Robert Bork

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The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

McGee, Praeger, 1971. 87 “destroyed my dreams of socialism”: “Aaron Director, Economist, Dies at 102,” Douglas Martin, The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2004. 88 “only that value we would today call consumer welfare”: “Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act,” Robert H. Bork, Journal of Law and Economics, 1966. 89 “a kingly prerogative”: Trusts, Speech by John Sherman to the U.S. Senate, 1890. 89 “Bork’s analysis of the legislative history was strained”: “Antitrust’s Protected Classes,” Herbert Hovenkamp, Michigan Law Review, 1989. 89 “prefer a system of small producers”: United States v. Aluminum Co. of Am., 148 F.2d 416 (2d Cir. 1945). 90 “a value will be announced as pertinent”: “Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act,” Robert H. Bork, Journal of Law and Economics, 1966. 91 “oversimplified economics”: “Antitrust Made (Too) Simple,” Christopher R.

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Or as Louis Brandeis, the great prophet of a decentralized economy, put it, the antitrust laws answered a question: “Shall the industrial policy of America be that of competition or that of monopoly?” What happened? The law is currently suffering from an overindulgence in the ideas first popularized by Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty.

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However, a new intellectual opposition to antitrust was brewing, in a different form than before, and in an unexpected place. It formed at the University of Chicago, the school founded by John D. Rockefeller, and in the person of a professor named Aaron Director, and a particularly brilliant student of his named Robert Bork. The Rise of the Chicago School Since at least Adam Smith’s day, economists have favored competition and condemned monopoly. For most of the twentieth century, antitrust enforcement was, therefore, broadly supported by the economic profession in its home country. As Donald Dewey writes, “not a single American-trained economist of any prominence questioned the desirability of antitrust in the interwar years.”

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

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

Austin Carr, “Reddit Co-Founder, The Band’s Ex-Tour Manager Debate SOPA, Anti-Piracy and Levon Helm’s Legacy,” Fast Company, April 19, 2012, www.fastcompany.com/1834779/reddit-cofounder-bands-ex-tour-manager-debate-sopa-antipiracy-and-levon-helms-legacy-video. Kurt Andersen, “You Say You Want a Devolution?” Vanity Fair, January 2012. Chapter Six: Monopoly in the Digital Age Much of the research on Robert Bork came from an interview with former secretary of labor Robert Reich, who was both a student and a research assistant to Bork in the 1970s. Robert Bork, Antitrust Paradox (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Barry Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2010). Lee Epstein, William Landes, and Richard Posner, “How Business Fares in the Supreme Court,” University of Minnesota Law Review, vol. 97, no. 1, www.minnesotalawreview.org/articles/volume-97-lead-piece-business-fares-supreme-court/.

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To understand how that happened, we need to look at the nature of monopoly capitalism and how an old and largely discredited form of robber-baron capitalism took on a new form in the digital age. CHAPTER SIX Monopoly in the Digital Age Competition is for losers. —Peter Thiel 1. Robert Bork did more than any individual in the twentieth century to embed the libertarian free-market principles of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman into the heart of the American economic and judicial system. Professor Bork’s class on antitrust law at Yale Law School was usually packed. In 1971, he had taught Bill Clinton and his soon-to-be wife, Hillary, as well as Robert Reich, Clarence Thomas, and Richard Blumenthal.

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As the New York Times noted in his obituary, this stance cost him a seat on the Supreme Court: “He also wrote a fateful article for The New Republic in 1963—one that played a key role in his 1987 confirmation defeat—condemning the public accommodation sections of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act aimed at integrating restaurants, hotels and other businesses. Mr. Bork said he had no objection to racial integration but feared that government coercion of private behavior threatened freedom.” Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all monopolies that would be prosecuted under antitrust statutes if it hadn’t been for Robert Bork. From the Ford administration all the way through to the Obama White House, Bork’s principles as expressed in The Antitrust Paradox, encouraging mergers and calling for less regulation, have ruled the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Just a few years after Bork published his book, Reagan’s soon to be appointed head of the antitrust division, William Baxter, told the New York Times that he would “pursue an antitrust policy based on efficiency considerations.”

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

Levi, later U.S. attorney general under President Ford. Levi would give four lectures, and then Director would give one. “Aaron Director would tell us that everything that Levi had told us the preceding four days was nonsense,” recalled one student. For some it was a religious experience. “We became Janissaries,” said Robert Bork, an early student who was one of the most influential popularizers of Director’s ideas.* Ronald Coase, a colleague who later won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work integrating economics into legal theory, also counted himself a disciple of Director, saying, “I regarded my role as that of Saint Paul to Aaron Director’s Christ.

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The Supreme Court, in siding with Utah Pie, once again emphasized that the law was written to protect companies.38 Indeed, in 1936, Congress had reinforced the Sherman Act by passing the Robinson-Patman Act, which specifically prohibited large companies from charging lower prices to undermine local rivals. Robert Bork described the verdict as a violation of the laws of economics. The defendants, he wrote, “were convicted not of injuring competition but, quite simply, of competing.”39 Stigler, testifying on Capitol Hill, urged Congress to rewrite the laws of the United States. “I hope the subcommittee will reflect upon the fact,” he said, “that if all the prominent economists in favor of the Robinson-Patman Act were put in a Volkswagen, there would still be room for a portly chauffeur.”40 Director retired from the University of Chicago in 1965, moving to California, where he kept an office at Stanford.

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District Court judge in California, told the Washington Post the lessons he learned in Miami induced him to issue a ruling that ended a federal system of quotas for contracts with minority vendors. “More and more,” Hauk said, “life is best explained not by religion, not by law, but by economics.”57 To justify the insertion of economics into antitrust law, Robert Bork rewrote history. After graduating from Chicago, Bork had become a professor at Yale Law School — where his students dubbed his class on antitrust law “protrust” — and then served as Nixon’s solicitor general.58 After returning to Yale, he wrote The Antitrust Paradox, a popular 1978 book that asserted the original purpose of the Sherman Antitrust Act was to maximize consumer welfare.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

That particular night Director hosted twenty dinner guests, largely conservative thinkers, including not just Friedman but George Stigler, who would go on to make a name for himself attacking government regulation, the British economist Ronald Coase and a fire-breathing conservative lawyer called Robert Bork.1 The University of Chicago in those days was a bear pit, an arena of intense macho intellectual combat where academics were constantly struggling to outdo each other with clever theories about efficient markets – theories that often perched on toe-curling assumptions – to adopt unconventional, even anti-social positions usually supporting big business and attacking big government.

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It was also an extension of red-blooded neoliberalism, which argued that lawyers and laws should bow down to economists and economics, and everything had a price. The scale and success of this insurrection was made clear when in 1983 a group of Chicago-school economists was reminiscing about – one might even say gloating over – this power grab. There was a short exchange between Robert Bork, Richard Posner, an influential pro-monopoly jurist and economist, and Henry Manne, another influential (and corporate-funded) economist. Manne was an associate of the libertarian theorist James Buchanan, and they had joined with the conservative tycoon Charles Koch to penetrate academia by setting up think tanks to spread anti-government ideas.

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Big business was attacking antitrust in the United States too, said Blum; it was ‘an area where pure political power was exercised to prevent prosecutions’.11 Yet British hostility was a minor difficulty when compared to the devastating blows that were to come from inside America itself, from Aaron Director’s students and dinner guests and above all Robert Bork. Bork was a cantankerous lawyer who had been growing steadily more agitated about impending moral collapse. He blamed feminists, multiculturalists, gays, pornographers and most especially leftist professors. He once asserted that ‘homosexuals, American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, women, and so on allegedly have been subjected to oppression’.

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

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

After the crisis, he, too, wrote a book saying there may have been flaws in his views on the perfect functioning of markets. We'll never know how much damage he caused. Yet if there is one man who is responsible for the revolution in antitrust thinking, it is Robert Bork. Most American baby boomers remember him for his highly charged Supreme Court nomination hearings in 1987. Other readers may remember him as the only man willing to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox at President Richard Nixon's orders in the Saturday Night Massacre. In the 1960s, Robert Bork published a series of highly influential articles that were hand grenades. His writing was brilliant, original, and entirely wrong. He attacked the state of antitrust policy in the United States.

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Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2579308 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2579308. 50. Robert H. Bork and Ward S. Bowman Jr, “The Crisis in Antitrust,” Columbia Law Review 65, no. 3 (1965). 51. Steven C. Salop, Symposium on Mergers and Antitrust. Economic Perspectives 1, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 3–12. 52. Milton Friedman, “The Business Community's Suicidal Impulse,” Cato Policy Report 21, no. 2 (March/April 1999). 53. Richard A. Posner, “The Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127, no. 4 (April 1979): 925–948. 54. http://keever.us/greenspanantitrust.html. 55. Robert H. Bork, “The Goals of Antitrust Policy,” American Economic Review 57 (1967): 242. 56.

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The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” He should have included defunct law professors. The state we find ourselves in today can be traced back to the economists of the Chicago School. We would not have highly concentrated industries if it were not for Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Like all revolutions, an organized group of ideologues developed the ideas and spread them zealously. The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, was the vanguard of attack against antitrust laws. The great irony is that they decried monopolies and concentration of power, but in practice they created all the conditions necessary for them.

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

But its redefinition was not of the sort Hayek had in mind. Over the next several years, the Project produced a multivolume revisionist history of antitrust that reversed conventional legal and economic thought on the subject. The Project’s breakout star was a young Chicago legal scholar named Robert Bork. A talented writer and polemicist, Bork produced some of the Project’s earliest reappraisals of the Sherman Antitrust Act and related case law. His writings defending the legality and competitive advantages of vertical mergers were as fulsome as his condemnations of antitrust actions were withering.

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Stigler would teach the industry to control its own destiny, not by throwing red paint at the FDA and placing editorials calling for its abolition, but by reshaping the thinking and priorities of its administrators and affiliated scientists, politicians, and the public—all without them even knowing it was happening. The promised land described by Stigler was not regulatory capture, but cognitive capture. For the drug companies, this opened up a number of possibilities. Some lines of attack were already underway and awaiting their support, such as Robert Bork’s revisionist project to rewrite the histories of antitrust law and patent populism. Others remained in the planning stage, such as establishing quasi-academic research centers to produce papers and books. These centers would serve as “echo chambers” to ensure the industry’s message rang continuously in the public square.

