Ronald Reagan

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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

Bush were a metaphor for leadership change in the whole country. But it was Ronald Reagan who set the tone for politics in the twentyfive years since his election in 1980. At his funeral in June of 2004, President George W. Bush said in the eulogy, ‘‘Ronald Reagan belongs to the ages now, but we preferred it when he belonged to us.’’ The Reagan legacy remained. His 248 Epilogue President George W. Bush bows at the casket of former President Ronald Reagan after giving a eulogy at the funeral service for President Ronald Reagan at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, June 11, 2004. (White House photo by Tina Hager) foreign and domestic policies were the template for all his successors.

Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), p. 109. 62. Vanderbilt Television News Archive, June 11, 1984. 63. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. xi. 64. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 15. 65. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, ‘‘Speeches,’’ March 8, 1983. 66. Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 144. 67. New York Times, June 21, 1984. 68. New York Times, October 26, 1982. 69. Lawrence I. Barrett, Gambling with History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 73–74. 70. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, ‘‘Speeches,’’ May 9, 1982. 71.

Presidents matter, but so do governors, Supreme Court justices, and legislators. The election of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the governorship of George W. Bush in Texas, the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the ‘‘Contract with America’’ all changed the course of politics for the nation as a whole. Their outcome, ratified or rejected in elections, also influenced the cultural agenda for a time. Prologue xi Almost without exception, election outcomes are the chapter divisions in this book. The most important one was 1980, when Ronald Reagan forged a conservative governing coalition that changed the course of American politics.


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

Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan’s Vision: Selected Writings (New York: Free Press, 1994) RRB: Reagan radio broadcast tapes, Hoover Archives, Stanford University RRC: Ronald Reagan syndicated newspaper column RRIHOH: Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Free Press, 2001). RRPL: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California, Ronald Reagan Pre-Presidential Files RVA: Richard V. Allen Papers, Hoover Archives, Stanford University UPI: United Press International newspaper syndicate USNWR: U.S.

MacDougall recorded his awe at how good he looked, “that tanned Texas face, the silver hair, the clean white shirt.” The man was not Ronald Reagan. He was John Connally of Texas. Ronald Reagan was the front-runner among Republicans in every presidential poll. But pundits said this was misleading—that in the earliest innings of a presidential race, first place was a bad place to be. George Romney had been in first place for the Republican nomination in 1967. Edmund Muskie in 1971, and Scoop Jackson in 1975, had been the first-place Democrats. All fell on their faces early in the election year. Ronald Reagan, all agreed, was if anything more vulnerable. At sixty-eight years old, any gaffe, any utterance too far out in right field, any wire-service photo of him falling asleep at some interminable Republican banquet, would be all it would take to finish him.

same jokes “Familiar Lines”; “Reagan Starts His Race for the Presidency,” London Observer, January 28, 1979; “Reagan: Soviet Ultimatum Near,” Palm Beach Post, January 5, 1979; “Reagan’s Index Cards of One Liners,” CBS News, n.d. “adversarial relationship” “Ronald Reagan: What’s Happening to Our Dollar,” California Business, July 1979. “164 different federal agencies” “Items,” RRB, recorded March 2, 1978; “Inside Ronald Reagan: A Reason Interview,” Reason, July 1975. For 131 taxes in a loaf of bread see “Bureaucrats Cause Inflation,” Akron Reporter, June 23, 1976. can’t hit a home run Michael Deaver, A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (New York: Harper, 2001), 27. David Frost’s televised interviews James Reston Jr., The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews (New York: Harmony, 2007).


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

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

Secure in our assessment, we had no problem with the grip-and-grin session we came to expect, if that would indeed help Gorbachev. After all, nobody was better at gripping and grinning than Ronald Reagan. THE AIR FORCE ONE carrying Reagan to Iceland—Sam 27000—had joined the presidential fleet in 1972. Although it was small compared with the 747 that would replace it, it had a history and a scale that Reagan loved. It was good that he did, since he would log more miles on it (630,000) than any of his predecessors. Fittingly, that plane now resides in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, seeming almost airborne on display in its own pavilion. Behind the presidential quarters were the staff conference area and a handful of seats for top presidential aides and secretaries.

