitals, and laboratories keep it. Often indefinitely. In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, last of its kind) with a “conservative estimate” that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States alone. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Forbes, Jan. 8, 2015. At http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/01/08/whatsapps-growth-exceeds-christianitys-first-19-centuries/. Anderson, James M., Nidhi Kalra, Karlyn D. Stanley, Paul Sorensen, Constantine Samaras, and Oluwatobi A. Oluwatola, Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers. Rand Corporation, 2014. Andrews, Dan, Chiara Criscuolo, and Peter N. Gal, “Frontier Firms, Technology Diffusion and Public Policy: Micro Evidence from OECD Countries.” OECD Productivity Working Paper. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Nov. 2015. Antràs, Pol, and Stephen R Yeaple, “Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade.”


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

He supervised himself.”17 Sharpe, on the other hand, is always generous when the talk turns to Markowitz. He told me he considers Markowitz “the most truly gentle man I know.”18 In his article in Management Science Sharpe begins with a note acknowledging computer assistance at UCLA and the University of Washington and goes on: [The author’s] greatest debt is to Dr. Harry Markowitz of the RAND Corporation. . . . It is no longer possible to segregate the ideas in this paper into those which were his, those which were the author’s, and those which were developed jointly. Suffice it to say that the only accomplishments which are unquestionably the property of the author are those of authorship—first of the computer program and then of this article.19 Nineteen sixty-one, the year in which Sharpe wrote “A Simplified Model for Portfolio Analysis,” was also the year in which an American astronaut, Alan Shepard, first rode a missile in space, for a thrilling fifteen minutes.


pages: 366 words: 119,981

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, Great Leap Forward, Kitchen Debate, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

A word, a wink, a nod from the president of the United States on the subject of quickly putting a satellite, any satellite, into orbit around Earth would have changed the course of mid-twentieth-century history and avoided the worst crisis of his presidency. But still, Ike was warned. Even Harry Truman had been warned. Way back in 1946, when German rocket parts and Wernher von Braun’s rocket team were in exile-residence at the Army’s Fort Bliss, by El Paso, Texas, a RAND Corporation report called it right: “The achievement of a satellite craft by the United States would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb.” World War II had just ended and nobody in power cared. Von Braun, of course, cared, but he was still a captured German scientist yet to prove himself to his new American masters.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

But the Next system lives on as the foundation for today’s Macintosh OSX operating system. Remember that little content management system my colleagues at Salon built in 2000, the one whose disastrous deployment haunted me and launched me on this book’s inquiry? It turned into an open source project named Bricolage and has been used by the World Health Organization, the RAND Corporation, and the Howard Dean presidential campaign. And all the research for the book you’re reading was organized, compiled, outlined, cross-referenced, and endlessly tweaked in an old Windows program called Ecco Pro that was first released in 1993. In 1997, Ecco was “orphaned” by its owners, who felt they couldn’t compete with Microsoft Outlook (though it makes Outlook’s rigid PIM design look like a—Oh, never mind!)


pages: 386 words: 122,595

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

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

Doing nothing essentially costs nothing (more or less); shooting protons from an accelerator costs somewhere in the range of $100,000. The cost difference is not surprising; the shocking thing is that proton therapy has not been proven any more effective than watchful waiting. An analysis by the RAND Corporation concluded, “No therapy has been shown superior to another.”3 Health maintenance organizations were designed to control costs by changing the incentives. Under many HMO plans, general practitioners are paid a fixed fee per patient per year, regardless of what services they provide. Doctors may be restricted in the kinds of tests and services they can prescribe and may even be paid a bonus if they refrain from sending their patients to see specialists.


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

He served as Mission Control Surgeon, Deputy Crew Surgeon or Crew Surgeon for numerous Space Shuttle missions and as Project Manager for the Space Station Medical Facility, developing the initial design for the first in-flight medical delivery system for long-duration missions. A founding board member of the American Telemedicine Association, Dr. Logan has served as a consultant to the RAND Corporation, a variety of professional organizations, international and domestic hospital-based health care systems, and the Department of Defense. He was the first Provost for the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Board certified in Aerospace Medicine, he completed a medical fellowship in Undersea & Hyperbaric Medicine at Duke University Medical Center in 2013.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

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

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

Governments began to intervene in the public interest through the ethos of public service – politicians and civil servants acting altruistically for others. Yet, ironically, it was intelligence’s success in managing the Soviet nuclear threat, masterminded by the US Research and Development (RAND) Corporation, that convinced political elites and business alike that Hayek’s self-interest theory might have been right all along. The constant feed of multiple intelligence surveillance data into powerful American computers revealed minute-by-minute warnings and indicators of Soviet nuclear intention. Thus, through computerised mathematical modelling, the uncertain intentions of two nuclear opponents suddenly became clear.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

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

The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.31 IN 1981 AND 1982, Francis Fukuyama, a thirty-year-old holder of a bachelor’s degree in classics and a former student of Allan Bloom at Cornell (class of ’74), held a position at the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. He spent the following six years at the Rand Corporation working on Cold War strategy while the Cold War was rushing through its final phases. In 1989, after Reagan’s vice president George H. W. Bush had become president, Fukuyama went back to Policy Planning as its deputy director. Around this time, he was invited by the University of Chicago’s Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy to lecture on politics and history.


pages: 441 words: 124,798

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

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

“you don’t have people shooting at you”: Author interview, Coffman, May 31, 2016. Coffman also described the regular weight of the Harlem heroin haul. important subset of the drug trade in Baltimore: Jean Marbella and Catherine Rentz, “Heroin Creates Crowded Illicit Economy in Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 19, 2015, quoting a RAND Corporation study and Baltimore’s heroin task force. With the highest per capita rate of heroin use: Baltimore has the worst heroin problem in the country, according to incoming Maryland governor Larry Hogan: Jenna Johnson, “Hogan Says He Will Declare Heroin ‘Emergency’ Once Sworn in as Md. Governor,” Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2014.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 1999, parliamentary leader Raja Mohammad Zafarat Haq claimed that Pakistan “would not allow anyone from its soil to interference [sic] in Afghanistan.”5 In 2006, while NATO forces fought back Taliban incursions into Afghanistan from Pakistan, Pakistani Army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan called allegations that Pakistan was harboring training camps for cross-border networks “absurd.” In 2008, Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas was asked to respond to a well-documented Rand Corporation study that found “active and former officials in Pakistan’s intelligence service and the Frontier Corps” providing the Taliban “with training at camps in Pakistan, as well as intelligence, financial assistance and help crossing the border.” Abbas responded, “We reject this claim of sanctuaries being aided by Pakistan’s army or intelligence agencies.”6 The ISI-created and -sustained Pakistani paramilitary militias tied to JI and JUI and their offshoots were a vital part of the unholy alliance (Appendix VI).

See Muhammad (the Prophet) Protestants Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) Proxy war See also specific Afghan proxies Pugo, Boris Pul-i-Charkhi prison Puzanov, Alexander Qaddafi, Muammar Qadir, Abdul Qadir, Haji Abdul Qadiriya Order Qais(chart) Qajar Dynasty Qanuni, Yunis Qazi, Javed Ashraf Qizilbash bodyguard force Quayle, Dan Quetta home base Quetta Shura (map) Quirke, Dan Qureshi, Shah Mahmood Qutb, Mohammad Qutb, Sayyid Qutbism Rabbani, Burhanuddin (table), and the Afghan Interim Government (AIG) government-in-exile as interim president and the ISI and the Jamaat-i Islami Party and Masood meeting with and the Muslim Brotherhood named as successor interim president and the National Commander’s Shura and the Peshawar Accords and Saddam Hussein shift to a moderate stance and shifts in Mujahidin alliances (chart) and the Taliban and the UN proposal Rabbani, Mohammad Rafi, Mohammad Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi Rahman, Fazlur Rahman, Jamil ur- Rahman, Mujibur Rahman, Omar Abdel (fig.), Rana, Nasim Rand Corporation study Rang, Gul Raphel, Arnold L. Raphel, Robin Rashid, Ahmed Rasoul, Zalmay Rasouli, Haidar Rawalpindi Shura Rawalpindi Treaty Razak, Abdul Reagan administration Reagan Doctrine Reagan, Ronald Reconstruction efforts Red Crescent(fig.) Refugees (map) Religious leaders, influence of Religious legitimacy Renaissance, the Reza Shah Reza, Shah Mohammad (son of Reza Shah) Rice, Condoleezza Riedel, Bruce Ritchie, James Ritchie, Joe Ritter, Don Roberts, Frederick Rocca, Christina Rogachev, Igor Rohinga Solidarity Group Rohrabacher, Dana Roman Republic Roosevelt, Franklin D.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

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

Two days later, Yeltsin boasted publicly about how he denied Gorbachev’s “exorbitant” request (which Gorbachev denied ever making) to extend his presidential immunity from prosecution: “If he is guilty of something, he should acknowledge it now while he is still president.”55 Gorbachev wanted to establish a think tank on the model of the RAND Corporation, and for that he would receive the large building complex of the Central Committee’s Social Science Institute on Len-gradskii Prospekt (complete with classrooms, cafeterias, gyms, and a hotel), which had previously hosted activists from other Communist parties. According to Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, his boss had “no idea of the actual dimensions of the complex,” but he was worried, according to Gorbachev, that it would become “a nest of opposition” to the new regime.