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Like other companies with an interest in regulation, Pfizer was curious to know what funding opportunities existed to support the work of Stigler and other neoliberals working along similar lines (and providing similar services). The movement’s biggest corporate funder at the time was General Electric, sponsor of the school’s Government-Business Relations program as well as the work of Robert Bork, who had become a human antitrust revisionist tornado, bouncing between courtrooms and boardrooms in a crusade to make the world safe for monopoly. If the Pfizer executives debriefed the law school dean about the enemies at the drug industry’s gate, it may have been a long meeting. In 1967, Wisconsin Democrat Gaylord Nelson picked up Kefauver’s mantle in the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly and initiated hearings on “Competitive Problems in the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Powell was a ‘‘swing vote,’’ often casting the deciding vote in 5-to-4 104 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT decisions.1 To tip the balance of power in favor of the conservatives, Reagan nominated Robert Bork, a District of Columbia federal appeals judge known for his articulate and outspoken convictions. If confirmed, Bork would be the nation’s 104th Supreme Court justice and a reliable vote for strict interpretation. The nomination set the stage for one of the biggest political battles of the decade. Robert Bork was born in 1927; he earned a law degree at the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught at Yale Law School. There he became one of the best-known conservative jurists in the country, opposing abortion and gay rights while favoring the death penalty.

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Office in China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and as vice-president, heir apparent to the Reagan legacy. The hauteur of Democratic questions to Robert Bork was familiar to him. In the entire time he had been in Washington, the Democratic Party was dominant in the U.S. Congress, and Republicans succeeded only when they compromised and cooperated with the majority. Bush’s tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee coincided with the Watergate scandal, and he was faced with the unenviable task of rebuilding morale in the dispirited party after the scandal. The same month Robert Bork was rejected, George Bush made his announcement to run for president. As a high school band played ‘‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’’ at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston, the candidate took the podium to declare that he had no plans to go off in ‘‘radical new directions.’’

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For example, Bork had written that the Fourteenth Amendment should apply only to race, and not to gender issues. Yet in his testimony, the judge said equal protection should apply to women.6 As he tried to moderate some of his positions to be acceptable to Democrats in Congress, Judge Bork alienated his supporters and further infuriated his detractors. All parties acknowledged that Robert Bork was one of the most astute legal scholars in the country; the American Bar Association gave him its highest rating, ‘‘exceptionally well-qualified.’’ But the credentials did not endear him to the Senate majority. After weeks of testimony, the Judiciary Committee voted 9 to 5 against confirming Bork.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War over the Supreme Court, from Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh. New York: HarperCollins, 2019. 119. 7.Ibid. 12; McConnell, The Long Game. 259–61. 8.Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 51. 9.Ring, Trudy. “Robert Bork’s Antigay Record.” Advocate. December 19, 2012. 10.Sen. Kennedy (MA). “Nomination of Robert Bork.” Congressional Record 133, Pt. 14 (July 1, 1987). 18519. 11.Marcus, Ruth. Supreme Ambition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. 52. 12.Greenhouse, Linda. “Bork’s Nomination Is Rejected, 58–42; Reagan Saddened.” New York Times. October 24, 1987. 13.McMillion, Barry J.; and Rutkus, Denis Steven.

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To perceive that a fight over a judicial nominee could be the point where the establishment and the superminority connected required a gut-level instinct that could only come from someone who had been building toward this moment for his entire career. IN 1987, President Reagan made a surprising choice to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell: a right-wing ideologue named Robert Bork. A darling of conservatives and a bête noire of liberals, Bork had wielded the knife in Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. After the top two officials in the Justice Department had resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, Bork obliged. In 1975, White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld put Bork on the list of candidates to replace Central Intelligence Agency director William Colby, who had proved too cooperative with the Senate’s investigation into abuses by the intelligence community being led by the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Senator Frank Church.

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While it was common for the president of one party to ask a Senate controlled by the other party to confirm a Supreme Court nominee, the president usually nodded to political reality by picking a nominee the other party could live with. Asking a Democratic Senate to confirm a radical conservative like Bork was courting trouble, and Reagan got it. On the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his career. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens,” he declared.10 The hearings erupted into the most contentious battle over a judicial nominee in recent memory.11 Despite the furor, Bork’s nomination did not face a filibuster when it came to the floor.

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

A 1985 Roper poll showed that large numbers of Americans thought yuppies were "overly concerned with themselves," a view that reflected a wider public discomfort with how the new individualism was evolving.15 But these sentiments had little traction in larger cultural debates. One reason was that no serious counterweight existed to the juggernaut of '80s materialism. Liberals were too busy worrying about Star Wars, the Contras, and Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork to attack the money culture. Also, somewhere along the line liberals had lost their ability to talk about values and their skills for moral storytelling. They spoke instead about "issues" and "constituencies." Among other things, this abdication allowed the right to successfully attack some parts of the new individualism while allowing other parts to flourish.

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One reason that the corporate scandals took America by surprise is that conservative diatribes about the "cultural war" directed attention away from the morally corrosive potential of extreme capitalism. Thus distracted, Americans weren't expecting the many ugly excesses that seem, in retrospect, to have been inevitable. For example, in his 1996 bestseller, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Robert Bork bemoaned the decline of America culture within a framework better suited to the '70s than to the '90s. Bork charged that "the enemy within is modern liberalism," that the dangerous left-wing orthodoxies of "radical egalitarianism" and "radical individualism" were bringing out the worst in Americans.

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As it happened, though, that tilt was not nearly right enough for those who controlled AEI's purse strings. In the mid-1980s, AEI's main contributors threatened to cut off funding unless it turned much more conservative. It did. These days, AEI has a $17 million budget and provides a home to some of America's most rabid right-wing ideologues, including Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich, and Charles Murray. AEI's twenty-five-member board of directors includes exactly one scholar, James Q. Wilson. The rest of the board is packed with corporate CEOs, including the chiefs of ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, State Farm Insurance, and American Express. These extremely busy men aren't there because they enjoy a good intellectual conversation.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

“When the laws undertake”: Andrew Jackson’s veto message of the Second Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp. In 1975 the country’s leading liberal politician: Stephen Breyer gives a full account of airline deregulation in Regulation and Its Reform, Harvard University Press, 1982. “sheer perversity”: Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself, The Free Press, 1978, 185. “a land in which women”: Edward M. Kennedy, speech opposing the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court of the United States, July 1, 1987. Congressional Record, Senate, July 1, 1987, 18518. Milken also developed a client base: The 269-page brief by the celebrated trial lawyer David Boies in the case of FDIC v.

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In 1978 the first Democratic president of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, signed legislation abolishing the CAB entirely. Carter also deregulated trucking and railroads, and he signed the first of a series of major laws deregulating finance—giving banks, in the name of serving the consumer, the ability to pay much higher interest rates to their depositors. In 1978 Robert Bork, a protégé of Aaron Director’s at the University of Chicago Law School and a Republican law professor and government official, published The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that the only acceptable rationale for government regulation of the economy was consumer welfare. Therefore, Bork argued, the tradition of economic liberalism associated with Louis Brandeis was at best silly and at worst an indefensible form of welfare for undeserving small producers, at consumers’ expense.

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The result was three years of unusually high interest rates, which sent the country into a recession and also pumped more energy into the bond markets. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, his administration signaled that it would continue the move toward deregulation that Carter had launched, only more so. Reagan’s Justice Department had a Robert Bork–like skepticism about antitrust enforcement, which further empowered the mergers and acquisitions departments at Morgan Stanley and the other Wall Street firms. Toward the end of the period of high interest rates, the savings and loan industry, which had lost its ability to attract deposits at its old modest interest rates, persuaded Congress to pass a major piece of financial deregulation, permitting it to acquire deposits in nontraditional ways, to offer adjustable-rate mortgages, and to make new and riskier kinds of investments—all while retaining federal insurance on their deposits.

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

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

“To be called African-Americans”: “Jackson and Others Say ‘Blacks’ Is Passé,” New York Times, December 21, 1988. a writer in Ebony magazine: Ibid. See also David Bradley, “The Omni-American Blues,” First Things, March 2017, 45–50. Bork had had misgivings: Robert Bork, “Civil Rights: A Challenge,” New Republic, August 31, 1963, 21–24. “Robert Bork’s America”: Congressional Record—Senate, July 1, 1987, 18518–19. “This is the most historic moment”: Ibid., 18519. This $50 billion “surplus” disguises: George J. Borjas, “The Economic Benefits of Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9:2 (Spring 1995): 3–22.

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Americans who felt that civil rights were justified by an especially shameful history also thought it was limited by that history. They would not have consented to it otherwise. Patterson was one of the few who understood that there were no logical grounds for limiting its work to desegregation. The Yale University law professor Robert Bork, in his own very different way, was another. Immigrant rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of the aged were not in the civil rights legislation, but they could easily be induced from it. The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women. 3 Sex The GI generation and its failures—The Feminine Mystique and male sexism—Playboy and male sexuality—Gloria Steinem, capitalism, and class—Roe v.

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But although no one had voted to make it so, the social changes of Reagan’s late 1980s were all suddenly going with the grain of the Johnson revolution. The waning of a conservative quarter-century was clear by 1987, when the newly arrived Democratic majority in the Senate rejected the Yale Law School professor Robert Bork, a towering figure in American legal philosophy, for a seat on the Supreme Court. Their discomfort was understandable. Bork had had misgivings about the constitutional basis for civil rights law, noting its potential to endanger First Amendment freedoms, and he had argued this case powerfully, not just in law reviews but in the pages of the New Republic.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Both purported to be based on objective principles that transcended mere politics or special interests, even while both were vehicles for big business and the right to recover, fortify, and expand their economic and political power. And both shared key promoters, of whom probably the single most important was Robert Bork. Bork was a founder of originalism in the 1970s, and in 1986 he was in the running for an open Supreme Court seat (as he had been in 1981). But Reagan made the safer choice from among the new generation of hard-right ideologues—Antonin Scalia, who as a result came to be the personification of originalism.