Photographic Insert Eager for the quickly planned event, Reagan and Gorbachev greet each other at Hofdi House on Saturday, October 11, 1986. Neither imagined what was in store for him that weekend. (Ronald Reagan Library) Reykjavik was the second summit for Reagan and Gorbachev, after their meeting at Geneva the year before, in November 1985. At their first session on a chilly Swiss morning, a sprightly, coatless Reagan assisted the younger, overcoated Gorbachev up the steps of the villa. “I felt that we lost the game during these first movements,” grumbled a Soviet spokesman after watching the opening play. (Ronald Reagan Library) Billed as a low-key business meeting, Reykjavik was anything but. A hastily summoned Summit Preparatory Committee met on October 3 with forty-five representatives from various U.S. government agencies (on the left), Soviet agencies (right), and Icelandic officials (behind the photographers) to prepare for the unexpected superpower summit just one week away. (© Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur/Kristjan Ari Einarsson) The government called back the newly crowned Miss World—Iceland’s own Hólmfríður Karlsdóttir—from a goodwill tour of Asia to be available in Reykjavik for press interviews over the weekend.

Translators sat at the corners, and two note takers sat behind them, out of the photo. (Ronald Reagan Library) On the Saturday night of the summit weekend there was a grand gathering—part peace rally, part street festival—in downtown Reykjavik, before a live Joan Baez concert. (Ólafur K. Magnússon/Morgunbladid) Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, and President Reagan eye each other warily, as Gorbachev and others look on. The five-star general made a surprise appearance in Reykjavik and led the Soviet arms team in making unprecedented concessions during an all-night Saturday session. (Ronald Reagan Library) The official U.S. residence in Reykjavik, which the ambassador had to vacate for the president’s stay, was filled with the antlers of assorted animals the ambassador had shot.


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

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

Unfortunately for then vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, political pundits and other opinion makers of the 1980s, like those of the 1880s, did not take kindly to aristocratic manners, generally seeing them as feminine…. This was a perception held as much—if not more—by Republicans as by Democrats. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s close friend Senator Paul Laxalt, and even Reagan himself regarded Bush as effete and unmanly. Newspaper articles appeared describing his life as one devoted to pleasing others. Conservative columnist George Will dismissed Bush as “lap dog” with a “thin tinny arf.” There are multiple levels of irony here, beginning with the fact that Ronald Reagan, depicted as the epitome of salt-of-the-earth, manly courage, avoided combat during World War II, remaining instead in Hollywood as a coddled actor, while George H.

This functions exactly the same as the images of moral purity that they work so hard to manufacture, whereby the leaders they embrace—such as Gingrich, Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, even the divorced and estranged-from-his-children Ronald Reagan and Coulter herself (with her revolving door of boyfriends and broken engagements)—are plagued by the most morally depraved and reckless personal lives, yet still parade around as the heroes of the “Values Voters.” Just as what matters is that their leaders present themselves as moral (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders playact as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the playacting. Like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he was some sort of super-brave military hero.

As McGovern put it in a 2007 Los Angeles Times editorial, responding to accusations from Dick Cheney equating “McGovernism” with cowardice and surrender: In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat—a record matched by President Bush. While Republicans have ensured that virtually every asset of America bears the name of Ronald Reagan—including a glorious battleship, the USS Ronald Reagan—right-wing tough guys who never spent a day in the military protested and mocked endlessly when it was announced, in 2005, that a submarine would be named after the Navy veteran Jimmy Carter. Carter is a graduate of the Naval Academy, having attended during World War II.


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

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

For them, the revolutions of 1989 became the foundation of a new post–Cold War weltanschauung: the idea that all totalitarian regimes are similarly hollow at the core and will crumble with a shove from the outside. If its symbol is the Berlin Wall, coming down as Ronald Reagan famously bid it to do in a speech in Berlin in 1987, the operational model was Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. “Once the wicked witch was dead,” as Francis Fukuyama, the eminent political economist, has put it, “the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation.” It is true that instead of seeking to contain the former Soviet Union, as previous administrations had done, the United States under Ronald Reagan chose to confront it. He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev not only to reform the Soviet system from within but to “tear down this wall.”

Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 1993. Peter Robinson’s fascinating book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, 2003, was a key source for the background on Reagan’s immortal speech. Additional references: Hoover Digest, “Tearing Down That Wall,” by Peter M. Robinson, reprinted from the Weekly Standard, June 23, 1997. Also by Robinson, “Why Reagan Matters,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, January 7, 2004. Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987; Address to the Students of Moscow University, May 31, 1988. I cite James Mann’s masterly history of the George W.

He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev not only to reform the Soviet system from within but to “tear down this wall.” Yet other factors figured in this equation, not least a drop in oil prices from roughly $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a decade later, not to mention the Soviet leader’s own actions. Even less well-known is Ronald Reagan’s political evolution. From hardened cold war warrior, he softened both his rhetoric and his policies to the point where his administration became the very model of enlightened diplomatic engagement—the antithesis of hard-right confrontation. Without question, the United States uniquely contributed to the end of the Cold War, from the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, to containment, to our efforts to help create what today has become the European Union.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

And they’re spreading out all over town. This time I’m gonna get me a gun.” At his announcement in January of his candidacy for California governor, Ronald Reagan had blamed the original Watts riot on the “philosophy that in any situation the public should turn to government for the answer.” Now he denounced Governor Brown. And the New York Times—which had last taken note of the California governor’s race in mid-February, commenting on how little attention the actor Ronald Reagan had been able to garner since “his dramatic and carefully rehearsed television entry into the race” (the paper had sent its Hollywood correspondent to cover it, and he had dwelled on the living-room set with the crackling fire, and props such as the bottle Reagan waved while warning how “social tinkering had caused the layoff of 200 workers in ketchup factories”)—now reported, “A withering crossfire of political accusations emerged today after Tuesday’s violent outbreak.”

On Mother’s Day last weekend, his parents went to the Columbia campus and brought a veal parmigiana dinner, which the family ate in their parked car on Amsterdam Avenue.” Marx, Mao, Marcuse, Mother: the rot could come from anywhere now. And such was the context, as spring became summer, within which Ronald Reagan’s presidential bandwagon gathered speed. The wealthy California businessmen who’d backed Ronald Reagan’s entrance into politics had been pushing their man toward the presidency since before he was governor. Reagan himself proved diffident. “Ron honestly believes that God will arrange things for the best,” a Republican told David Broder in January of 1968.

Reagan, the sentimental favorite, ruled himself out by refusing to say whether he was officially running. Now, on May 31, it was Nixon’s turn to supplicate. He arrived armed with his argument that he was the only candidate who could win. His campaign manager, John Mitchell, spun the press silly: “The people here all like Ronald Reagan, but they love Dick Nixon.” It wasn’t so. Strom Thurmond was supposed to be for Nixon. But every time he was asked about Ronald Reagan, he said, “I love that man. He’s the best we’ve got.” After taking the political temperature of the room, Richard Nixon was sorely nervous. He got on the phone to D.C. and begged Strom Thurmond to come down to straighten things out.


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The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Courtesy: Special Collections, University Library, UNLV. 2) Elton and Madelaine Garrett Collection, 000644. Courtesy: Special Collections, University Libraries, UNLV. 3) Photo Collection, 004500. Courtesy: Special Collections, University Libraries, UNLV. 4) C3954504. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “Chronology of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.” 5) C38108-15. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “Chronology of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.” 6) C10593-21A. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 7) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 8) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 9) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 10) Courtesy of Nixon Presidential Library. 11) Photo by Mark Wolfe, January 2, 2006.