., 86 Pavlov, Valentin, xxi, 575, 577, 582–86, 591, 592, 593, 600, 600, 601, 605, 617, 622 Pavlovsk (Massie), 283 Peace and Friendship Treaty, 566 peaceful coexistence, 257, 263–64, 414 “peace offensives,” 263–64 Pell, Claiborne, 560 Peloponnesian War, 156 Peres, Shimon, 683 Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Gorbachev), 319–20, 382, 413 Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier, 421 “permanent mobilization,” 100–101 Perot, Ross, 405 Pershing II missiles, 170, 394, 716n “personality cult,” 58, 96–97, 126, 327, 329 Pertini, Sandro, 195 Peter I (“the Great”), Emperor of Russia, 50, 261, 342 Peterhof, 342, 344 Petrakov, Nikolai, xxi, 238, 239, 311, 313, 364, 364, 451, 519, 522–24, 526–28, 531, 533, 534–35, 536 Petrov, Stanislav, 171 Petrov, Yuri, 355, 356 Petrozavodsk State University, 141 Petukhov, Vasily, 77 Piatigorsk (city), 30, 81, 104–5 Pitsunda (resort), 230–31, 310, 440, 453, 603 Plekhanov, Georgy, 100, 340 Plekhanov, Yuri, 423–24, 607, 608, 609, 613, 614 Poindexter, John, 304–5 Poland, 170, 173, 195, 267–68, 270, 344, 369, 378, 427, 465, 472, 477, 480–84, 485, 494, 506, 548, 564, 640, 641, 682 Polish Communist Party, 173 Political Publishing House, 92 Pollack, Richard, 392 Polozkov, Ivan, 309, 514, 515, 516, 533 Poltoranin, Mikhail, xxi, 649, 655–56 Ponomarev, Boris, xxi, 197, 210, 221, 256, 257, 259, 269 Popov, Gavriil, xxi, 245, 430, 444, 452, 454, 532, 532, 578, 585, 598, 680 Porgorny, Nikolai, 174 Porotov, Nikolai, xxi, 77, 78, 135 “Portrait of Gorbachev,” 454 Portugalov, Nikolai, xxi, 492 Potemkin, Grigory, 10 “Potemkin villages,” 10, 113, 235 Powell, Charles, xxi, 198, 199, 200, 390, 391 Powell, Colin, xxi, 402, 408, 409, 412, 682 Pozgay, Imre, xxi, 483 Prague, 45, 54, 58, 91, 92, 93, 116, 119, 122–24, 143, 172, 180, 218, 267, 379–81, 387, 486, 504, 689, 693 Prague Spring (1968), 45, 54, 54, 91, 92, 93, 119, 122–24, 143, 172, 180, 218, 267, 379–81, 504, 689, 693 Pravda, 21, 91–92, 132, 178, 193, 247, 270, 272, 324, 332, 339, 346, 349, 350, 355, 434, 459–60 President Hotel, 648 Primakov, Yevgeny, 207, 253, 451, 501, 511, 525, 536, 559, 567, 570, 589, 592, 593, 614, 654 Pristavkin, Anatoly, 317 Problems of Peace and Socialism, 92 Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom (Sakharov), 122–23 Progress Publishing House, 127, 253 Prokofiev, Yuri, xxi, 533 Public Advisory Council, 677 Public Opinion, 350 publitsistika (essays), 339 Pugachev, Yemiliyan, 10 Pugo, Boris, xxii, 578, 584, 600, 600, 621 Pushkin, Alexander, 30, 33, 261, 340, 642–43 Putin, Vladimir, xxii, 2, 143, 652, 653, 659, 676–81, 676, 682, 684–87, 691–93 “quantitative indicators,” 311 Radio Liberty, 397 Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, 682–83 Raisa Maksimovna’s Club, 664–65 Rakhmanin, Oleg, xxii, 269, 270 Rakowski, Mieczyslaw, xxii, 482–83, 485 RAND Corporation, 639 Rappoport, Yakov, 45 Rasputin, Valentin, 511 Razin, Stepan, 10 Razumovskaya, Ludmila, 190 READD-RADD collection, xii Reagan, Nancy, xxii, 4, 225, 283, 289–91, 302–3, 304, 403, 407, 409, 414, 416, 417–18, 421, 556, 563, 656 Reagan, Ron, 303 Reagan, Ronald, xxii, 4, 170, 197, 201, 225, 252, 255, 263, 274–305, 284, 285, 297, 377, 385, 392, 393, 394, 396, 398, 400–419, 417, 421, 423–25, 424, 462, 465, 468, 469, 470, 472, 473, 475, 496, 556, 560, 563, 596, 656, 685, 686, 693 realpolitik, 473, 558 Red Army, 20–27, 55, 122, 170, 234, 540–41, 572 “Red Hundred,” 429, 433 Red Labor Banner, 8 “Red October” collective farm, 13 Red Square, 43, 98, 123, 140, 206, 220, 228, 321, 396–97, 416, 417, 518, 532, 581 refugees, 22, 35, 368, 369, 426 refuseniks, 415 Regan, Donald, xxii, 286, 288–90, 301, 303 Reid, Thomas Mayne, 29 Remnick, David, xxii, 442, 456, 457, 518, 559, 658, 659 Repentance, 248, 249, 250, 429 Repubblica, 459 Republican Party, 279, 304, 393, 396, 410, 412, 490 Revenko, Grigory, xxii, 511, 623, 654 revolution of 1905, 429, 576 rheumatoid arthritis, 78 Rice, Condoleezza, xxii, 458, 553 Ridgeway, Rozanne, 396 Rimashevskaya, Natalia, xxii, 51, 53 Road of Ilich, 35–36 Rocard, Michel, 683 Rockefeller, David, 459 Rodin Museum, 280 Rodionov, Ivan, 437 Roh Tae Woo, 562–63 Romania, 269, 378, 384–85, 427, 465, 483, 498–99, 506, 693 Romanov, Grigory, xxii, 181, 205, 210, 212, 219, 227 Rome, 150, 195, 495, 666 Romero, Carmen, 656–57 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 183, 422, 469, 495, 552, 602, 654 Ross, Dennis, 563, 566–67, 570 Rossini, Gioachino, 593 Rossiya Hotel, 158, 159, 364 Rostov (city), 10, 22, 41, 43, 450 Rostov-on-Don (city), 21, 661 ruble (currency), 28, 68, 81, 96, 111, 214, 232, 239, 310, 378, 393, 434, 546, 549, 575, 591, 594, 639 Rublevskoe Shosse, 653 Rubtsovsk (village), 63 Rural Life, 116 Rusakov, Konstantin, xxii, 210, 270 Rusalka (Pushkin), 33 Russia: constitution of, 658, 659 Duma (parliament) of, 513, 627–28, 635, 657–58, 659, 661, 680, 684, 685 oligarchy in, 483, 663, 679, 693 parliamentary elections of (1993), 658 presidential elections of (1996), 660–63, 666 presidential elections of (2000), 676–77 presidential elections of (2003), 679–80 privatization in, 181, 524, 527, 591, 653, 693 as Soviet republic, 193, 353, 371–72, 445, 500, 590–91, 610, 622–23 steppes in, 11, 13, 21, 41, 55, 78, 81, 130, 163, 164, 314 tsarist, 3, 17, 29, 31, 55, 80, 164, 206, 231, 243, 260, 352, 355, 365, 372, 476, 500, 506, 517, 518, 531, 576, 602, 603, 606, 693 Russian Children’s Hospital, 663–64 Russian Communist Party (RCP), 501, 514, 515, 622–23 “Russian freedom,” 314–15 Russian Independence Day (2012), 684–85 Russian Orthodox Church, 11, 340, 560 Russian Republic Supreme Soviets, 321, 521 Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), 500 Russian United Social Democratic Party, 678 Rust, Mathias, xxii, 397 Rutskoi, Aleksandr, xxii, 612–14, 654 Ryabov, Yakov, xxii, 322, 328 Rybakov, Anatoly, xxii, 249, 250, 317, 339 Ryzhkov, Nikolai, xxii, 3, 188, 189, 193, 206, 208–10, 220, 220, 221, 222, 233, 236, 244, 308, 310–13, 320, 322, 328, 349, 353, 391, 420, 424, 434, 435, 437, 450–52, 464, 503, 506, 509, 511, 512, 514, 515, 521–32, 532, 540, 543, 575 S-80 tractors, 35 Sadykov, Fagim B., 124–26 Sagdeyev, Roald, xxii, 253, 282, 296, 430 St.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

He served as director of policy planning at the Department of State, a senior staff 11-7561-4 ch11.qxd 9/16/08 4:21 PM Page 246 246 joshua eisenman member of the National Security Council, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, and head of the political science department at the RAND Corporation. 37. Ibid. 38. Interview between the author and Phillip Idro, former Ugandan ambassador to China, in Johannesburg, South Africa (11 September 2007). 39. Shambaugh, “China’s ‘Quiet Diplomacy,’” 45. Parentheses in original text. 40. In 2006, a Japanese diplomat in Shanghai committed suicide after he was black-mailed by Chinese intelligence about an affair he had with an operative working at a karaoke bar.


pages: 872 words: 135,196

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security by Deborah D. Avant

barriers to entry, continuation of politics by other means, corporate social responsibility, failed state, Global Witness, hiring and firing, independent contractor, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, operational security, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, The Nature of the Firm, trade route, transaction costs

There have been no complaints from the Army about the quality of staff MPRI has provided. As is often the case, however, the cost of garnering the exact same service from the private sector was higher.184 Indeed, from the start, the privatization of ROTC was expected to cost more than the alternative of using active duty personnel. The RAND Corporation estimates suggested that each year it cost about $10,000 more per instructor for 181 182 183 184 http://www.mpri.com/subchannels/nat_ROTC.html. The majority of positions that have been contracted out are assistant professors of military science. Trainers and logistics positions have also been outsourced, but not to such a degree, and administrative positions have been outsourced the least.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