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Exactly one year after Bork’s book was published, a pivotal Supreme Court decision quoted its key “consumer welfare” sentence, and since then federal judges have quoted the line in antitrust decisions dozens of times. Just like that, economic efficiency as measured by prices became “the stated goal in antitrust” exclusively. “Antitrust was defined by Robert Bork,” says the University of Arizona law professor and antitrust specialist Barak Orbach. I cannot overstate his influence. Any antitrust person would tell you the same thing….The Court started thinking they should have an economic framework, and they had Chicago’s work as very simple ideas they could use.

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These are all the laws and regulations intended to make our economic system operate as well as it can, to referee the balance between making American economic life both as free and as fair as possible, optimizing those two goals in tandem rather than simply maximizing one. The main part of this other category of business regulation is antitrust, all the evolving rules spun out of our antitrust laws for more than a century—and, crucially, the interpretation of those laws by courts and judges, interpretations that Robert Bork and the Law and Economics movement so effectively changed in favor of big business. The word antitrust was coined back in 1890 when Congress passed the first such law. A trust was one of the shockingly large new corporations that had effectively eliminated competition by swallowing up competitors (and suppliers) and thereby controlling whole industries.

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

Ely has concluded, these critics attack the concept of substantive due process because of their “disagreement with particular applications of the doctrine,” and in the process they often ignore or misrepresent the long and respectable tradition of substantive due process theory.113 Robert Bork One of the chief critics of Lochner and its legacy is Robert Bork, who has developed an elaborate argument that substantive due process lies at the root of most of America’s constitutional ills.114 Bork contends that substantive due process made its first appearance in Dred Scott v. Sandford,115 the infamous case in which the Supreme Court declared that Congress could not forbid the spread of slavery into the western territories and that blacks could never be citizens of the United States.

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Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 290–91. 124. Dred Scott, 60 U.S. (19 How.) at 450. 125. Graber, Dred Scott, p. 64. 126. Bork, Tempting of America, pp. 44–45. 127. Ibid., p. 124. 128. Ibid. 129. Robert Bork, Slouching towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 63 (quoting Irving Kristol). 130. Bork, Tempting of America, p. 139. In another place, Bork has claimed that “only a legal-positivist judge can be an adherent of the Framers’ original intent.” Robert H. Bork, “Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question,” book review, National Review, February 7, 1994, p. 61 (1994 WLNR 3412460). 131. James Madison, “Sovereignty,” in Writings of James Madison, ed.

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Koller II, “The Myth of Predatory Pricing: An Empirical Study,” Antitrust Law and Economic Review 4 (1971): 105 (“the standard theoretical analysis in this area treats predation as a form of non-maximizing (irrational) behavior and thus 305 Notes for Pages 53–57 an unlikely occurrence in the real world”); James C. Miller III and Paul Pautler, “Predation: The Changing View in Economics and the Law,” Journal of Law and Economics 28 (1985): 495–502; and Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 154 (“predation by such techniques is very improbable . . . [and prohibiting price-cutting] would do much more harm than good”). 81. John S. McGee, “Predatory Price Cutting: The Standard Oil (N.J.) Case,” Journal of Law and Economics 1 (1958): 168. 82.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Orley Ashenfelter, Daniel Hosken, and Matthew Weinberg, “Did Robert Bork Understate the Competitive Impact of Mergers? Evidence from Consummated Mergers,” Journal of Law and Economics 57, no. S3 (Aug. 2014): S67–S100, https://doi.org/10.1086/675862. 6. Julie Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. 7. Credit Suisse, “The Incredible Shrinking Universe of Stocks: The Causes and Consequences of Fewer U.S. Equities,” http://www.cmgwealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/document_1072753661.pdf. 8. Ashenfelter, Hosken, and Weinberg, “Did Robert Bork Understate the Competitive Impact of Mergers?”

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The playing field has been tilted so far that a growing number of people are falling off the edge, beset by precarious employment, stagnating wages, high costs for education, housing and healthcare, and economic policies that prize shareholders over people and communities. This great tilting of the playing field, away from workers and toward owners, has a variety of causes, but the biggest is a radical theory of antitrust, driven by jurist and far-right cult-of-personality darling Robert Bork and exported by his disciples at the Chicago school of economics. During the glory years of antitrust—after the New Deal, before Bork—governments set themselves the task of shrinking monopolies on the grounds that they were bad. Very large companies were able to exert undue influence on governments, bribing or coercing them into enacting policies that were good for those companies’ shareholders and harmful to their workers, customers, and the rest of society.

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And what we need right now is a movement against chokepoint capitalism—one that finds new tools to cut through the roots of monopolistic and monopsonistic power. ANTITRUST IS VITAL—BUT IT ALONE WON’T SAVE US Our recent ancestors practiced a lost art of maintaining a pluralistic society, where monopolies were prohibited because they were monopolies, not because they might raise prices. Robert Bork and the Chicago crew forced upon us a great forgetting, shattering our capacity to rein corporate power in. It was a breathtaking trick: convincing us that monopolists are good, regulators are bad, and that captured markets are “free.” For forty years, we’ve lived in the Chicago School’s funhouse upside-down land, where greed is good and hourglass-shaped markets make us all better off.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

* * * — GIVEN ALL THIS, one might ask why the Big Tech firms haven’t yet been treated as monopolies by the federal government and broken up like Bell Telephone of yesteryear, and Standard Oil before that. Or at least transformed and constrained by the threat of regulation, like Microsoft was twenty years ago. Because of a forty-year shift in our economic thinking around antitrust policy.52 Or, more concisely, because of one man: Robert Bork. While infamous for being voted down by the Senate in his bid for a seat on the Supreme Court (and for firing Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of the Watergate scandal years before that), Bork has achieved far more lasting importance for his work as the author of the 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, which provided the legal rationale for Big Tech’s unimpeded global dominance and became the basis of a 1979 Supreme Court decision that is still being upheld today.

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In fewer than one hundred pages, Khan made the case that current interpretations of U.S. antitrust law, which is meant to regulate competition and curb monopolistic practices, are utterly unsuited to the architecture of the modern economy. For roughly four decades, antitrust scholars—taking their lead from Robert Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox—have pegged their definitions of monopoly power to short-term price effects; so if Amazon is making prices lower for consumers, the market must be working effectively. Khan set out a simple but powerful counterargument: that it doesn’t matter if companies such as Amazon are making things cheaper in dollars if they are using predatory pricing strategies to dominate multiple industries and choke off competition and choice.

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Technology companies have so far avoided such specialized restrictions, even as they’ve become some of the largest and most concentrated companies in the world.22 This is due in part because the opacity of their business model makes them hard to even understand, let alone regulate. But it’s also because regulators who might curb their power are working with an outdated model of monopoly power, one that hasn’t been revisited in forty years. Indeed, the last time we had a major reset of antitrust policy in the United States was when Robert Bork published The Antitrust Paradox in 1978. Bork held that the major goal of antitrust policy should be to promote “business efficiency,” which from the 1980s onward came to be measured in consumer prices. It was a shift that took the United States away from antitrust policy predicated on the welfare of the “citizen” and toward one that clearly served the laissez-faire politics of the Reagan administration.

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

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

Tax Policy: Revenue and Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 87–115; McCartin, Collision Course; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, chapter 10; Monica Prasad, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018); Sidney Blumenthal, “Defining ‘Reaganomics,’ ” Boston Globe, November 2, 1980, H10. 35.Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 196–200. 36.Daniel Rowe, “Beyond Reaganomics: The Long Economic Crisis and the Rebuilding of America, 1974–1988” (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2019), 162. 37.Lee Edwards, To Preserve and Protect: The Life of Edwin Meese III (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2005); Charles Connor, “Rethinking the Robert Bork Affair” (undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2018). 38.Laura Kalman, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 132. 39.Robert J. Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971), 1–35; Robert J. Bork, “We Suddenly Feel That the Law Is Vulnerable,” Fortune, December 1971, 115–117, 136–138, 143; Robert J. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: Free Press, 1990).

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To counteract these tendencies, Meese called in 1985 for a “jurisprudence of original intention” that would require judges to abide by the actual meaning imparted to laws and constitutional articles by their framers.38 This emphasis on a strict construction of the Constitution had originated with a Yale law professor, Robert Bork, in the early 1970s. It then migrated to the University of Chicago, where another law professor, Antonin Scalia, became a supporter. Reagan’s elevation of both Bork and Scalia to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1985, appointments often recognized as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court, signified the rising prestige of their views with Meese and other ideological architects of the Reagan revolution.39 Bork and Scalia initially were most perturbed by the Warren Court’s use of rights language to sanction the goals of the liberation movements of the 1960s—especially civil rights and feminism.

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The man chairing the Democratic Leadership Council in 1990 and hoping to lead the Democratic Party to its own neoliberal future was Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.64 Clinton had agreed to take on this role once Al From, a key figure in the DLC, convinced him that it would open a path toward winning the 1992 Democratic Party nomination for president.65 The growing strength of the DLC should not be interpreted to mean that neoliberalism had conquered all of the Democratic Party by 1990. African Americans, now one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, made it clear they would not tolerate backtracking on civil rights, affirmative action, or welfare. When Reagan in 1987 had nominated to the Supreme Court a man (Robert Bork) who appeared to threaten all that the Warren Court had done for civil rights (and women’s reproductive rights), the opposition deployed by Democratic senators was fierce and successful. Organized labor was another key Democratic Party constituency; even as its membership declined, it kept up a steady stream of donations to the Democratic Party and conducted major voter turnout initiatives on election days.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Ford and Jimmy Carter issued executive orders — in 1976 and 1978, respectively — aimed at tightening regulation of the intelligence agencies. Not everyone was thrilled by the changes. “Periods of sin and excess are commonly followed by spasms of remorse and moralistic overreaction,” harrumphed famed conservative Robert Bork, who’d served as Nixon’s solicitor general, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The repentance of the hungover reveler is standard comic fare.” But Bork needn’t have worried; the age of regret didn’t last long. Soon the sense of urgency sparked by the Church Committee faded. Meanwhile, the FISA Court, operating in the shadows with closed-door sessions and classified opinions, got a reputation for rubber-stamping surveillance applications.