Defense Official Korb to Make Case for Pollard’s Release at Knesset,” Jerusalem Post, December 19, 2010. “predilection to support Saudi Arabia” . . . “Weinberger believes”: Zatuchni and Drooz, “Back Door to the PLO.” “Weinberger’s anti-Israel tilt”: Joe Conason, “ ‘Most Antagonistic’ Toward Israel? That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary,” Creators Syndicate, January 10, 2013, https://www.creators.com/liberal/joe-conason/-most-antagonistic-toward-israel-that-would-be-ronald-reagan-s-defense-secretary.html. “Others believed it was more complicated”: Ibid. “redirect” . . . “seem to have differing assessments” . . . “of being hostile” . . . “neglected its ties”: Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Aides at Odds,” New York Times, February 15, 1982.

Clair. “The Truth About the Bohemian Grove.” Counterpunch, June 19, 2001. www.counterpunch.org/2001/06/19/the-truth-about-the-bohemian-grove/print. Conason, Joe. “ ‘Most Antagonistic’ Toward Israel? That Would Be Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary.” Creators Syndicate, January 10, 2013. https://www.creators.com/liberal/joe-conason/-most-antagonistic-toward-israel-that-would-be-ronald-reagan-s-defense-secretary.html. Cooper, Helene. “Obama Turns to Biden to Reassure Jewish Voters, and Get Them to Contribute Too.” New York Times, September 30, 2011. Corpwatch, Global Exchange and Public Citizen. “Bechtel: Profiting from Destruction.


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

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

Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.”44 A showman of extraordinary ability, ideally unschooled in economic history, was required if families were to be convinced to vote against their own economic interest. That leadership was provided by the charismatic and trusted Ronald Reagan. Much of the subsequent success in stripping economic sovereignty from families that we discuss shortly lies with the advocacy role of Friedman and his powerful ability to appeal to wealthy executive suites and, through them, to Ronald Reagan. Similar to prominent twentieth-century scientists such as Francis Crick or Linus Pauling, Friedman’s professional accomplishments lent undue weight to his personal philosophical musings.

Until the Tea Party election of 2010, almost all Congressional Republicans went along, as Rothbard noted: “conservative Republicans … found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits.”27 Republican Party Budget Deficits Ronald Reagan’s attributes, especially his joviality, his ability to inspire, and his fear of nuclear weapons, demand admiration. But balancing a checkbook was obviously not one of his talents. Ronald Reagan proved no more resistant to the siren call of deficit spending and easy credit than the most spendthrift Pharaoh, Roman emperor, or Oriental potentate shaving silver coins to debase their monetary base.

After all, it was the community that hired Earp and sparked the gunfight at the OK Corral, banding together in joint action to improve their lives by creating new opportunity, their eyes set on the future. In contrast, the politician Ronald Reagan chose to demonize the communitarian spirit and the notion that the business community has broad responsibilities to society. Like Ayn Rand, he glorified individualism—precisely the dark societal trade-off rejected by the greatest director of Westerns—over an individual’s responsibility to strengthen community. President Reagan empowered the narcissists among us, instead of the good citizens of Tombstone rightly deified by Ford. In stripping economic sovereignty from families, Ronald Reagan mocked the concept of opportunity symbolized by the visionary families of Tombstone.


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

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

Campbell, Iron Lady, 260. 20. Ibid. 21. Thatcher, Downing Street, 485. 3. THE UNITED STATES, 1980: THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 227. 2. Roger Rosenblatt, “Man of the Year 1980: Ronald Reagan,” Time, January 2, 1981, 3. 3. Reagan wrote in his diary in 1982 that the press was wrong to argue that he was taking aim at the New Deal, and that his real target was the Great Society. See Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 61. 4. Reagan, American Life, 230. 5.

She was, by contrast, an unabashed admirer of the United States in general and of Ronald Reagan in particular. Her speechwriter Ronnie Miller remarked, “She loved America … and America loved her back.”19 John Campbell, her biographer, believes that “a part of her would really rather have been American.”20 As the Soviet bloc began to crumble, the partnership of Thatcher and Reagan took on a global significance. Thatcher was not exaggerating hugely when she wrote in her memoirs, “The West’s system of liberty, which Ronald Reagan and I personified in the eastern bloc, was increasingly in the ascendant; the Soviet system was showing its cracks.”21 While Thatcher and Reagan’s support of democracy in Eastern Europe fits a narrative in which the advances of economic and political freedom throughout the 1980s were essentially inseparable, elsewhere things were more complicated.