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

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

Glassner, Barry, The Culture of Fear, Basic Books, New York, 1999. Goklany, Indur M., The Improving State of the World, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2007. Herman, Arthur, The Idea of Decline in Western History, Free Press, New York, 1997. Jenkins, Brian Michael, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2006. Keeley, Lawrence H., War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996. Kida, Thomas, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The Six Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2006. Lichter, S.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Bell, Daniel. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1946. Bennett, Bruce W. “Preparing North Korean Elites for Unification.” Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. Berger, Mark. The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bestor, Theodore C. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

During the late 1940s, some progress was made in tackling this broader category of problems when John Nash, a Princeton mathematician, introduced a general method for solving non-zero-sum games, but much remained unclear. Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher were two mathematicians working at the RAND Corporation, which the Pentagon had founded in the aftermath of World War II to engage in scientific research “for the public welfare and security of the United States of America.” Much of the work undertaken at RAND had military implications, but it was also an important center of operations research and other applications of mathematics.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The president said that energy was a moral issue and that the nation needed to husband American and world resources. His new revelation was not accompanied by specific policy preferences. Carter left the details to James R. Schlesinger. Schlesinger, who had a PhD in economics from Harvard, was director of strategic studies at the Rand Corporation when he joined President Nixon’s Bureau of the Budget. The president made him head of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, director of the CIA in 1973, and finally Secretary of Defense. He opposed Kissinger and détente, and was not shy about making his views known, and President Ford fired him in November 1975.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

PS (Parti Socialiste), 8.1, 8.2 PSDI (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano), 6.1, 6.2, 8.1 PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifie) PVDA (Partij van de Arbeid), 6.1, 8.1 PVDV (Partij van de Vrijheid) PVV/PLP (Partij van de Vrijheid en Vooruitgang/Parti de la Liberté et Progrès) Quay, J.E. Queuille, H., 6.1, 6.2 Quigley, C., 2.1, 4.1 Radford, Admiral A.W. Radical Party (Fr.), 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 8.1 Radkau, J. Ralston Purina Ramadier, P. RAND Corporation Rank, J.A. Rank Organization Rathenau, W., 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1 Reagan, R. Rebattet, F.X. Redressement Français Réformateurs Renault Republican Party, 4.1, 6.1, 7.1 Républicains Independents (RI), 8.1, 8.2 Republic Steel, 4.1, 4.2 Retinger, J., 5.1, 7.1 Reusch, P. Reuther, Victor Reuther, Walter, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2 Reynaud, P.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Unofficially he is the Pentagon’s chief futurist, the man responsible for looking over the horizon and assessing threats to U.S. national security long before others even know they exist. Marshall has held this position since 1973, through eight presidential administrations. His involvement in national security strategy goes back even further, to 1949, when he joined the RAND Corporation, the original think tank. The list of his former associates and protégés includes Herman Kahn, James Schlesinger, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and other giants of national security policy over eight decades. Only the late Paul Nitze is comparable to Marshall in terms of the depth and breadth of his influence on strategic affairs in the period since World War II.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Built on a platform that is controlled, the protocols of the Internet have erected a free space of innovation. These private networks have created an open resource that any can draw upon and that many have. Understanding how, and in what sense, is the aim of this chapter. PAUL BARAN was a researcher at the Rand Corporation from 1959 to 1968. His project in the early 1960s was communications reliability. The fear slowly dawning upon the leaders of the world's largest nuclear arsenal was that the communications system controlling that arsenal was vulnerable to the smallest of attacks. An accident, or a single nuclear explosion, could disable the ability of the commander in chief to command.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Groves and Ledyard (1977, 1980). 5. Bathurst (1999). 6. Buchanan and Tulloch (1962), Downs (1957), Buchanan and Tollison (1972, 1984). 7. See the discussion in Zakaria (2003). 8. Langford (1996), Kennedy (1956). 9. The Prisoner's Dilemma was one of the problems devised in early exploration of game theory at the Rand Corporation after World War II. Supposedly devised by Merrill Glood and Melvin Dresher, the problem was posed in story form by Albert Tucker to explain his research to Stanford psychologists. 10. Marwell and Ames (1981). 11. The "folk theorem" of game theory (see, for example, Fudenberg and Tirole [1991], chapter 5), so called because its attribution is unclear, claims that all such strategies are Nash equilibrium in an indefinitely repeated game.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

See also game theory politics, 20, 269, 319 Ponzi finance, 312–15 portfolio insurance, 150–51, 227–28, 229–31, 236–39 Portfolio Selection, 55 portfolio theory, xiv, 48–52, 55–59, 65, 85, 104, 137, 169 power laws, 133, 134 Prais, Sig, 64, 65 Predictability of Stock Prices (Granger), 192–93 Prediction Company, 304 The Predictors (Bass), 304 price-to-book ratio, 208–9, 224 price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, 204, 206, 257, 260 Princeton University, 50 Princeton-Newport Partners, 218–19, 220, 242 Principles of Corporate Finance (Brealey and Myers), 355n. 38 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 30, 33, 189, 301 probability, 7–8, 13–15, 50–51, 62, 135, 177 “Proof that Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly” (Samuelson), 73, 144 prospect theory, 184, 186, 191, 291, 298 “Prudent Man” rule, 137 psychology, 176–78, 183–88, 201, 232–33, 266, 293–95. See also behavioral finance Purchasing Agents Association, 24 Putnam Investors, 112 Quantitative Finance, 305 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 63 Rand, Ayn, 91, 258 RAND Corporation, 55, 59, 86 A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Malkiel), 129–30 random walk hypothesis and the business cycle, 26–28 and computing, 99–101 and Cowles, 35–39 and Fama, 96–97 and ideological debate, 29–35 and Malkiel, 129–30 and market uncertainty, 13 modeling, 28–29 and options, 146 and the public consciousness, 99 and Samuelson, 60–66, 67–70, 70–74 and social value of markets, 39–44 Rappaport, Alfred, 164, 271, 280 rational market hypothesis, xiii–xv, 35, 82–83, 107, 179–80, 197, 251, 287–88.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

But in China, India, and Japan—countries known for their competitive educational environments—solid majorities of parents say parents put too much pressure on their kids. And of course, Asian students do score higher on certain international exams than Americans. The United States placed 24th out of 29 OECD countries on a global mathematics literacy test in 2003, far below Japan and China. Could this be linked to the fact that, as the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution have found, the typical American student spends less than an hour a day on homework? Maybe we should spare the rod and spoil the teachers—and just make kids sit down and do their homework. Late-Breaking Gays In August 2004, Governor James McGreevey of New Jersey stood before local reporters, the national press corps, and 300 million television viewers to announce that he would be resigning because he had had an affair with a man that had left him vulnerable to “false allegations and threats of disclosure.”


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

“Probably ten thousand of the best developers”: Chris Dixon, phone interview with Michael J. Casey, June 25, 2014. In their 2006 book: Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Portfolio, 2006). as per a schema on network structure: Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communication,” The Rand Corporation, August 1964, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf. In June 2013, the California Division of Financial Institutions: Jon Matonis, “Bitcoin Foundation Receives Cease and Desist Order from California,” Forbes, June 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/06/23/bitcoin-foundation-receives-cease-and-desist-order-from-california/.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The ARPA planners adopted a particular way of sending chunks of computer information over a network, a scheme known as packet-switching. IP Packet-switching is yet another case of a technology invented for one purpose evolving into purposes beyond the intentions of the inventors. It started in the 1950s, when the RAND Corporation performed top-secret studies on thermonuclear war scenarios. 26-04-2012 21:43 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 11 de 43 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html They focused on the survivability of the communications system that made command and control possible on local and national levels.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

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

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

built to withstand buried IEDs: Robert Haddick, “This Week at War: Why Don’t Stryker Brigades Work in Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy, November 6, 2009, foreignpolicy.com/2009/11/06/this-week-at-war-why-dont-stryker-brigades-work-in-afghanistan/. make combat vehicles safer: Terrence K. Kelly, et al., “The U.S. Combat and Tactical Wheeled Vehicle Fleets,” Rand Corporation, National Defense Research Institute, rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1093.pdf. half of boomers agreed: Pew Research Group, “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election: Section 8,” November 3, 2011, people-press.org/2011/11/03/section-8-domestic-and-foreign-policy-views./ misunderstood by the American public: Pew Research Group, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era,” Pew Social Trends, October 5, 2011, pewsocialtrends.org/2011/10/05/war-and-sacrifice-in-the-post-911-era/.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

Still, ten years after the national Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” the average median income of a black family ($9,252) is about 60 percent that of the average white family ($15,537). A more recent Rand Corporation study said it was 75 percent. Teenage black unemployment is almost three times greater than for whites—double the gap that existed in the mid-1950’s. Nationally, over 50 percent of all black births were illegitimate in 1976; one of every three black youths is supported by welfare. Public schools are more segregated, and the education levels achieved by blacks—central to competing for the growing number of white-collar jobs—is far behind that of white Americans.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

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

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

The Department of Defense has their own version of the Bilderberg Conference called The Highlands Forum, and it aims to provide the Pentagon with a network of social media and big business connections that can help to further their spying efforts and provide them with a talent pool to draw from. Representatives from a variety of companies are a part of this forum, including private spy agencies like Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and RAND Corporation, as well as tech giants like AT&T, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, eBay, PayPal, General Electric, British Broadcasting Corporation, and even Disney, to name a few. They form small workshops where they discuss how the companies can integrate their services with the large government spy agencies and the military, for a price, of course.


Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s harder than you think. I can’t prove that any of these techniques generates random bits. These techniques produce a sequence of bits that cannot be easily reproduced. For some details, see [1375,1376,511]. RAND Tables Back in 1955, when computers were still new, the Rand Corporation published a book that contained a million random digits [1289]. Their method is described in the book: The random digits in the book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse.

Rabin, “Fingerprinting by Random Polynomials,” Technical Report TR–15–81, Center for Research in Computing Technology, Harvard University, 1981. 1288. T. Rabin and M. Ben–Or, “Verifiable Secret Sharing and Multiparty Protocols with Honest Majority,” Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, 1989, pp. 73–85. 1289. RAND Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, Glencoe, IL: Free Press Publishers, 1955. 1290. T.R.N. Rao, “Cryposystems Using Algebraic Codes,” International Conference on Computer Systems and Signal Processing, Bangalore, India, Dec 1984. 1291. T.R.N. Rao, “On Struit–Tilburg Cryptanalysis of Rao–Nam Scheme,” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO ’87 Proceedings, Springer–Verlag, 1988, pp. 458–460. 1292.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Once again, it was war, or rather the possibility of war, that brought it into being. After the launching of Sputnik in 1957, the Defense Department formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to organize and coordinate science and technology projects with military applications. In 1962 Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation was asked to propose means whereby command and control could be maintained after a nuclear strike. Communications networks had always been either centralized, with all communication through a central hub, or decentralized, with a number of hubs, with subnetworks. Telegraph and telephone networks were structured this way, with switchboards serving as the hubs.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

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

Finseth, The Craft of Text Editing (Berlin, DE: Springer-Verlag, 1991; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). E-book, chap. 4, http://www.mit.edu/~yandros/doc/craft-text-editing/. 57. R. Stockton Gaines, quoted in Willis H. Ware, RAND and the Information Revolution: A History in Essays and Vignettes (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008), 122. 58. Edgar T. Irons and Frans M. Djorup, “A CRT Editing System,” Communications of the ACM 15, no. 1 (January 1972): 17. 59. Weiner, interview with the author. 60. Unless otherwise noted, details of what likely constituted a typical writing session with the Yale Editor on the PDP-10 in this paragraph and those that follow have been reconstructed from various sources in the John Hersey Papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.


pages: 537 words: 149,628

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

q=node/135. 257 the lobster made a final sprint: Joseph Ayers, “Biomimetic Underwater Robot Program,” Northeastern Marine Science Center, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.neurotechnology.neu.edu/. 258 suppressed HK 416 rifles: “HK416 A5,” Heckler and Koch, accessed August 17, 2014, http://www.heckler-koch.com/en/products/military/assault-rifles/hk416-a5/hk416-a5-11/overview.html. 258 swim to shore without oxygen tanks: “110 Predictions for the Next 110 Years,” Popular Mechanics, December 10, 2012, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/news/110-predictions-for-the-next-110-years. 259 the Tallyho had originally been: “Spaceships: Virgin Galactic’s Vehicles,” Virgin Galactic, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.virgingalactic.com/overview/spaceships; fictional spaceship. 260 Harry Winston in London’s Mayfair: “Harry Winston,” Bond Street Association, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.bondstreet.co.uk/shop/harry-winston/. 260 the image had stuck with Sir Aeric: Thom Patterson, “Overheard on CNN: New Shuttle Needs Space Plane ‘Coolness,’ ” CNN.com, June 8, 2012, accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/08/us/space-shuttle-overheard-on-cnn/index.html?hpt=hp_c2. 261 a love that would never come: Christopher Paul et al., “Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies,” RAND Corporation, 2013, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z2.html. 261 civilian-style Great Wall pickups: “Wingle 5,” Great Wall Motors, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.gwm-global.com/wingle5.html. 265 the two metallic hands: Francie Diep, “A Mind-Controlled Robotic Hand with a Sense of Touch,” Popular Science, February 5, 2014, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.popsci.com/article/science/mind-controlled-robotic-hand-sense-touch. 266 “lenses of the wrong prescription”: Emily Gold Boutilier, “Thinking the World into Motion,” Brown Alumni Magazine, January 2005, accessed August 23, 2014, http://archive.today/hf0P9. 266 “William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer”: Ed Cumming, “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow,” Guardian, July 27, 2014, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/28/william-gibson-neuromancer-cyberpunk-books.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

The stockbroker seemed to suggest that Markowitz think about the portfolio selection problem in the context of linear optimization, and Marschak later agreed to his doing just that.27 Markowitz was the man for the job; he knew the linear optimization methods, having studied with George Dantzig at the RAND Corporation.28 Philosophically, Markowitz realized that the theory of asset pricing was incomplete without a corresponding theory of risk. Markowitz reasoned that one can indeed perform a calculation of dividends (in truth, proxies for discounted cash flows), but those future dividends themselves are uncertain.


pages: 500 words: 146,240

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

In 1973, I purposefully spent two years convincing Harvard to let me have my own special field of endeavor called “Strategy and Applied Game Theory,” in which I applied computer simulation to relevant social problems, like organizational decision-making and nuclear-war prevention. During the summer of 1975, I got a job at a Santa Monica think tank, Software Development Corporation, that was the computer spin-off of the RAND Corporation. A colleague returned from lunch one day and said he was at a retail store where you could rent KSR-33 teletype terminals for only $10 an hour. I said, “That’s great! This is the birth of home computing. I am going to make games that people can play at home on these computers.” My colleague, who had been at Dick Heiser’s The Computer Store, which turned out to be the world’s first computer retail store, then told me that another company called Intel had introduced the first CPU chip.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

At the same time, America avoided the mistake of turning higher education into a nationalized industry, allowing public and private universities to flourish side by side and encouraging the creation of new sorts of institutions. Universities were the suns in a constellation of knowledge-related organizations that included think tanks such as the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles, and national institutes such as the National Institutes of Health. America also awarded research grants on the basis of competitive bids rather than bureaucratic influence. The United States led the rest of the world in its investment in “big science.” The man who did more than anybody else to convert the political establishment to the idea that science was a vital economic input rather than an expensive luxury was Vannevar Bush.


pages: 488 words: 145,950

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner

American ideology, Anthropocene, Charles Lindbergh, fear of failure, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mass immigration, move 37, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

The building of the base, moreover, was hastened by a new pact signed in 1951 between the United States and Denmark that replaced the 1941 treaty between the two countries. The new treaty allowed the United States generous leeway to establish and enlarge its defense installations. 2. Albert Wohlstetter, “Economic and Strategic Considerations in Air Base Location,” Rand Corporation, 1951. Some estimates put the actual cost of building Thule significantly higher. 3. “The Big Picture: Operation Blue Jay,” twenty-seven-minute video, Department of Defense, National Archives and Records Administration, ARC Identifier 2569497, Department of Defense. See also “Birth of a Base,” p. 132.


Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

It can either be run autonomously or by requiring some human intervention, depending on the type and model of governance used in the decentralized application running on blockchain. The following diagram shows the different types of systems that currently exist: central, decentralized, and distributed. This concept was first published by Paul Baran in On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (Rand Corporation, 1964): Different types of networks/systems Centralized systems are conventional (client-server) IT systems in which there is a single authority that controls the system, and who is solely in charge of all operations on the system. All users of a centralized system are dependent on a single source of service.


pages: 386

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

Trebach AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Gordon Tullock GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY Richard E. Wagner GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY June E. O'Neill Sir Alan A. Walters BARUCH COLLEGE AIG TRADING CORPORATION Charles E. Phelps Walter E. Williams UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY Paul Craig Roberts Charles Wolf INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY RAND CORPORATION THE INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE 100 Swan Way, Oakland, California 94621-1428, U.S.A. Telephone: 510-632-1366 • Facsimile: 510-568-6040 Email: info@independent.org • Website: www.independent.org Good Money BIRMINGHAM BUTTON MAKERS, THE ROYAL MINT, THE BEGINNINGS AND OF MODERN COINAGE, Private Enterprise and Popular Coinage George Selgin MI.···,.·.··.·· Ludwig von Mises Institute ~ Auburn, Alabama THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS ANN ARBOR Copyright © by The Independent Institute 2008 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid-free paper 2011 2010 2009 2008 43 2 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any Ineans, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Anderson included an excerpt from Rand in Martin Anderson and Barbara Honegger, eds., The Military Draft: Selected Readings on Conscription (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1982). For more on the Gates Commission, see Bernard D. Rostker, I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2006). 65. The Austrians remained a tiny minority within the economics profession but established durable clusters at George Mason University, Auburn University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Karen Iversen Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).


pages: 492 words: 153,565

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

It also means, though, that if someone were to use a weapon like Stuxnet against the United States, the US government would consider it an armed attack, something Lotrionte says concerns her.59 There have been conflicting reactions to some of the Tallinn Manual’s conclusions. Martin Libicki, an expert on cyberwarfare with the RAND corporation, questions the wisdom of allowing cyber conflicts to be resolved with kinetic attacks. He wonders if it wouldn’t be wiser to apply “Las Vegas rules” to cyberwarfare so that what happens in cyberspace stays in cyberspace. “Your escalation potential, if you go to the kinetic realm than if you stay in the cyber realm, is much greater,” he says.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

The Underwater Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Submarines and the Risk of Nuclear War. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 399. National Security Archive. Boberg, J. (2005). “Freshwater Availability,” in J. Boberg (ed.), How Demographic Changes and Water Management Policies Affect Freshwater Resources (pp. 15–28). RAND Corporation. Bolton, J., and Azar, A. (2018). Press Briefing on the National Biodefense Strategy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/press-briefing-national-biodefense-strategy-091818/. Bonnell, J. T., and Klebesadel, R. W. (1996). “A Brief History of the Discovery of Cosmic Gamma-Ray Bursts.”