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p. 90 Cointelpro, “a sophisticated vigilante operation”: US Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, book 3, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 2. p. 91 Bork harrumphs: Robert J. Bork, “‘Reforming’ Foreign Intelligence,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 1978. p. 91 classified opinions: Cora Currier, Justin Elliott, and Theodoric Meyer, “Mass Surveillance in America: A Timeline of Loosening Laws and Practices,” ProPublica, June 7, 2013, projects.propublica.org. p. 91 secret court would authorize 33,942 warrants: Evan Perez, “Secret Court’s Oversight Gets Scrutiny,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2013.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Standard economic theory holds that to be a monopoly, a business must restrict output in order to push up prices. Although this definition of monopoly was not well developed in 1890, some scholars believe that it was nevertheless what Senator Sherman and his colleagues had in mind in promoting antitrust legislation. Robert Bork, who taught antitrust law at Yale Law School for more than fifteen years and is a frequent critic of antitrust regulation, stated in the Journal of Law and Economics that “Sherman demonstrated more than once that he understood that higher prices were brought about by a restriction of output. . . .

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William Letwin, Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the Sherman Antitrust Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 67. 6. Robert Gray and James Peterson, Economic Development in the United States (New York: Irwin, 1965), 57. 7. Sanford D. Gordon, “Attitudes Toward Trusts Prior to the Sherman Act,” Southern Economics Journal 20 (June 1963): 158. 8. Robert Bork, “Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act,” Journal of Law and Economics 9 (October 1966): 16. 9. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Origins of Antitrust: An Interest-Group Perspective,” International Review of Law and Economics 5, no. 1 (June 1985): 73–90. 10. Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 1st Session, House, June 20, 1890, 4, 100. 11.

The Payoff by Jeff Connaughton

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, Neil Kinnock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, too big to fail, two-sided market, uptick rule, young professional

To be fair, the Kennedy legacy was tough to compete with. That same summer, Lewis Powell retired from the Supreme Court, and President Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to take his place. It was a polarizing choice, since many believed that, if confirmed, Bork would create a majority that might overturn a number of previous Court decisions on matters relating to personal liberty, particularly Roe v. Wade. Senator Ted Kennedy made his infamous In-Robert-Bork’s-America speech, which galvanized both Bork’s opponents and supporters. Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, would chair the confirmation hearings, and his performance was widely expected to be like a first primary election for him.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

Melvin Reder emphasizes Director’s role among Chicago economists, writing in 1982 that in conducting his own work on the history of economics at the University of Chicago, he was “struck by the many strong expressions of intellectual indebtedness both of Chicago economists and legal scholars (such as Edward Levi and Robert Bork) to Aaron Director.... Director appears to have exercised a great deal of influence upon the principal figures in Chicago economics from the 1930s to the present.”39 According to Coase: “Director was extremely effective as a teacher, and he had a profound influence on the views of some of his students and also on those of some of his colleagues... both in law and economics.”40 Stigler wrote in 1974 that in “forming most present day policy views of Chicago economists, Director and Friedman have been the main intellectual forces.”41 Milton and Rose’s friends at Chicago outside economics were the university’s elite, including Ed and Laura Banfield in political science, Daniel and Ruth Boorstin in history, and Edward and Kate Levi in the law school, among many others.

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.), “The Fire of Truth: A Remembrance of Law and Economics at Chicago, 1932–1970,” Journal of Law and Economics (April 1983), is the transcript of an exceptional gathering of thirty former University of Chicago students and former and current faculty focusing on the contributions of Aaron Director and Ronald Coase to the field of law and economics. Among the participants are Milton and Rose Friedman, Stigler, Wallis, Becker, and Robert Bork, in addition to Director and Coase. There is much history and exploration of the development of ideas. A number of obituaries were written on Director’s death in September 2004. These include Richard M. Ebeling, “Aaron Director on the Market for Goods and Ideas,” Freeman (November 2004), and Adam Bernstein, “Aaron Director Dies at 102; Helped Fuse Economics, Law,” Washington Post, September 14, 2004.

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

Traditional monopolists often drove prices higher and took a laid-back approach to improving products and services – they might even use devious methods to prevent competitors from entering a market. In the Exponential Age, troublesome dominant firms are more likely than ever – but the issues they pose are subtly different. They require a rethink of the way we think about monopolistic practices. In the 1970s, Robert Bork – the solicitor general of the United States under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford – came up with what became the standard approach to antitrust law, the body of US legislation concerned with monopoly. Bork’s emphasis was less on anti-competitive practices or cartel-like behaviour per se, and instead on consumer welfare.

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Cameras in phones and easy-to-use sharing applications have brought the joy of photography to billions of people for practically nothing. In every area of the digital economy, the consumer experience seems to be getting cheaper and more efficient. So much for the perils of monopoly. But there’s a catch. Robert Bork’s framework for understanding monopoly doesn’t account for the real issues created by monopolistic companies – at least not in the Exponential Age. It is an example of the exponential gap. There are problems with the new age of monopoly, but these problems don’t manifest themselves in the way our existing norms and rules can grasp.

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation by Kord Davis, Doug Patterson

4chan, business process, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, performance metric, Robert Bork, side project, smart grid, urban planning

It is increasingly difficult to “opt out” of the expansion of business operations into our lives. One can choose not to subscribe to a grocery store reward program—and accept the loss of the discounts those programs can provide. Although there is no requirement to join a social network, there can be a stigma attached to not doing so. In 1987, Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was hotly contested, in part by using his video rental history as evidence in support of arguments against his confirmation. His reputation as a qualified candidate for the Supreme Court was being assessed, in part, by making judgments about the movies he watched.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

* Of course, 1928 was not a Depression year. But Louisiana was so poor even before the crash, and Huey Long would soon become such an archetypal Depression figure, that we include this episode as an honorary example. * A curious echo of Mellon’s dictum about hard times forcing people to “live a more moral life” occurs in Robert Bork’s mournful meditation, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, in which he briefly considers “a deep economic depression” as one way of bringing about “moral regeneration.” The idea is immediately discarded for “lacking broad public support.” See Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 336.

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

Of course, to build a recommendation system, you need data, so Netflix publicly released a lot of it—a dataset consisting of more than a hundred million movie rating records, corresponding to the ratings that roughly half a million users gave to a total of nearly eighteen thousand movies. Netflix was cognizant of privacy concerns: it turns out that in the United States, movie rental records are subject to surprisingly tough privacy laws. The Video Privacy Protection Act was passed by the United States Congress in 1988, after Robert Bork’s video rentals were published in the Washington City Paper during his Supreme Court nomination hearings. The law holds any video rental provider liable for up to $2,500 in damages per customer whose records are released. So, just as the state of Massachusetts had done, Netflix removed all user identifiers.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

In each country, a particular incident will initially raise the issues at stake in dramatic fashion and drive public demand, similar to what has happened in the United States. A federal statute was passed in 1994 prohibiting state departments of motor vehicles from sharing personal information after a series of high-profile abuses of that information, including the murder of a prominent actress by a stalker. In 1988, following the leak of the late Judge Robert Bork’s video-rental information during the Supreme Court nomination process, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, criminalizing disclosure of personally identifiable rental information without customer consent.6 While all of this digital chaos will be a nuisance to democratic societies, it will not destroy the democratic system.

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method=home.regcon&contentid=20120821133653. murder of a prominent actress by a stalker: “The Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) and the Privacy of Your State Motor Vehicle Record,” Electronic Privacy Information Center, accessed October 13, 2012, http://epic.org/privacy/drivers/. leak of the late Judge Robert Bork’s video-rental information: “Existing Federal Privacy Laws,” Center for Democracy and Technology, accessed October 13, 2012, https://www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/protect/laws.php#vpp. Texas lawsuit: “Harris v. Blockbuster,” Electronic Privacy Information Center, accessed October 13, 2012, http://epic.org/amicus/blockbuster/default.html; Cathryn Elaine Harris, Mario Herrera, and Maryam Hosseiny v.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Barnett, University of Kansas, December 23, 2003. 2.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 150 Oral History project, July 19, 2007. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 3.As first cousins, they were obliged to move from Chicago, where the marriage of first cousins was illegal, first to Wisconsin, then Indiana, where it wasn’t. 4.MIT 150 Oral History project, July 19, 2007. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 5.Ibid. 6.MIT150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 7.Karen Ilse Horn, Roads to Wisdom, Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England, 2009), p. 43. 8.MIT150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 9.Ibid. 10.His father owned a set of Harvard Classics—the most important books in the Western canon—included one of the founding works of economics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but young Samuelson failed to read it. 11.Thomas Robert Malthus (February 13, 1766–December 29, 1834), English cleric who studied the influence of demographics on economics. 12.MIT 150 Oral History project. https://infinitehistory.mit.edu/video/paul-samuelson. 13.Aaron Director (September 21, 1901–September 11, 2004), a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who played a central role in the founding of the Chicago School of economics. Director influenced some prominent jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia, and William Rehnquist. He was an early patron of Friedrich Hayek and was instrumental in having Hayek’s Road to Serfdom published in the U.S. 14.The Chicago School of economics at the University of Chicago has championed a neoclassical school of economic thought, which, during the Keynesian hegemony, countered the new orthodoxy with traditional market-based arguments.

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Taylor interview with Friedman. http://web.stanford.edu/~johntayl/Onlinepaperscombinedbyyear/2001/An_Interview_with_Milton_Friedman.pdf. 3.Interview with Friedman for the WGBH economics series Commanding Heights, 2002. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html. 4.Aaron Director inspired a generation of conservative jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. 5.Friedman’s biographical note for the Nobel Prize committee. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1976/friedman-bio.html. 6.David Friedman (born February 12, 1945), American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist, followed his parents into economics, sharing their belief in free markets and libertarian thinking.

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

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

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.” In subsequent years antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office. Yet after 1980 it all but disappeared. The new view, popularized by Yale Law School professor, and subsequently judge, Robert Bork was that large corporate size produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Political considerations became irrelevant. Power was no longer at issue. This was exactly the message that America’s emerging corporate oligarchy wanted to hear.