But while Thatcher may have exaggerated the extent to which she and Ronald Reagan always represented “freedom,” there is no doubt about the potency and importance of their transatlantic partnership and their promotion of free markets. Together with Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher and Reagan were the dominant figures of the Age of Transformation. 3 THE UNITED STATES, 1980 THE REAGAN REVOLUTION All new American presidents seek to capture the spirit of the age in their inaugural addresses. Ronald Reagan did it more completely than most when he stood facing west behind the Capitol building in January 1981 and proclaimed, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”


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

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

The search for candidates has begun and no doubt some staffers are already dreaming of the offices they will occupy in the West Wing of the White House. If only American politics were so simple. Lose the flag, capture the flag. We liberals have played this game before and sometimes won. We have had Democratic presidents in four of the ten terms that followed Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and there were significant policy victories during the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But scratch below the surface of presidential elections, which seem to follow their own historical rhythm, and things turn very dark, very fast. Clinton and Obama were elected and then reelected with messages that were long on hope and change.

A vision that would orient the Democratic Party and help it win elections and occupy our political institutions over the long term, so we might effect the changes we want and America needs. Liberals bring many things to electoral contests: values, commitment, policy proposals. What they don’t bring is an image of what our shared way of life might be. Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan the American right has offered one. And it is this image—not money, not false advertising, not fearmongering, not racism—that has been the ultimate source of its strength. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated. The Once and Future Liberal is the story of that abdication.

A new generation of well-educated conservative intellectuals had serious, fresh ideas about reforming (not abolishing) government that they really believed in, making them seem the brightest kids in the class. But it wasn’t careful study of their arguments that convinced millions of Americans to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was the imaginative connection he made with the public that transformed those ideas into an epiphany, a vision of a new way of national life, masquerading as an old one. And this allowed him to cast himself as a homespun, aw-shucks John the Baptist. In the year before the election seven out of eight Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

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

., pp. 737, 760. 26 LEAST NOTICED WAS THE PLIGHT: Paul Krugman, “LDC Debt Policy,” in Feldstein, ed., American Economic Policy in the 1980s, p. 719. CHAPTER 7: RONALD REAGAN 1 HIS PROTESTANT MOTHER, THE DO-GOODER: Ronald Reagan with Richard G. Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?: The Ronald Reagan Story (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1965), pp. 7–8. 2 ACCORDING TO RONALD REAGAN: Ibid., pp. 8–9. Also on Jack’s anger, see Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan, The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Chapter 1 in general. Dallek also makes much of Reagan’s fear of a loss of self-control, a more spurious claim, at least to the degree Dallek stresses it. 3 “HE SUCCEEDED IN EVERYTHING HE TRIED”: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 33. 4 HE SHOWED LITTLE OF THE DEEPER EMOTION: Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 305–6. 5 REAGAN RETAINED: Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 157–60. 6 “THE PROFITS OF CORPORATIONS HAVE DOUBLED”: Dallek, Ronald Reagan, p. 27. 7 GARRY WILLS ARGUES PERSUASIVELY: Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 288–97. 8 “THE COMMUNIST PLAN”: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?

Richard Nixon and Arthur Burns Political Expediency 4. Joe Flom The Hostile Takeover and Its Consequences 5. Ivan Boesky Wanting It All 6. Walter Wriston II Bailing Out Citibank 7. Ronald Reagan The Making of an Ideology 8. Ted Turner, Sam Walton, and Steve Ross Size Becomes Strategy 9. Jimmy Carter Capitulation 10. Howard Jarvis and Jack Kemp Tapping the Anger 11. Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan Revolution Completed Two THE NEW GUARD 12. Tom Peters and Jack Welch Promises Broken 13. Michael Milken “The Magnificent” 14. Alan Greenspan Ideologue 15. George Soros and John Meriwether Fabulous Wealth and Controversial Power 16.