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Now it’s always too close, part of the deal. “Were you ever in on that Cold War stuff, Pop?” “For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with . . . Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch.” “Maybe he didn’t work in the blowing–up-the-world department.” “I know, I’m a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Hale is an excellent place to start if you want to understand funding trends for SDI. 120.National Research Council, Lessons Learned from the Clementine Mission (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997), https://doi.org/10.17226/5815. 121.Hale, Statement of Robert F. Hale. This is the source of SDI funding figures for the years 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987. See also B. S. Lambeth and K. N. Lewis, The Strategic Defense Initiative in Soviet Planning and Policy (R-3550-AF) (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, January 1988), 101, https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R3550.html.Thisisthesourceofthe1988figure. See also CQ Almanac 1989: 101st Congress, 1st Session (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013). The 1989 CQ Almanac is the source of the four-point-one-billion-dollar figure for 1989. See also L.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Good unclassified technical intelligence also gives policymakers the ability to bring evidence to international debates more quickly because they don’t need to request declassification. Cortney Weinbaum, John V. Parachini, Richard S. Girven, Michael H. Decker, and Richard C. Baffa, “Perspectives and Opportunities in Intelligence for U.S. Leaders,” RAND Corporation, 2018. 74. Center for Strategic & International Studies, “CSIS Korea Chair Announces Research Partnership with National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA),” May 22, 2018, https://www.csis.org/news/csis-korea-chair-announces-research-partnership-national-geospatial-intelligence-agency-nga. 75.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Risk of deficiency in multiple concurrent micronutrients in children and adults in the United States. Nutrients 9(7):655. doi:10.3390/nu9070655 Bloch, M. 1931. Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Bloom, D.E. et al. 2003. The Demographic Dividend: A New Perspective on the Economic Consequences of Population Change. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 2006. 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston. https://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/ BLS. 2014. Agriculture: occupational employment and wages. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2014/article/agriculture-occupational-employment-and-wages.htm BLS. 2018.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The notion of a random number is full of difficulties. Can there be such thing as a particular random number; a certain random number? This number is arguably random: 10097325337652013586346735487680959091173929274945…♦ Then again, it is special. It begins a book published in 1955 with the title A Million Random Digits. The RAND Corporation generated the digits by means of what it described as an electronic roulette wheel: a pulse generator, emitting 100,000 pulses per second, gated through a five-place binary counter, then passed through a binary-to-decimal converter, fed into an IBM punch, and printed by an IBM model 856 Cardatype.♦ The process took years.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Called Misleading by Senate Panel,” New York Times (16 July 1978), on how Kissinger and Colby “misled Congress about the extent of the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in the 1975 civil war in Angola, according to sources with first-hand knowledge”—to put it more bluntly, lied to Congress, the least significant but most discussed element of this sordid affair. 39. Cited by Clayton Fritchey, “Encore for Pax Americana,” Washington Post (25 March 1978). Fritchey is critical of the renewal of interventionist ideology. 40. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “The case for using force against the third world,” Washington Post (5 May 1978), citing a Rand Corporation study by Guy J. Pauker. See also C. Cooper et al., The American Experience with Pacification in Vietnam: an Overview of Pacification, NTIS, U.S. Department of Commerce, March 1972, a study of pacification commissioned by the Pentagon and undertaken by the Institute for Defense Analysis, a university-based consortium, which “derives doctrinal and operational lessons from the US experience with pacification in South Vietnam to guide US policy-makers in providing technical assistance and advice in the future to a friendly government facing an internal security problem.”


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

The defense intellectuals in the Pentagon gamed out a series of moves and countermoves that demonstrated the futility of Hanoi's continued defiance of the vastly superior might of the United States. A bombing campaign known as Rolling Thunder got under way in March 1965. But the North Vietnamese leaders were unfamiliar with game theory as taught at Harvard and promoted by RAND Corporation. They failed to behave in a "logical" manner and ignored the signals from Washington. Instead of backing down, they matched the United States escalation for escalation. According to Clark Clifford, McNamara's successor as secretary of defense, the architects of the Vietnam War were "deeply influenced by the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis."


pages: 628 words: 170,668

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

“I realized that in the Marine Corps, without a college education I was not going to go very far,” Cunningham told nasa historian Ron Stone. “I didn’t expect them to send me to test pilot school; I didn’t have the qualifications they were looking for at the time.” One of the jobs Cunningham held to pay his way through college was at the rand Corporation, a nonprofit think tank researching innovative solutions for U.S. military challenges. He worked on possible defenses against submarine-launched ballistic missiles and studied the Earth’s magnetosphere. His thesis project at ucla was an experiment carried on the first orbiting geophysical observatory.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

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

Even more concrete, in 1984 the CIA commissioned a special national intelligence estimate (SNIE) on whether American intelligence had been missing the point. The paper was drafted by National Intelligence Council chairman Fritz W. Ermarth, a Russian specialist who had been brought back to the CIA from the RAND Corporation, and was a veteran of the National Security Council staff. The paper, SNIE 11-10-84/JX, titled “Implications of Recent Soviet Military Political Activities,” held that each of the unusual Russian actions (for example, the bomber alert) could have had an innocent explanation, short of Moscow's succumbing to a war scare.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Pew Research Center, 8 June 2015, p. 3. 27. Crabtree, Steve. “Gallup Brain: Strom Thurmond and the 1948 Election.” Gallup, 17 Dec. 2002, www.gallup.com/poll/7444/gallup-brain-strom-thurmond-1948-election.aspx; National Defense Research Institute. “Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment.” Rand Corporation, 1993, p. 191 et seq. 28. Public Law 103-160, subtitle G, §654(a).15 (1993). 29. Goldwater, Barry M. “Ban on Gays Is Senseless Attempt to Stall the Inevitable.” Carnegie Mellon University, www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/bulgarians/barry-goldwater.html (selections from Goldwater’s commentary in the New York Times and the Washington Post); “Goldwater Backs Gay Troops.”


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

What do you do, then, with that predictive information? What kind of intervention for a thousand people would help the seven that will actually go on to be victims? “By leveraging advanced analytics, police departments may be able to more effectively identify future crime targets for preemptive intervention,” noted a 2016 RAND Corporation report on predictive policing in Chicago.83 However, “improvements in the accuracy of predictions alone may not result in a reduction in crime . . . perhaps more importantly, law enforcement needs better information about what to do with the predictions” (emphasis mine).84 Predictions are not an end in themselves.


pages: 477 words: 165,458

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, card file, centre right, data acquisition, Eratosthenes, Gene Kranz, invention of gunpowder, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

If one were, however, to condemn the computer for this nightmare of a future, condemn it today for its automation, its new methods in banking, condemn its use by the Bar Association and the Stock Exchange and Boeing and the Bureau of Mines, the Cancer Society for research, condemn Control Data Corporation and General Dynamics, General Motors and General Electric, condemn computer analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, condemn its employment in the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense, condemn Douglas Aircraft and Dow Chemical, du Pont and the election forecasts, condemn the FAA and freight trains shunted by program in and out of freight yards, condemn General Precision and Goodrich, Goodyear and Charles Goren, Hoffman Electronics and Hughes Aircraft, IBM 704 and IBM 1401, condemn the Industrial Advertising Research Institute and the Internal Revenue, International Air Transport and Johnson’s Wax, Kresge Eye Institute and Lincoln Laboratory, the Public Library and Lockheed Aircraft, McGraw Hill and Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, Minneapolis Honeywell, Monsanto, NATO and the National Cash Register—the names go by like sounds in a coffee-house poem—the U.S. Navy and the National Bureau of Standards, Ohio State, Patent Office, Philco, Phillips Petroleum, Radcliffe, the Rand Corporation, Rockefeller Institute and the Sara Lee Bakeries, the Signal Corps and Social Security, Southern Methodist and Sun Oil, TWA and UNESCO, Union Carbide, USC, the Upjohn Company, Wall Street, Westinghouse—does one condemn them for using ADAM and BINAC and BRAINIAC, CALCULO and CLASS, ENIAC, ERMA, ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, LARC and MANIAC?


pages: 735 words: 165,375

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

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

“The Mask Slackers of 1918.” The New York Times, August 3, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/mask-protests-1918.html. Haviland, Amelia, Roland McDevitt, M. Susan Marquis, Neeraj Sood, and Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin. “Consumer-Directed Plans Could Cut Health Costs Sharply, but Also Discourage Preventive Care.” RAND Corporation, June 28, 2012. www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9672.html. Hawks, Howard, dir. Red River. Monterey Productions, 1948. He, Xi, Eric H. Y. Lau, Peng Wu, Xilong Deng, Jian Wang, Xinxin Hao, Yiu Chung Lau, et al. “Temporal Dynamics in Viral Shedding and Transmissibility of COVID-19.” Nature Medicine 26, no. 5 (May 2020): 672–75. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0869-5.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Gates’ worry is not frivolous: CRISPR can be used easily without expensive lab equipment or specialized training. CRISPR-based kits available from outfits like the Odin, launched by biohacker Josiah Zayner, sell for less than $500 in some cases. Pathogen-specific kits are “offered up like so many choices at a grocery store,” according to a RAND Corporation report.55 These are legitimate concerns, but have been overshadowed by recent events. As the world saw in 2020, we don’t need DNA-designing despots or basement biohackers playing with CRISPR to cause a pandemic—nature is quite capable on her own. I. Most people pronounced the company “gnome” but Church insisted on calling it “know-me.”