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

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

In the critical sector of information technology, media, and communications, the Economist magazine found the top four firms now accounted for nearly 50 percent of the revenue.49 Concentration has been made easier by a more lax antitrust environment, as argued by my colleague Sam Peltzman.50 Right until the early 1980s, antitrust authorities were quite active in preventing mergers that increased industry concentration substantially. The legal scholar Robert Bork (yes, he of the failed Supreme Court nomination) argued in his book The Antitrust Paradox in 1978 that it is possible that rising concentration in an industry may reflect gains in market share for more efficient players rather than growing monopolization.51 He urged antitrust regulators to focus on whether the consumer was better off rather than whether industry was dominated by a few firms.

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See Sam Peltzman, “Industrial Concentration under the Rule of Reason,” The Journal of Law and Economics 57, no. S3 (August 2014): S101–20. 49. “Too Much of a Good Thing,” The Economist, March 26, 2016, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-good-thing. 50. Sam Peltzman, “Industrial Concentration.” 51. Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War With Itself (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 52. “AT&T and Time Warner Are Cleared to Merge,” The Economist, June 16, 2018, https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21744068-more-consolidation-will-follow-consumers-ought-worry-att-and-time-warner-are-cleared?

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

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

In 1995 George Gilder wrote, “Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery.” In 1996 Robert Bork’s bestseller, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, “Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos.” But if you look around upscale America, it’s not all chaos and amoralism, even among the sexual avant-gardists at the Arizona Power Exchange.

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

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

The culprits in this account include the Democratic Party reformers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who broke the power of the party bosses and unwittingly made dealmaking and compromise that much harder; Newt Gingrich, who transformed the early-1990s Republican minority into something much more like a parliamentary party, ideologically zealous and centralized around his leadership; Fox News and talk radio, which ratified this shift by holding Republican politicians to impossible standards of ideological purity; the rise of similar ideological enforcers on the left, from the Bush-era netroots, to MSNBC, to the activist left of the late Obama years; and then the politicians of both parties who saw advantage in consistently breaking the informal norms that kept Washington working, beginning with the Democratic defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 and escalating through nomination battles thereafter, all the way to Mitch McConnell’s pocket veto of Merrick Garland, the slow death of the filibuster, and whatever happens next. But the deeper problem, according to this diagnosis, is that the American Constitution, in its very design, tends to break down when ideological conflict grows too intense.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

On the night the media announced their projection that Joe Biden would be president-elect of the United States, Biden sought to put the culture war genie back in the bottle. This was, in and of itself, rather ironic, given Biden’s role in stoking the culture wars, from destroying the Supreme Court hopes of Robert Bork to suggesting that Mitt Romney wanted to put black Americans back in chains. Still, Biden expressed that the way forward for the country lay in unity rather than recrimination. “Now,” Biden intoned, “let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

The broadcast, beamed into millions of homes around the country, praised unfettered competition, sounded the alarm on excessive regulation, disparaged labor unions, and blamed the government for everything from declining educational performance to inflation. Other checks on the unbridled power of major corporations were also losing their purchase around this time. In 1978 Robert Bork, the Yale law professor and future Supreme Court nominee, published The Antitrust Paradox, arguing that the most important consideration when evaluating potential mergers was whether or not a combination was likely to raise prices for consumers in the short term. It was a narrow interpretation of the potential harms that could arise from monopolistic behavior and gave little credence to the potential for more concentrated industries to raise prices over time.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In the EU, competition policy has emerged as one of the most important functions of the Commission, with a powerful Commissioner for Competition (even if its highly technical nature draws little attention in the social science literature) (Cini and McGowan 1998; McGowan 2010). In the United States, antitrust law, of course, builds on the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914, but there is broad consensus that consumer-centered competition policies have been notably strengthened since the late 1970s, marked by the publication of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox in 1978 (see Hovenkamp 2015). FIGURE 4.4. Inflation rates before and after adoption of inflation targetingl. Notes: Dates inflation targeting was first adapted: 1) Reserve Bank of New Zealand, April 1988; 2) Sveriges Riksbank (Swedish central bank), January 1993; 3) Reserve Bank of Australia, March 1993.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

In 1987, what had once been the dramatic sideshows of politics became the main event: the candidate and his humiliated wife under the hot lights, the nominee at the televised hearing table talking through and around and against his own past, the ideologues and interest groups on each side of every question large and small mobilizing for total war, the daily excavation of old and recent sins in the life of a politician, the momentum building to a crescendo, the reporters a pack of wild dogs outracing one another on the blood scent of some powerful but wounded quarry. In 1987, there was Gary Hart, there was Robert Bork, and there was Joe Biden—the last two happening at the same moment. Inside the campaign, the two weeks after the Kinnock story were a frantic nightmare, every day a new shock. But in retrospect, the dénouement looked as mechanical and inevitable as an ancient sacrificial rite at the center of a tribal culture.

…

“I’m angry with myself for having been put in this position—for having put myself in this position,” Biden announced to the firing squad of cameras. “And, lest I say something that might be somewhat sarcastic, I should go to the Bork hearings.” With that, Biden went to the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor and took his seat as chairman of the Judiciary Committee hearings that would lead to the defeat of Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and begin Biden’s political rehabilitation. Connaughton was shell-shocked. His hero had been exposed as a phony, reduced from White House material to national joke in two weeks. “His strength, he claimed, was his ability to speak and move people,” Connaughton said.

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

And yet, Prosserʼs four categories are far from universally accepted. Nor have we begun to see more than a glimmer of their implications for the electronic age. Although much of the legal activity surrounding privacy is taking place in the turbid realm of torts, there has also been some legislation by statute. For instance, when Judge Robert H. Bork was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, some journalists obtained his video rental records, presumably to learn if he had kinky tastes. Outraged by this intrusion, Congress passed the Video Privacy Act, outlawing this narrowly specific invasion of privacy. As yet, there is no comparable protection for books or periodicals, or even our medical histories.

…

Even as we plunge into the electronic age, legal scholars keep hedging, backtracking, and disagreeing over the constantly shifting borderline between the essential interests of the individual and the practical needs of an urban state. This chaos is especially noteworthy when we compare it to the way certain other rights, especially that of free speech, are treated as quasi-religions essences and defended with rulings that are fierce in their sweeping, uncompromising clarity. Robert Bork is among the many jurists who have called privacy a “derived” right, not a basic one, like free speech. What does tend to come through many recent privacy decisions is the following: 1. The “right to be let alone,” to go about our lives free from unreasonable interference by external forces, has become somewhat accepted as a guiding principle of common law. 2.

Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

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

Lindley Clark, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1987. In short, not a limited state, but a more powerful one, which serves the wealthy and privileged. 3. Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of constitutional law at the University of Southern California, speaking for a group of lawyers opposing the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, reflecting the views of civil libertarians rather generally; Bernard Weinraub, NYT, Aug. 29, 1987. A principle that emerges with still greater clarity is that where there’s business versus anyone, business wins. On Bork’s muddled thinking and “fake” scholarship, see Ronald Dworkin, New York Review, Aug. 13, 1987; Arthur Schlesinger, WSJ, Sept. 24, 1987.

Misogynies by Joan Smith

classic study, Etonian, Norman Mailer, Robert Bork

Two other former employees of Judge Thomas came forward to say that he had made sexual remarks to them while he was their boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1984 and 1985. What about the case against Anita Hill? The notion that she was politically motivated did not survive the revelation of her own conservative politics, including her support for the rightwing Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, in 1987. Her failure to make an official complaint about Thomas at the time of the alleged harassment drew a sympathetic reaction from thousands of women who have remained silent in similar circumstances; when I was grabbed and kissed by a dee-jay at the radio station where I worked in 1979, I struggled free but did not complain to the management because he was a far more valued employee than I was.

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

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

It viewed the market as a structure influencing the conduct of businesses and the performance of the industry. This set of ideas and principles came to be known as the Harvard School of antitrust. The Chicago School brought a counterrevolution in the 1970s which tried to put economic efficiency at the center of antitrust policy. Robert Bork’s highly influential book, The Antitrust Paradox, marked a shift in policy in 1978. As IO economists John Kwoka and Lawrence White (2014) explain, “the skepticism and even some hostility toward big business that characterized the initial period of antitrust have been replaced by current policy that evaluates market structure and business practices differently.”

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

During the drafting of new constitutions and laws around the world, the United States often encouraged (and, in the case of Japan, imposed) tough new antitrust laws. But in the 1970s, a new school of thought came to dominate the debate around monopoly and competition. The newer theory, popularized by judge and legal scholar Robert Bork, held that economic concentration was a bad thing only if there was demonstrable harm in the form of higher prices to consumers. As long as monopolies charged fair prices, they were perfectly acceptable. Bork’s narrow interpretation of antitrust law aligned perfectly with the Friedman doctrine and the political atmosphere of the 1980s.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

By the 1960s, however, several economists were already articulating ideas that were more skeptical of the utility of antitrust measures, aimed at limiting the power of big business. Particularly important in this was George Stigler, who saw antitrust action as part of the overall meddling of governments, just like regulations. Stigler’s ideas influenced legal scholars with some knowledge of economics, most notably Robert Bork. Bork’s influence and persona extended far beyond academia. He was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and then became acting attorney general after his predecessor and his deputy resigned rather than accepting the pressure from the president to fire Archibald Cox, the independent prosecutor going after the Watergate scandal.