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

And, if everything goes according to the evolving plans, the combination of scheduled events could well turn into the broadest and most spectacular antiwar protest in American history.” Everything was going better than planned. As Weathermen tore up Chicago, the New York Times reported on a letter from six of the top Vietnam experts from the Rand Corporation, the top defense think tank. America should withdraw, they said, unilaterally and immediately—not “conditioned upon agreement or performance by Hanoi or Saigon.” They went on, “Short of destroying the entire country and its people, we cannot eliminate the enemy force in Vietnam by military means.”

The announcement of his second marriage in 1970 (to, Nixon noted, a millionaire’s daughter) added more ornaments to his résumé: “The bridegroom was graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Society of Fellows and where he received a doctorate in economics. He served as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps and worked as a strategic analyst with the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.” In between, the Times mentioned his argument in a 1969 anthology of essays on Vietnam that the war was so unmitigatedly horrifying because “to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie.” Then, on October 9, 1969, the Times ran “Six Rand Experts Support Pullout; Back Unilateral Steps Within One Year in Vietnam”; he was one of the experts—and the lead signatory of a November 1970 letter to the editor of the Times from MIT faculty accusing Nixon of “vastly expanding this immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional war…and the moral degradation of our country.”


The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth

Abraham Wald, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, G4S, Georg Cantor, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, NP-complete, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, sorting algorithm, Turing machine, Y2K

Kendall and B. Babington-Smith to produce a table of 100,000 random digits. The Ferranti Mark I computer, first installed in 1951, had a built-in instruction that put 20 random bits into the accumulator using a resistance noise generator; this feature had been recommended by A. M. Turing. In 1955, the RAND Corporation published a widely used table of a million random digits obtained with the help of another special device. A famous random-number machine called ERNIE has been used for many years to pick the winning numbers in the British Premium Savings Bonds lottery. [See the articles by Kendall and Babington-Smith in J.

Radix point, 10, 185, 195, 204, 209, 214, 319. Raimi, Ralph Alexis, 257, 262. Raleigh, Walter, 199. Rail, Louis Baker, 240, 242. Ramage, John Gerow, 135. Ramanujan Iyengar, Srinivasa (t/rfssflay/rsn) ijm-DrrsgyeDm ggajiEJsnTrr), 662. Ramaswami, Vammi (guldlSI rrmD&mB), 383. Ramshaw, Lyle Harold, 164, 181. ran.array, 186-188, 193. RAND Corporation, 3. Randell, Brian, 202, 225. Random bits, 12, 30-32, 35-36, 38, 48, 119-120, 170-176. Random combinations, 142-148. Random directions, 135-136. Random fractions, 10, see Uniform deviates. Random functions, 4-9, 385. Random integers, among all positive integers, 257, 264, 342, 354. in a bounded set, 119-121, 138, 185-186.


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Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

Michael Schratt, who writes books and travels around the country giving lectures about government cover-ups at Area 51, says that the secret facility is “directly connected to Edwards [Air Force Base] North Base Complex and Air Force Plant 42 at Palmdale by an underground tube-shuttle tunnel system developed by the Rand Corporation and others [circa] 1960.” Schratt also says that Area 51 is “very likely connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio” this same way. “The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill that can dig three miles of tunnel a day,” Schratt says. “These tunnels also connect, by underground train, to other military facilities where leaders of government will go and live after a nuclear event” such as World War III.


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

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

Gorbachev would not criticize Yeltsin during the most difficult months of the coming economic reform. Yeltsin would allow Gorbachev to create and run his own foundation, which was supposed to support research on social, political, and economic matters but stay out of politics per se. For days before the meeting, Gorbachev had fantasized about a “RAND Corporation” of his own, funded by Western foundations, which would cooperate with think tanks in the West. He invited Cherniaev and his other aides and allies, including Yakovlev, to work for the new foundation. They had their doubts, but Yakovlev helped Gorbachev negotiate a deal with Yeltsin according to which the latter turned over to the future foundation a complex of buildings administered before the coup by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and used as training grounds for foreign communist cadres.


Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

Bill Anders Intense, energetic, dedicated, no drink, no smoke, no nonsense—used to be inflexible and a bit immature until he became executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council in Washington, a job that would teach anyone humility and flexibility. Bill is now one of the Atomic Energy commissioners. Walt Cunningham Outspoken, blunt, small chip on shoulder; strange mixture of Marine fighter pilot and Rand Corporation research scientist; a complex man alternating between genuine warmth and outright hostility. * * * I have drawn the line at the living, and exclude from the list of thirty Grissom, White, Chaffee (Apollo launch pad fire, Cape Kennedy, January 27, 1967); and Freeman, See, Bassett, and Williams (T-38 accidents).


pages: 593 words: 189,857

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

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

“The very substantial improvements in risk management since the last crisis did not capture some risks that inevitably look more obvious in retrospect than they did left of the boom,” I said. Left of the boom was a phrase I had picked up from analysts studying improvised explosive devices at the RAND Corporation think tank, where I served on the advisory board. The phrase referred to the time before an IED explodes. In October 2007, I thought we had survived a major financial explosion. In fact, we were still left of the boom. A WEEK later, the investment bank Merrill Lynch announced $7.9 billion in mortgage-related losses, the largest write-down in Wall Street history.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

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

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

A certain number of American specialists on China suggest that the document is fake, because of the positive image it lends to Zhao Ziyang, but the broad thrust of the leadership conversations at this critical time have been ratified by many other documents and testimonies. 14. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2007. 15. Michael D. Swaine, The Military & Political Succession in China: Leadership, Institutions, Beliefs, Santa Monica CA, Rand Corporation, 1992. According to Nicholas Eftimiades (Chinese Intelligence Operations, Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994), Deng Xiaoping did succeed in establishing a liaison with the regional centres of PLA2, military intelligence. 16. Transcript available at http://folk.ntnu.no/tronda/kk-f/fra081100/0444.html. 17.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Jackson, Robert, Quasi—States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the 77Jird W/orld, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990. 396 THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Lefi‘ Review, 146, 1984, pp. 53-92. Jenkins, Brian, New Modes of Conflict, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1983. Jenks, Leland H., 77Je Migration of Britis/7 Capital to 1875, New York and London: Knopf 1938. Jeremy, David J., “Damming the Flood: British Government Efforts to Check the Outflow of Technicians and Machinery, 1780-1843,” Business History Review, 51, 1, 1977, pp. 1-34. Jessop, Bob, “Regulation Theories in Retrospect and Prospect,” Economy and Society, 19, 2, 1990, pp. 153-216.


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The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

Daniel Coates, “Annual Threat Assessment,” § Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2019), https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2019-01-29-ATA-Opening-Statement_Final.pdf. 18Alastair Iain Johnston, “Shaky Foundations: The ‘Intellectual Architecture’ of Trump’s China Policy,” Survival 61, no. 2 (2019): 189–202; Jude Blanchette, “The Devil Is in the Footnotes: On Reading Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon” (La Jolla, CA: UC San Diego 21st Century China Program, 2018), https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/The-Hundred-Year-Marathon.pdf. 19Jonathan Ward, China’s Vision of Victory (Washington, DC: Atlas Publishing and Media Company, 2019); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World (New York: Penguin, 2012). 20Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Andrew Scobell et al., China’s Grand Strategy Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition (Arlington, VA: RAND Corporation, 2020). 21See Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Ashley J.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

In 2005 ‘Deep Throat’ finally identified himself as the former Associate Director (number two) of the FBI, Mark Felt, the most senior whistleblower in the history of the US intelligence community.78† A memorial plaque above an underground garage in Rosslyn, Virginia, marks the location where Felt briefed Woodward.‡ Apart from Felt, the most celebrated American whistleblower of the Cold War era was Daniel Ellsberg, a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation who had also worked at the Pentagon and White House. In 1971 Ellsberg secretly gave The New York Times a copy of a top-secret 7, 000-page study of US decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968 which became known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’. Unlike Mark Felt, Ellsberg’s identity quickly became public knowledge.

., The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, vols. 2–6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922–37) Jones, Peter, ‘Antoine de Guiscard, “Abbé de la Bourlie”, “Marquis de Guiscard ”’, British Library Journal, vol.8 (1982), no. 1 Jones, Peter, and Keith Sidwell (eds.), The World of Rome: An Introduction to Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Jones, Seth G., and Martin C. Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida, (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2008) Jordan, Don, and Michael Walsh, The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History (London: Little, Brown, 2012) Josephus, Flavius, Antiquitates Judaicae; http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0037-0103__Flavius_Josephus__Antiquitates_Judaicae__GR.pdf.html Jourquin, Jacques, ‘Bibliothèques particulières de Napoléon’, in Jean Tulard (ed.), Dictionnaire Napoléon (Paris: Fayard, 1989) Jukes, Geoff, ‘The Soviets and “Ultra”’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 3 (1988), no. 2 Juurvee, Ivo, ‘Birth of Russian SIGINT during WWI on the Baltic Sea’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 32 (2017), no. 3 Kahn, David, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1967) —, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978) —, ‘Codebreaking in World Wars I and II: The Major Successes and Failures, Their Causes and Their Effects’, in Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds.), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984) —, ‘Pearl Harbor and the Inadequacy of Cryptanalysis’, Cryptologia, vol. 15 (1991) —, ‘The Intelligence Failure at Pearl Harbor’, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1991–92 —, ‘Roosevelt, MAGIC and ULTRA’, Cryptologia, vol. 14 (1992) —, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

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

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

David Clark, quoted in Paulina Borsook, ‘How Anarchy Works’, Wired, http://perma.cc/9XXM-PKKX 51. Mueller 2004, 74–75 52. the British scientist was Donald Davies; see Hafner et al. 2006, 67. For TCP/IP see the discussion in Mueller 2004, 5–7 53. this was certainly the case with Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation; see Hafner et al. 2006, 54–64 54. see Zittrain 2008, 31–33, and Wu 2010, 201–2. The cyberlaw expert Tim Wu is credited with coining the term; see Wu 2003. Listen to his discussion of it on ‘Wu on His Phrase “Net Neutrality”’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/net-neutrality-by-the-man-who-coined-the-phrase/, and see the introduction on his website at http://perma.cc/4Z5P-RP4C 55. dated 8 February 1996; John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, http://perma.cc/V8VS-XHZD 56. full detail in Mueller 2004 and Mueller 2012 57. a useful account of the history is given on Wikipedia: http://perma.cc/Q36Q-366E 58. see several contributions to Levmore et al., eds. 2010 and Sunstein 2009, 83 59.


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The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Available at unctadstat.unctad.org. 4 Charles T. Kelley, Jr., Mark Y. D. Wang, Gordon Bitko, Michael S. Chase, Aaron Kofner, Julia F. Lowell, James C. Mulvenon, David S. Ortiz, and Kevin L. Pollpeter, “High-Technology Manufacturing and US Competitiveness,” Technical Report prepared for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Rand Corporation, March 2004, p. 130. 5 National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 2004, Appendix, Table 6–5. Available at nsf.gov. 6 Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, “China and the Dynamics of International Accumulation: Causes and Consequences of Global Restructuring,” Historical Materialism 14: 3 (2006), p. 4. 7 Asian Development Bank, Emerging Asian Regionalism: A Partnership for Shared Prosperity, Manila: ADB, 2008, pp. 8, 16, 23. 8 Francisco H.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

Kindleberger. 7 Of course, many of the high-flying companies of 1929 were no longer in the index in 1955, so that anyone who held on to their 1929 share portfolio took far more than twenty-five years to get their money back, and most of the shares they held were worthless. 8 Barber notes that after Fisher came into great wealth when his filing invention was taken over by the Remington Rand Corporation, he was ‘eager to add to his portfolio of common stocks and placed himself in some exposed positions in order to do so. At this time, his confidence in the soundness of the American economy was complete’ (Barber 1997). 9 Barber observed that among the other reasons was the fact that ‘In the 1930s, his insistence on the urgency of “quick fix” solutions generated frictions between Fisher and other professional economists’ (ibid.). 10 Almost 90 percent of the over 1,200 citations of Fisher in academic journals from 1956 were references to his pre-Great Depression works (Feher 1999). 11 Strictly speaking, this was supposed to be anything in which one could invest, but practically the theory was applied as if the investments were restricted to shares. 12 Since diversification reduces risk, all investments along this edge must be portfolios rather than individual shares.


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Each group is a little different, but they all contain fine people that often run into one another at the scene of a big-old tire fire. Further Reading Let me be the first to say that I might not have written a single original idea in this chapter. If you would like to read more, and in the original English, please consider the following: Inside Bureaucracy by Anthony Downs, published by the RAND Corporation in 1967. It’s out of print, but you can usually find it on Amazon (where I have personally driven up the price by 300%; sorry). Do not confuse this with the 36-page paper published with the same title in 1964. The paper is also good, and you can download it from RAND for free, but it is a tiny fraction of the book.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Wilson, Woodrow “winner-take-all” society Wolfenson, James Woolcock, Michael workers working class; conversion into middle class; voting by World Bank; Worldwide Governance Indicators World Bank Institute World Values Survey World War I World War II; Japan’s defeat in Wrong, Michela Wu Zhao Xi Jinping Yamagata Aritomo Yang, Dali Yang, Hongxing Yanukovich, Viktor Yar’Adua, Umaru Musa Yemen Yrigoyen, Hipólito Yugoslavia Zaire Zakaria, Fareed Zambia Zanzibar Zenawi, Meles Zhao, Dingxin Zhou Enlai Zhu Yuangzhang Zimbabwe ALSO BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity The End of History and the Last Man About the Author Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. Fukuyama was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. He is the author of The Origins of Political Order, The End of History and the Last Man, Trust, and America at the Crossroads. He lives with his wife in California. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2014 by Francis Fukuyama All rights reserved First edition, 2014 eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use.


pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

They were at places like Caltech, UCLA, Stanford, Berkley, Utah, Michigan, and, of course, a bunch of East Coast places like MIT, Carnegie Tech, and a few others. He decided to take a few tens of millions of dollars and distribute it in small packages to about a dozen of these universities and a couple of research labs like Bolt Beranek and Newman, and the RAND Corporation. He said “I’m not going to micromanage you. I’m going to give you this money and you can depend on it for a few years to get you up and started and what I want you to do is to do research so that if Congress ever does come and ask us questions, we can point to how the money was being used. But more importantly, especially for the academic institutions, I want you to train a whole new cadre of people who are experts in this field.”


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

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

For example, the Washington Post deemed the report a “thorough, careful plan for putting the needed push of the Federal Government behind our scientific progress and yet keeping our science independent of Government control.” See Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling: ‘Science, the Endless Frontier,’” Washington Post, July 20, 1945, 8. 54. “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship” (May 2, 1946), 2, RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/special_memoranda/2006/SM11827part1.pdf. 55. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 231. 56. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 315. See National Security Agency, “Scientific and Technological Resources as Military Assets,” memorandum from General Eisenhower, April 30, 1946, https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/reports-research/FOLDER_065/41701309074063.pdf (emphasis in original). 57.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

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

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

Peking PEN club Peng Pai Penguin (publishers) penicillin Penn Central railway ‘Pentagon Papers’ People’s Liberation Army see Red Army (Chinese) perestroyka Perkins, Thomas Perle, Richard Persepolis Peter the Great Petőfi, Sandor petrochemicals industries Pflimlin, Pierre Philadelphia Philby, Kim Philipe, Gérard Philippines Phillips, Alban William Phillips Curve Phillips, Melanie Phnom Penh Phoenix, Arizona Piaf, Édith Picasso, Pablo Pieck, Walter pieds noirs Pill, contraceptive Pinay, Antoine Piñera, José Pinochet, Augusto ‘Pinochet solution’ Pinter, Harold Pipes, Richard Piscator, Erwin Pitsunda PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) Platts-Mills, John Playboy (magazine) Plaza Agreement (1985) Pleiku Pleven, René PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) Plojhar, Mgr Josef Plumb, Sir John plutonium Plyushch, Leonid Podolia Poindexter, John Poitiers Pol Pot Poland: agricultural collectivization anti-semitism anti-Soviet demonstrations aristocracy Catholic Church coal industry collapse of communism Communist Party communist takeover Convention of Targowice (1792) emigrants to Germany ethnic German population and France under Gierek under Gomułka inflation intelligentsia Jews in and Khrushchev’s relaxation attempts and Marshall Plan martial law (1981-2) ‘modernization’ oil money invested in peasantry relations with USSR relations with West Germany Second World War Solidarność (‘Solidarity’) Stalinization steel industry territorial losses trade unions UB (secret police) Ukrainians in universities Warsaw Uprising (1944) WRON (national security council) Polaris (missile) Poll Tax (Britain) Pollitt, Brian Pomerania Pompidou, Georges Ponomarev, Boris Ponzi schemes Poos, Jacques population growth collapse of Porsche, Ferdinand Port Said Port Talbot Port-au-Prince Portugal Potsdam Potsdam conference (1945) POUM (Spanish anarchist organization) Powell, Charles, Baron Poznan Pozsgay, Imre Prague: architecture Communists’ organized discontent Czernin Palace Kinsky Palace museum of security police revolution of 1989 Smichov Stalinization undamaged by war working class ‘Prague Spring’ Prats, Carlos Pravda (newspaper) Prebisch, Raúl Presley, Elvis Preuves (magazine) Primakov, Yevgeney Prisender, Edgar privatization of industry and services: Britain Chile West Germany prostitution Protestant churches: and economic development in Germany in Hungary missionaries in China Thirty Years War see also Calvinist Church; Lutheran Church Prussia PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) Punjab ‘pursuit of happiness’ Pusan Pushkin, Alexander ‘Pushtunistan’ Putin, Vladimir Quang Tri (US combat base) Queen Elizabeth, RMS Quemoy islands Quennell, Peter Raab, Julius radar Radio Urumchi Rákosi, Mátyás Rakowski, Mieczysław Rambouillet summit (1975) Ramsay, Douglas Rangel, Charles Rangoon Rapallo, Treaty of (1922) Rasputin, Valentin rationing: Britain East Germany France Ravenscraig steel works Reader’s Digest (magazine) Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Ronald: background and character and Ceauşescu and collapse of communism core beliefs defence policy economic policy election as President (1980); (1984) enemies of on failure of Johnson’s Great Society and Goldwater campaign Governor of California Iran-Contra affair marriages oratory skills and Poland popularity relationship with Margaret Thatcher retirement Savings and Loans crisis ‘The Speech’ (1980) Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) and universities visits Britain work regimen and leadership style Récsk Red Army (Chinese; ‘People’s Liberation Army’) Red Army (Soviet): atrocities committed by conquering of eastern and central Europe Second World War casualties Red Army Faction Red Brigades Redford, Robert Reece, Sir Gordon Rees-Mogg, William, Baron ‘Reg Q’ (American interest rate regulation) Regan, Donald Reich, Robert Reider, Jonathan Reinhardt, Max Remington Rand (corporation) Rémond, René Renault (automobile manufacturer) reparations, First World War reparations, Second World War: German Japanese Soviet demands Republican Party (United States) Rerum Novarum (papal enyclical) Reuter, Ernst Reuther, Walter revolutions of 1848 Rez, Adam Rhee, Syngman Rhineland Rhodesia Richter, Horst-Eberhard Richter, Svyatoslav Ridley, Nicholas, Baron Ridley of Liddesdale Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd Rimbaud, Arthur Robbins, Lionel, Baron Robespierre, Maximilien Robinson, Joan Rocard, Michel Rochet, Waldeck Rockefeller, Nelson Rodriguez, Carlos Roe.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

To speak of the Angeleno condition, its precipice, in the dystopian vernacular is not a critical stance; it is the party line (or more precisely, the oscillation between the utopian and the dystopian, back again, over again, in and out, one through the other, both occupying the same place and plot). The Tyrell Corporation and Rand Corporation, Reyner Banham and Darby Crash, Squeaky Fromme and Ryan Seacrest. Joan Didion's self-driving Google car and Gregory Ain's gated community project in Calabasas. Philip K. Dick's spec screenplay for the Farmville movie, and Rene Daalder and Rem Koolhaas's 1974 screenplay about computer-generated actors and digital films taking over Hollywood.