…

Specifically, this paper shows that conditioning on the sample of innovative firms, small-young firms are much more innovative than large-old firms (where large firms are those with more than two hundred employees, small firms are those with fewer than two hundred employees, and young firms have existed fewer than nine years). For example, the R&D-to-sales ratio is about twice for small-young firms as for large-old firms. The probability of patenting is also higher for small-young firms than for large-old firms. Robert Bork is discussed in Appelbaum (2019). On the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges and its effects on rulings, see Ash, Chen, and Naidu (2022). On current Supreme Court justices’ relationships with the Federalist Society, see Feldman (2021), although some of the details are disputed. A Lost Cause.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

Roosevelt put it in an address to Congress in 1938, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” But right around the time that all those jobs were offshored to China, the government started to change its mind on the monopoly threat. In his seminal 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork, the failed Reagan nominee for the Supreme Court, argued that corporate mergers benefited consumers by providing lower prices and promoting greater business efficiency. The government should stop focusing on ensuring competition for competition’s sake, he thought, and instead focus on consumer welfare.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

They focused their attention on the latter, in the belief that the likelihood that any noncompetitive practice could survive was, in any case, low. 67.The Supreme Court seemed to buy this argument in Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U.S. 209 (1993). Even at the time that these arguments were first put forward by Chicago lawyers, for instance by Robert Bork, they were skewered by economists such as Nobel Prize winner Oliver Williamson in “Review of The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself by Robert H. Bork,” University of Chicago Law Review 46, no. 2 (1979): 10. Developments of economic theory since then have reinforced these conclusions. It’s ironic that at the same time the US has made it difficult to win a predatory pricing case within the country, it’s easy to win the analogous case when charging foreign companies with unfair trade practices, charging prices below costs. 68.Currently, the burden falls on the plaintiff (the party claiming that the firm is acting in a noncompetitive way) to show that the anticompetitive effects outweigh the efficiency gains.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Appropriating the most appealing rhetoric of the Independents, and arguing persuasively that the Bell system could get the job done more effectively, Vail turned his monopoly into a patriotic cause. There is a long-running debate in the field of antitrust theory as to what should matter when judging the conduct of a monopolist. Robert Bork, the onetime federal judge and notoriously rejected Supreme Court candidate, is famous for arguing that the corporation’s intent, whether malign or beneficent, should be irrelevant.24 Yet as Bork himself knew, for most of the history of antitrust, attitude is everything, even if market efficiencies are supposed to matter most.

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Danielian himself was drawing on a three-volume FCC document entitled Telephone Investigation: Special Investigation Docket, Report on Control of Telephone Communication, Control of Independent Companies (1936–37). 22. The settlement is discussed in Mueller, Universal Service, 130. 23. The government reaction to the agreement is covered in Brooks, Telephone, 136. 24. Bork’s opinion on the irrelevance of corporate intent can be read in Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 38–39. 25. This quote is in Theodore Vail, “Some Observations on Modern Tendencies,” Educational Review vol. 51, February 1916, 109, 129. 26. Mueller, Universal Service, 146. CHAPTER 4: THE TIME IS NOT RIPE FOR FEATURE FILMS 1. For a more detailed account of this initial meeting (and an excellent history of the rise of the American film industry), see James Forsher, The Community of Cinema: How Cinema and Spectacle Transformed the American Downtown (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 30–32. 2.

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

People have different instinctual reactions to the existence of these databases. Some welcome them and see the efficiency as a net gain for society (Brin 1998). Others fret about how the information might be used for other purposes. We have laws protecting the movie rental records of people because the data became a focal point during the Senate confirmation hearings of Robert Bork (Etzioni 1999). Times and mores change, and no one knows what will be made of this information in the future. Cigarette smoking was once widespread and an accepted way to push the pause button on life. Now, companies fire people for smoking to save medical costs. What will the society of the future do with your current purchase records?

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

Had it not been for the Fed’s timely intervention, it seems quite likely that the stock market panic of 1987 could have provoked a broader financial panic, which would have done great damage to the overall economy. In the days following the crash, many people rushed forward to offer explanations for what had happened. The market break was said to be the result of the failure of the Senate to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court (showing Reagan to be a lame duck), mistaken Fed monetary policy (either too tight or too loose), or concerns about the ever-present budget and trade deficits. Donald Trump said that there were “too many things wrong with the country” and claimed that he had sold out all his stocks before the crash.7 One explanation that received a great deal of attention involved proposed legislation to disallow tax deductions for interest paid on money borrowed to finance corporate takeovers.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

The crucial difference is that these criticisms are now embedded in the fabric of mass culture. We live in an era of pop pessimism, with all the problems and limitations that cultural perspective tends to create. Contemporary pessimism does not surface just in gloomy tracts like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or Robert Bork’s Slouching Toward Gommorah. We see it popularized in futuristic films like The Road Warrior, Total Recall, Waterworld, and Escape from New York, whose implicit messages are all derived from cultural pessimist models. They present a future in which traditional standards of barbarism and civilization are deliberately inverted.

…

Without Jacob Burckhardt’s gloomy vision of the European future, Nietzsche’s nihilist vitalism would have seemed ludicrous. Without an Oswald Spengler pronouncing the bourgeois West extinct, the German revolution of the Right would have lacked its sense of historical inevitability. When an Arnold Toynbee or Paul Kennedy or Kevin Phillips or Robert Bork solemnly writes our civilization’s epitaph, the cultural pessimists gather to celebrate at the wake. Do we conclude, then, that anyone with misgivings about the direction of modern society should keep silent, or that such misgivings are fanciful or the result of self-delusion? Certainly not. The effects of rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century were in fact deeply disruptive and inflicted pain on large numbers of people.

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

According to students who were there, Levi would spend the first four days of the week explaining existing antitrust law, after which Director devoted the fifth to explaining why none of it made any economic sense. At first Levi bridled, but eventually he was won over by Director’s relentless economic logic. So were the students. “A lot of us who took the antitrust course or the economics course underwent what can only be called a religious conversion,” said Robert Bork, who studied law at Chicago in the early 1950s. “It changed our view of the entire world.”18 Many of Director’s students went on to make his economics teachings the focal point of their careers. An academic movement had been launched. Director’s main message was that things happened in the business world for a reason, and that when one looked hard enough one would usually find Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work—even at General Motors.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks." Eisman asked, "Are any regulators interested in this?" "No," said Sandler. "That's when I decided the system was really, 'Fuck the poor.'" In his youth, Eisman had been a strident Republican. He joined right-wing organizations, voted for Reagan twice, and even loved Robert Bork. It wasn't until he got to Wall Street, oddly, that his politics drifted left. He attributed his first baby steps back to the middle of the political spectrum to the end of the cold war. "I wasn't as right-wing because there wasn't as much to be right-wing about." By the time Household's CEO, Bill Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

While it was originally intended to apply to a broad range of public and private databases to parallel the HEW report, the Act was amended before passage to apply only to government agencies’ records.4 Congress never enacted a comparable comprehensive regulatory scheme for private databases. Instead, private databases are regulated only in narrow areas of sensitivity such as credit reports (addressed by a complex scheme passed in 1970 affecting the handful of credit reporting agencies)5 and video rental data,6 which has been protected since Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was leaked to a newspaper during his confirmation process in 1987.7 The HEW report expresses a basic template for dealing with the informational privacy problem: first, a sensitivity is identified at some stage of the information production process—the gathering, storage, or dissemination of one’s private information—and then a legal regime is proposed to restrict these activities to legitimate ends.

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

Haldeman that “an amazing number of people around Harvard and MIT are extremely upset at the prospect of McGovern’s nomination” and named “one particular” individual that the Nixon campaign ought to reach out to: Ithiel de Sola Pool.24 By October, Pool had been named an honorary vice chair of Democrats for Nixon.25 He joined Scholars for the President, with fifty-four other academics, including Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, and Robert Bork, and signed a letter published in the New York Times on October 15, supporting the Committee for the Re-election of the President.26 While Pool avowed Nixon, Popkin’s persecution at the hands of the Nixon Justice Department became a national political cause. As the New York Times reported on November 1, the grand jury had become entangled “in an almost impenetrable thicket of legal objections raised by a group of doggedly recalcitrant witnesses.”

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

For one of her first tasks, Lynn assigned Khan to write a report on the history of Amazon’s first and most dominant market, the book industry. A few years later, Khan applied the same skeptical, journalistic approach to her article for the Yale Law Journal. Her paper took its name from a seminal 1978 book by Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that regulators should curb market power only when it might result in higher prices for consumers. Khan soberly countered that the so-called “consumer welfare standard” was ill-suited to the consolidating effects of the internet and to a company like Amazon, which ruthlessly lowered prices to bleed out competitors and amass market share—a perpetually money-losing strategy that was nevertheless endorsed by its patient investors.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Rehnquist had aggressively fought local antidiscrimination laws in Phoenix, where Goldwater had valiantly fought for them as appropriate and morally imperative. As a Supreme Court clerk, Rehnquist had even written a memo arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson should be upheld. And, not surprisingly, Rehnquist confirmed Goldwater’s instincts that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional. Goldwater approached Professor Robert Bork of Yale University for a second opinion. Bork was on the record already as arguing that the matter was “not whether racial prejudice or preference is a good thing but whether individual men ought to be free to deal and associate with whom they please for whatever reasons appeal to them.” He reiterated that opinion to Goldwater in a seventy-five-page brief.

…

His liege men had been by his side in San Francisco: Warren Nutter, chairman of the University of Virgina’s economics department; Dick Ware, who dispensed the largesse of a deceased motor oil manufacturer from Michigan as director of the Earhart-Relm Foundation; trusty Ed McCabe and his second, Chuck Lichenstein; Baroody’s old AEI partner, W. Glenn Campbell, now running the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Baroody’s aristocracy were ad hoc consultants, conservative intellectuals like Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Bill Rehnquist, and Robert Strausz-Hupé. They found the very idea of consulting polls contemptible. Kitchel, Baroody, and Goldwater didn’t bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane (“YIA BI KEN” [House in the Sky], read the legend above the lightning stripe running down its side) was their playhouse: Kitchel, Karl Hess, and the candidate conversed in Navajo (Hess was studying up), swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

The issue today centers on companies abusing their market power to beget greater social, cultural, and political power. The main victim isn’t the consumer in the market; it’s the citizen in our democracy. Neither the original antitrust statutes like the Sherman Act nor the revisionist judicial logic of more recent antitrust scholars like Robert Bork was designed or equipped to tackle this uniquely twenty-first-century conundrum. That leads to a classical error made by professional politicians: using yesterday’s toolkit to fight today’s problems. There’s a children’s story about a character called Br’er Rabbit who pleads “please don’t throw me into that briar patch!”