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

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

CIA researchers had been quick to recognize the consequences of falling prices of oil on the world market; but their settled opinion was that the USSR remained in a ‘healthy financial position’.42 Ambassador Hartman too judged that Gorbachëv’s early economic measures were achieving a degree of success.43 If this was the reality, it strengthened the case for America’s need to keep up its financial allocations for military research and development. But how reliable was the CIA’s analysis? Harry Rowen, a former president of the RAND Corporation and recent chairman of the National Intelligence Council, challenged the idea that the economy in the USSR was achieving any growth at all. He circulated a paper to interested officials – Shultz, Weinberger, McFarlane and Casey – and got it published in the National Interest.44 In April 1986 Rowen and four Soviet experts of like mind secured the opportunity through presidential aide Charles Fortier to brief Reagan and Shultz.


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The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Power at Sea, Vol. 2: The Breaking Storm, 1919–1945 (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2007). Rosen, William. The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century (New York: Viking, 2014). Rosenau, William. Special Operations Forces and Elusive Enemy Ground Targets: Lessons from Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War (Rand Corporation, 2001). Rothwell, Victor. War Aims in the Second World War: The War Aims of the Major Belligerents, 1939–45 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Rotundo, Louis C. Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989). Ruge, Friedrich.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

After Stalin’s death, in 1953, an armistice reset the border.44 A draw between the great powers in military terms, the war was a disaster for the Korean and Chinese peoples. American strategic bombing had proved itself in Japan under Shockley’s team of actuaries, and MacArthur began the war with a massive attack on North Korean cities and infrastructure. A RAND Corporation report describes the bombing campaign as “leisurely” because of the lack of enemy air defenses, and in less than two months American forces destroyed almost all their strategic targets. One crew was apparently so well armed that they chased a single enemy soldier on his motorcycle, dropping bombs until they hit him.45 U.S. air forces dropped 635,000 tons of explosives during the three years of the war, more than the total used in the World War II Pacific theater, including over 30,000 tons of napalm.46 An estimated 400,000 to one million Chinese soldiers died, and according to the head of the U.S.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

See also: I. Pichon et al., “Nonconscious Influences of Religion on Prosociality: A Priming Study,” Eur J Soc Psych 37 (2007): 1032; M. Bateson et al., “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in Real-World Setting,” Biol Lett 2 (2006): 412. 15. S. Jones, “Defeating Terrorist Groups,” RAND Corporation, CT-314 (testimony presented before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats and Capabilities), September 18, 2008; P. Shadbolt, “Karma Chameleons: What Happens When Buddhists Go to War,” CNN.com, April 22, 2013. 16. J. LaBouff et al., “Differences in Attitudes Toward Outgroups in Religious and Nonreligious Contexts in a Multinational Sample: A Situational Context Priming Study,” Int J for the Psych of Religion 22 (2011): 1; B.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Khalilzad was an old acquaintance of Hamid Karzai. They had run into each other in Pakistan and elsewhere over the years, and they stayed in touch. After the murder of Karzai’s father by the Taliban, Khalilzad had turned against the Taliban in the articles he published from his consulting office at the RAND Corporation in Washington. He urged Clinton to openly seek the movement’s overthrow. Among other things, Khalilzad feared the spread of Taliban ideology to Pakistan. “The prospect of a nuclear-armed Pakistan adopting the credo of the Taliban, while unlikely, is simply too risky to ignore,” he had written a year before joining the National Security Council.


Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

active measures, air freight, airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, clean water, computer age, Exxon Valdez, false flag, flag carrier, Live Aid, old-boy network, operational security, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent control, rolodex, superconnector, systems thinking, urban sprawl

The hostages, too, but in this case the hostages were computer-generated children, all girls in red-and-white striped dresses or jumpers-Ding couldn't decide which. It was clearly a psychological effect programmed into the system by whoever had set up the parameters for the program, called SWAT 6.3.2. Some California-based outfit had first produced this for Delta Force under a DOD contract overseen by RAND Corporation. It was expensive to use, mainly because of the electronic suit he wore. It was the same weight as the usual black mission suit - lead sheets sewn into the fabric had seen to that - and everything down to the gloves was filled with copper wires and sensors that told the computer - an old Cray YMP - exactly what his body was doing, and in turn projected a computer-generated image into the goggles he wore.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

., 1982); Hosking, History of the Soviet Union, pp. 432ff. 170. Apart from Kazokins, “Nationality in the Soviet Army,” passim, see the eye-opening details in Cockburn, Threat, pp. 74ff; E. Jones, “Minorities in the Soviet Armed Forces,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 3, no. 4 (1982), pp. 285–318; and the Rand Corporation studies S. Curran and D. Ponomoreff, Managing the Ethnic Factor in the Russian and Soviet Armed Forces: An Historical Overview (Santa Monica, Calif., 1982); and E. Brunner, Jr., Soviet Demographic Trends and the Ethnic Composition of Draft Age Males, 1980–1985 (Santa Monica, Calif., 1981). 171.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

., box 38, White House Central Files, Staff Member and Office Files: Martin Anderson, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. 13. Alan Greenspan, interview by the author, November 15, 2010. 14. Descriptions of scene taken from photograph of Cabinet Room, reproduced in Bernard Rostker, I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), 88. 15. Presidential Daily Diary Entry, September 28, 1971, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. 16. The three-page memo resulting from this meeting is in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Paul W. McCracken, “Handwritten Notes,” August 30, 1969, Friedman, Tonsor, Greenspan 8-30-1969, box 17, White House Central Files, Staff Member and Office Files: Paul W.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

But the tobacco industry now drew attention to evidence gathered by econometricians, biostatisticians, and other analysts that the net figure for health costs attributable to smoking-caused diseases was being much exaggerated by tobacco control advocates. The most highly regarded work on the true health-cost burden smokers were imposing on the rest of society was a 1991 study sponsored by the Rand Corporation and published by Harvard University Press—The Cost of Poor Health Habits by Willard G. Manning et al. The Manning study added up the higher lifetime medical costs for smokers, the deficit in life insurance premiums they paid in as compared with the total payout to their beneficiaries, the property damage from cigarette-ignited fires, and the tax revenues that prematurely dying smokers did not pay to finance health and retirement programs—but out of fairness the study also calculated the savings that smokers provided by being fated to die younger than nonsmokers.


The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching by Donald Ervin Knuth

card file, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, linked data, locality of reference, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, p-value, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, sorting algorithm, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

Red-black trees, 477. Redundant comparisons, 182, 240, 242, 245-246, 391. Reed, Bruce Alan, 643, 713. Reference counts, 534. Reflection networks, 670. Regnier, Mireille, 565, 632. Regular polygons, 289. Reiner, Victor Schorr, 719. Reingold, Edward Martin, 207, 476, 480, 715. Relaxed heaps, 152. Remington Rand Corporation, 385, 387. Removal, see Deletion. Reorganizing a binary tree, 458, 480. Replacement selection, 212, 253-266, 325, 329, 331-332, 336, 347, 348, 360, 364-365, 378. Replicated blocks, 489. Replicated instructions, 398, 418, 429, 625, 648, 677. Reservoir, 259-261, 265. Restructuring, 480. Reversal of data, 65, 72, 310, 670, 701.


pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In September 1971, Mao’s handpicked successor, .Marshal Lin Biao, revolted against him and allegedly was killed in a plane crash while seeking to defect to the Soviet Union. These incidents convinced Kim Il-sung that he should carefully prepare a smooth political transition” (Kong Dan Oh, Leadership Change in North Korean Politics: The Succession to Kim Il Sung [Santa Monica, Calif: RAND Corporation, 1988]). 33. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2). 34. Ibid. 35. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (1) (see chap. 2, n. 1). Hwang does not address the question of whether Kim’s modesty in those remarks had been merely feigned, as so often seems to be the case with some other self-deprecating portions of Kim’s memoirs—an invitation to others to pile on more praise. 36.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Take a peek behind the curtain. One of the campaign-in-formation’s strategic initiatives went by the acronym PTWWT. That stood for “People to Whom We Talk”: a continually updated list of distinguished foreign policy personages like Henry Kissinger, NATO commander General Alexander Haig, and Harry Rowan of the RAND Corporation. A related effort was called the “SP Program”: a formal process for staffers to draft letters to molders of establishment opinion for the governor to “Sign Personally.” These missives frequently praised books and articles the recipient had written, establishing their signatory—despite what you might have heard—as a cosmopolitan intellectual, well within the mainstream of respectable opinion.