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

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

The professor was an optimist and a tireless educator who believed that legislative and judicial action invariably reflect the public opinion of twenty to thirty years earlier. It was an insight that he and Hayek—the two have been described as “soul mates and adversaries”—had crafted and transformed into systematic strategies and tactics.70 As Hayek told Robert Bork in a 1978 interview, “I’m operating on public opinion. I don’t even believe that before public opinion has changed, a change in the law will do any good… the primary thing is to change opinion.…”71 Friedman’s conviction oriented him toward the long game as he threw himself into the distinctly nonacademic project of neoliberal evangelism with a steady stream of popular articles, books, and television programs.

…

For a wise and elegant defense of democracy, see also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015). 70. Roger W. Garrison, “Hayek and Friedman,” in Elgar Companion to Hayekian Economics, ed. Norman Barry (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2014). 71. Friedrich Hayek, interview by Robert Bork, November 4, 1978, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles, http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu. 72. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2000); Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 1:620. 73. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 614–15. 74.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Fighting the Second Bank’s fight, Webster was able to defeat the nomination, humiliating Taney, who became the first cabinet nominee in American history rejected by the Senate.37 It is tempting to believe that Washington today suffers from unprecedented rancor and partisanship, especially when it comes to the judicial confirmation process. Critics often point to the Senate’s 1987 rejection of Robert Bork, an outspoken conservative nominated by President Ronald Reagan, as the turning point. Yet politics in the 1830s was equally divisive, if not more so, and Webster was one of the most aggressive partisan warriors. Unsatisfied with merely embarrassing Taney by defeating his cabinet nomination, Webster in 1834 organized a Senate censure of both Taney and Jackson.

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

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

Too often, my party has focused on the national economy, to the exclusion of all else, speaking a sterile language of rates and numbers, of CBO and GNP. Too often my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.” Slouching Towards Gomorrah was also the title of a recent polemic by Robert Bork, whose 1987 Supreme Court nomination was scotched after Democrats branded him a dangerous ideologue. To the right, Bork would forever be a hero, and it was customary for Republican office seekers to pay homage to his martyrdom. Bush’s signaling was clear. He was looking for ways to defy the Puritan caricature voters were now attaching to Republican politicians.

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

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

Although he has given nearly as much money to the Democrats as Geffen or Spielberg has, he made his biggest mark by founding People for the American Way in 1981. The group was formed to push back against the evangelical right, and it emerged as the leading opponent of Reagan’s judicial appointments—for example, Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Lear has also given c08.indd 176 5/11/10 6:24:52 AM left-coast money 177 money to a variety of progressive organizations, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. The liberal leanings of some of the entertainment industry’s most successful leaders help explain why Democrats are awash in Hollywood money (and why they rarely criticize the trashy, violent, and just plain dumb cultural products coming out of that town).

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

Otherwise, conservatism was “destined to remain the Stupid Party and die.” The Times case study of the new counterintelligentsia was the American Enterprise Institute. In 1970, it had employed twenty-four people on a budget of less than $1 million. It now employed more than five times that on a budget of $7 million. Distinguished fellows included Robert Bork, a former solicitor general of the United States, whose students at Yale Law School nicknamed his course on anti-trust law “Pro-Trust”; a former president of the American Political Science Association; and the most recent former president of… the United States. They published eight periodicals, produced “a ready-made set of editorials sent regularly to 105 newspapers and public affairs programs carried on more than 300 television stations, and centers for the display of AEI materials in some 300 college libraries.”

…

This was radical even among conservative Republicans; so much so that the right-wing group that spawned the movement Brown was joining, the National Taxpayers Union, was alarmed. They had won approval in twenty-six out of the thirty-four state legislatures the Constitution required to convene such a convention by organizing under the radar. Now that Brown had flushed the idea into the open, other conservatives came out of the woodwork to denounce it. Robert Bork said constitutional conventions were “the last resort of foundering nations, not the casual practice of a successful one.” Barry Goldwater called the idea “a tragic mistake.” President Carter, for his part, called it “extremely dangerous.” Brown harbored ambitions to do what Ronald Reagan had: challenge a sitting president from his own party.

…

For the second year in a row, they left in a warm glow of unity after passing a slate of resolutions that leaned far to the right. They overwhelmingly rejected the proposal of the radical National Taxpayers Union to call a constitutional convention for a balanced budget amendment—but overwhelmingly endorsed a bill drafted by Milton Friedman and Robert Bork to achieve the same result through the normal legislative process; and Washington conventional wisdom on fiscal policy ratcheted several clicks to the right. George Will gloatingly compared the Maryland resort to where the Bolsheviks plotted their overthrow of the Romanov dynasty: “Comes the revolution, the Tidewater Inn here will be regarded as America’s equivalent of the Smolny Institute.”

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Wedgwood (1910–97), English historian and biographer of leading figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the English Civil War and the Thirty Years’ War. 23 Aaron Director (1901–2004), former leftist radical whose teaching at the University of Chicago Law School influenced leading right-leaning American justices, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. 24 Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998), p. 158. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 159. After 1957, when his children were old enough to be left alone in the United States, Milton Friedman, often accompanied by his wife, Rose, made the annual Mont Pelerin meeting his summer vacation.

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

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

“The enemy in America” he argued, “is the tyrannical and indifferent majority: the good people, the churchgoers, the typical Americans.”9 But Neuhaus and Novak eventually broke with their radical past, dismissing the 1960s as a “slum of a decade.” They feuded with their former comrades, and moved smartly to the right, in due time finding a comfortable home in the bosom of the conservative establishment. The guests at Neuhaus’s ordination ceremony to the Catholic priesthood included Buckley and Robert Bork, the right’s leading judicial thinker; George W. Bush referred to him simply as “Father Richard.” Novak is now a cardinal in the Papal College of neoconservatism, the American Enterprise Institute. (When he first arrived at the AEI, some of the economists and social policy people seemed at a loss as to what to make of a scholar of religion, wondering if he was there to say grace; now they defer to him.)

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Underlying all of this focus on pot was a surge of cultural conservatism into positions of power in the new administration. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen the emergence of a movement of conservative intellectuals. Periodicals like Commentary, The Public Interest, and occasionally National Review were featuring think pieces from people like Robert Bork, Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, and James Burnham. Where someone like George Wallace openly appealed to base prejudices, and the Moral Majority might openly cite the Bible as an authority when discussing public policy, the right’s emerging tweed caucus intellectualized the culture wars. They made essentially the same points that Nixon political strategists had made among themselves in memos and behind closed doors, only with more erudition, and more for public consumption.

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

By dint of his efforts, Hoover became the primary location for Austrian School correspondence—Haberler’s and Machlup’s respective papers also ended up there, as did the archives of the IHS. Meanwhile Heritage invited Hayek to Washington on several occasions for conferences and the conferral of a distinguished fellowship. Hayek was feted at a Heritage Foundation conference on constitutional economics in 1985, which included conservative stalwarts Robert Bork, James Buchanan, William Niskanen, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock, and others. In Washington, he shared stages with old friends from Vienna (Haberler and Machlup) and Chicago (Milton Friedman and George Stigler). He participated in several conferences at AEI that Haberler helped organize. Cato paid the salary of his English-language secretary in the late 1970s, and he was its guest of honor at a 1984 conference titled “Planning America: Government vs. the Market.”

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

If we focus on breaking up Facebook as a cure-all, we will distract ourselves from legislating and regulating the root causes of the harms created by the Hype Machine. Since the 1970s, U.S. antitrust law has been dominated by a “consumer welfare” perspective—defined by Yale law professor and appellate judge Robert Bork and promoted by the Chicago School of Economics—that narrowly interprets consumer harm from uncompetitive markets as the result of higher prices (and secondarily from restricted output and reduced quality). But this narrow view misses Facebook entirely. Facebook is free. Consumers aren’t harmed by Facebook’s ability to charge higher prices because Facebook doesn’t charge consumers to begin with.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

which bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”19 A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”20 Erik Prince’s close friend, political collaborator, and beneficiary Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays of the issue, as did extremist Judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. “Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have,” asserted the symposium’s unsigned introduction. “This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

As a member of the law school faculty, Director helped found the Chicago School of thought on antitrust law, which claimed the American application of antitrust laws to break up large companies was often misguided and restrained economic growth, and these ideas became the foundation of Ronald Reagan’s weakened antitrust enforcement in the 1980s. Director’s students at the Chicago law school included future outspoken federal judges Robert Bork and Richard Posner, whose conservative views later had wide influence. Hayek was ultimately given a position on the university’s Committee for Social Thought, not in its economics department. It is possible that the economics faculty, fully understanding how influential he was in redirecting their theoretical work, did not want to acknowledge him.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

Richard Deveson (New York: Arnold, 1995), pp. 166ff; David Blackbourn, The Long 19th Century: A History of Germany 1780-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), introduction; Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). Sean Hannity, "The Battle over Competing Visions of the Family and Family Values," speech at United Families International Conference, November 21-22, 2003, at www.unitedfamilies.org. See also Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1997); D'Souza, What's So Great About America, also raises the question of whether "an open society, where such criticisms are permitted and even encouraged, has the fortitude and will to resist external assault." 228 N O T E S TO P A G E S 28-33 45.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Whatever the reason, and it is probably a combination of all of these changes and more, politics has become uglier than the relative civility that prevailed in Allen Drury’s Washington. The players on opposite sides and even many on the same team don’t like each other, and they do little to hide it. Some, mostly Republicans, date the beginning of the ugliness to the Democrats’ fierce opposition to Robert Bork, a brilliant judge whom the Democrats attacked relentlessly as they blocked President Reagan’s bid to appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1987. More observers, including many Republicans, date it to the rise of Newt Gingrich, whose ascendance began at about the same time as the Bork war. In 1974, Gingrich was a restless history professor at West Georgia College.

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

He was among a handful of senators who voted against the bill, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to address the intractable legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Goldwater’s vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state’s rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater’s vote went down as a vote for segregation. Rand understood his action differently because she shared his individualistic perspective on rights and his belief that private property was sacrosanct.

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

American television viewers watched in disbelief as news anchormen broke into regular late night broadcasting to report that President Nixon had fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, abolished the Watergate task force, and conducted a purge of his own Justice Department. Nixon accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and sacked Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, for disloyalty when both men refused Nixon’s order to fire Cox. (The number three Justice official Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox.) The calls for Nixon’s resignation came on a day when the country still lacked a vice president—nominee Gerald Ford had only begun the process to win congressional confirmation—and while the secretary of state was in Moscow conferring with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on the war in the Middle East.

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

See also Methaven's “ultraminimal state” and its Facestate project: Andrea Hyde, “Metahaven's Facestate,” Walker Art Center, December 13, 2011, http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2011/metahavens-facestate. 41.  The confusion this sows is readily apparent in both attempts to curtail Google under the rubric of a trust “monopoly” and in the awkward rationales for why Google is actually not a monopoly. See judicial “originalist” Robert Bork's back-bending “What Does the Chicago School Teach About Internet Search and the Antitrust Treatment of Google,” Robert H. Bork and J. Gregory Sidak, Journal of Competition Law & Economics 8 (2012): 663–700. 42.  In a way, geopolitical reality is only catching up with the anticipations of the science fiction that has already explored the proliferation and institutionalization of data havens and data infrastructures, “community clouds,” cloud-based microreligions and macrostates, and others.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel. Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass—chair of George W.

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

Specter opposed Reagan’s spending cuts on Social Security, unemployment benefits, child health care, food stamps, and programs for the poor, and he fought against a ban on abortions and a constitutional amendment legalizing school prayer. National Review put Specter on its cover in 1983 as the “Worst GOP Senator.” But what most infuriated the hard-core Right was his vote in 1987 in the Senate Judiciary Committee against Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Specter’s no vote helped defeat Bork. The New Right smoldered. In 2004, the hard-core Right decided to purge Specter by challenging him in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary and intimidating other Senate RINO moderates. “If we beat Specter, we won’t have any trouble with wayward Republicans …,” asserted Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a militantly anti-tax, anti-government right-wing group.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Everyone chuckled. Because he had served as a judge since 1991, Luttig’s record as a conservative was clearer, and most of the questions were designed to get a sense of who he was as a person. But it was not enough to evaluate candidates. The confirmation of Thomas and the failed nomination of Robert H. Bork made clear that Supreme Court selections had become another battleground in the political wars. By filibustering Bush’s appointments to lower courts in his first term, Senate Democrats had already demonstrated an appetite for the struggle. Bush was determined to be ready as his father had not been.

…

“The reaction of many conservatives today will be that the president has made possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas, who had been the president’s lawyer,” Miranda wrote, referring to one of Lyndon Johnson’s choices for the Supreme Court. Within hours, other conservatives expressed disappointment, including William Kristol, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Robert Bork, and Rush Limbaugh. While conservatives had been uncomfortable with some of Bush’s decisions before, like No Child Left Behind, Medicare, and Social Security, this was the first time they revolted in such an overt, unrestrained way. Cheney jumped in to defend the president’s choice, calling Limbaugh to vouch for Miers despite his own doubts.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

He’s logical … he’s really easy to get along with, he’s really funny, really great with kids, very generous, very giving in all ways. It’s not odd to us.” In his interview with the Times, Field was in full roar, comparing the religious right in America to Nazis, and defending his campaign against Robert Bork, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the Supreme Court, calling him “the most dangerous kind of monster.” That kind of talk and the kind of music Interscope promoted had put Field in the sights of then vice president Dan Quayle, who met with the daughter of a Texas state trooper who’d been shot by a fleeing suspect who was driving a stolen car and listening to Tupac Shakur’s Interscope album, 2pacalypse Now.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Company annual and quarterly reports; GDP data from Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 1.1.5, available at http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/Index.asp. Figures are as of September 2009. 82. “Officials Fear Systemic Risks of Bailout,” Marketplace, October 21, 2009, available at http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/21/pm-systemtic-risk/. 83. The origins of the Sherman Act of 1890 are unclear and remain controversial. See Robert H. Bork, “Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act,” Journal of Law and Economics 9 (1966): 7–48; and George J. Stigler, “The Origins of the Sherman Act,” Journal of Legal Studies 14 (1985): 1–12. Thomas Hazlett argues it was a political compromise designed to provide Republican legislators “with a cosmetic defense on the trust question, in anticipation of the upcoming consumer-to-industry transfers in the McKinley Tariff,” and “it was not thought to do more than codify and federalize the common law.”

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

Gates had been on the government’s radar since 1990, and he successfully weaseled out of charges throughout the decade with appeals and consent decrees, though regulators stalled a merger with the tax software firm Intuit to death. To press its case against Microsoft, Netscape hired a surprise ringer: Robert Bork, legendary conservative, one-time Supreme Court nominee, and author of the prevailing theory of antitrust. If even Bork said there was a monopoly, there probably was. The Clinton administration filed suit and Microsoft hired its own ringer—a recent head of the DOJ antitrust division, natch. Still, the district judge didn’t like Bill Gates, and he didn’t like Microsoft.

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

(Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 131-32. 22 “Chicago school” analysts argued that a monopolist possesses a fixed amount of market power and therefore can extract only a fixed amount of monopoly profit from consumers, whether from one market or several. On this basis, they concluded that leverage of monopoly power from one market into another is impossible. See, e.g., Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Richard A. Posner, Antitrust Law: An Economic Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). More recent economic analyses have demonstrated several mechanisms by which market power in one market can be used to harm competition in another market.

Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Unilateral Conduct Working Group, Report on the Objectives of Unilateral Conduct Laws, Assessment of Dominance/Substantial Market Power, and State-Created Monopolies (Moscow: International Competition Network, May 2007), http://www.internationalcompetitionnetwork.org/uploads /library/doc353.pdf. 8. See, for example, Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Richard A. Posner, “The Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127 (1978): 925, 933. 9. Posner, “The Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis.” 10. Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market (New York: Harper Business/ HarperCollins, 2009), 89–107. 11.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Schroeder, “The Midas Touch: The Lethal Effect of Wealth Maximization,” Wisconsin Law Review 1999, no. 4 (1999): 687, 754–60. 31.George J. Stigler, “Economics or Ethics?,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1981), 143, 176; see also Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 119 (reasoning profit-maximization assumption is “crucial” to the Chicago School’s theories); Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown 1986), 3 (“The task of economics . . . is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions—what we shall call his ‘self-interest’”); Robert A.

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

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

The only three Duke lacrosse players on the 2006 team who were not part of any lawsuit were Matt Danowski, the son of the Duke lacrosse coach; Kevin Mayer, who had been “passed out” at the party, according to Evans, McFadyen, and others; and Matt Zash, one of the three cocaptains who had lived at 610 North Buchanan and told his friends that he “doesn’t split dark wood.” (Nifong observed that Zash’s lack of involvement with the lawsuits “is interesting if it shows nothing other than restraint on his part.”) Incredibly, their attorneys and publicist—Bob Bork Jr., the son of Robert Bork, the unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee—commandeered the National Press Club in Washington, one block from the White House, to announce the lawsuit. At the same time, they also launched a website to accompany the filing of the lawsuit. “This is kind of a media center,” Bork said, “and Durham isn’t.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

In Damon Linker’s review of Neuhaus entitled “Without a Doubt: A Catholic priest, a pious president, and the Christianizing of America,” in The New Republic, April 3, 2006. The book Linker reviewed is Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Neuhaus’s controversial First Things Symposium included contributions by Robert H. Bork, Charles W. Colson (who calls for “some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation”), and Robert P. George. 6. In Jihad vs. McWorld. 7. See Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). The limits of the creolization argument, discussed below, are evident in the fact that Kennedy’s assessment of Japanese domination proved to be exaggerated, while the United States turned out to be a more difficult leader to overtake than he had suggested. 8.

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

Bill Marriott, Regional Representative, Youth Speech, “Letters from David,” Suitland Maryland Stake Conference, June 12, 1994. 5. Michael S. Rosenwald, “Marriott’s Youngest Son Makes His Mark; Fast Rise of Hotel Firm’s Global Sales Chief Prompts Speculation About Succession,” Washington Post, October 29, 2007. 6. Bill Marriott, Note to Carolyn Cullers, August 23, 1979. 7. Robert H. Bork, Jr., “The price of their toys,” Forbes, October 28, 1985. 8. Blanche T. Sullivan, “From Hot Shoppes to Hotels & Hot Cars,” Low-country Monthly [South Carolina], October 2007. 9. Bill Marriott, Remarks at Bill Shaw’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Celebration, Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, Virginia, October 21, 1999. 10.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

I’d like to begin with the country of my birth, the United States, and then move to the country I currently call home, the United Kingdom. In each section, I’ve done my best to list names alphabetically by surname. In the United States, I would like to thank Michael Abramowitz, Karl Altau, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Anders Åslund, Robert Berschinski, Ellen Bork, Cindy Buhl, Dr. Robert Bux, Ted Bromund, Chris Brose, Senator Benjamin Cardin, David Crane, Charles Davidson, Patrick Davis, Lars de Gier, Sophie de Selliers, Sarah Drake, Grant Felgenhauer, Thomas Firestone, Enes Kanter Freedom, Jeffrey Gedmin, Juleanna Glover, James Goldston, Maggie Goodlander, Michael Gottlieb, Thor Halvorssen, Hans Hogrefe, Gulchehra Hoja, Nathaniel Hurd, Uri Itkin, Nils Johnson-Shelton, Robert Kagan, Robert Karem, Jonathan Karp, Garry Kasparov, Orly Keiner, Michael Kim, David Kramer, Katrina Lantos Swett, Carolyn Leddy, Duncan Levin, Senator Joe Lieberman, Nikita Magnitsky, Representative Tom Malinowski, Christopher Mangum, Paul Massaro, Randy Mastro, Senator John McCain, Meghan McCain, Ambassador Michael McFaul, Representative Jim McGovern, Juan Méndez, Katya Migacheva, Mark Milosch, Tanya Nyberg, Spencer Oliver, Priscilla Painton, Hana Park, Kyle Parker, Julia Pettengill, Lisa Rubin, Randy Scheunemann, Stefan Schmitt, Nate Sibley, Neil Simon, Mason Simpson, Susannah Sirkin, Representative Chris Smith, Kimberly Stanton, Bernie Sucher, Jordan Tama, Piero Tozzi, Fred Turner, Ed Verona, Lindsey Weiss Harris, Senator Roger Wicker, Jonathan Winer, John Wood, and Natasha Zharikova.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game