During the recession, Reed had slashed expenses, fired tens of thousands of employees, and made Citibank a more cautious and conservative lender, but Alan Greenspan cut interest rates sharply beginning in 1991, producing an economic recovery. Citibank returned to profitability. Now profits returned with economic recovery. By the mid-1990s, Reed had remade his reputation and saved the bank’s independence, but he was still not certain the giant bank could survive without a major partner. 7 Ronald Reagan THE MAKING OF AN IDEOLOGY In the 1960s, Ronald Reagan, well into his fifties, became the political leader of the conservative movement. To almost everyone’s surprise, the former actor won election as governor of California in 1966, even as political conservatives were defeated around him. One of his main strengths had been his understanding of the needs and fears of working people, of which he never lost sight.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

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

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

“We are intensely interested in the supply side,” she said.52 Reaganomics Ronald Reagan made little mention of taxation during his failed 1976 presidential campaign, nor in the early months of his 1980 campaign. But after losing the Iowa caucuses to George H. W. Bush, Reagan headed into the New Hampshire primary in February 1980 needing a victory to reestablish himself as the front-runner. He found traction with voters by promising to cut taxes, debuting a series of ads that proved hugely popular. Announcer: Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings and investment like never before.

Clark was a pioneer in the development of national income accounting, but he got a little too excited about the uses of his measuring stick. 60. Ronald Reagan, “Reflections on the Failure of Proposition #1,” National Review, December 7, 1973. 61. Dart broke into the drugstore business by marrying Charles Walgreen’s daughter. After they were divorced, he left Walgreen’s to run Rexall. His second wife, Jane Bryan, was an actress who had appeared in several movies with Reagan, and the two couples became close friends. 62. Ronald Reagan, “Taxation,” November 28, 1978, reprinted in Reagan, in His Own Hand, ed. Kiron K. Skinner et al. (New York: Free Press, 2001). 63.

Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the profession’s most forceful and uncompromising advocates of free trade, is another longtime opponent of the free movement of capital. See John Williamson and Molly Mahar, A Survey of Financial Liberalization, Essays in International Finance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Department of Economics, 1998). 58. Ronald Reagan, “Milton Friedman and Chile,” December 22, 1976. See Kiron K. Skinner et al., Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan’s Vision; Selected Writings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 98. 59. Economists, even those who disagreed with Friedman’s politics, generally regarded him as a deserving laureate for his academic work. Two letters opposing Friedman’s selection, by laureates in other disciplines, appeared in the New York Times on October 24, 1976.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Quoted in Silber, Volcker: The Triumph, 195. 28. Ronald Reagan to Murray L. Weidenbaum, “Handwritten Note on Gordon Luce Correspondence,” 1981, box FG 143033198, Ronald Reagan Library. The author is grateful to Jerry L. Jordan for bringing this evidence to his attention. 29. Murray L. Weidenbaum to Ronald Reagan, memorandum, August 11, 1981, box FG 143033198, Ronald Reagan Library. The author is grateful to Jerry L. Jordan for providing a copy of this document. 30. Ronald Reagan to Gordon Luce, letter, August 14, 1981, Ronald Reagan Library. Copy obtained from Jerry L. Jordan. 31.

See Edwin Meese, “Campaign Planning Meeting Notes,” n.d., all April and May 1979 Notes, Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, April 1979/May 1979, Box 103, 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Library. 41. Martin, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, 141. 42. Edwin Meese, “Notes and Agendas from Meeting on Public Policy Issues,” September 8, 1979, Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, September 1979, box 103, 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Library. The following account derives from these sources. 43. Greenspan, interview by the author, April 11, 2011. CHAPTER ELEVEN 1.

“Right Move at the Eleventh Hour: Time Board of Economists Generally Backs Fed’s Decision,” Time, October 22, 1979, 24. 20. “Will the Last Remain First? A Cooler Ronald Reagan Enters the Race,” Time, November 26, 1979. 21. “‘President Reagan,’” New Republic, December 1, 1979. For further doubts about Reagan’s seriousness, see “Where Did He Get Those Figures? G.O.P. Front Runner Seems to Pluck Facts from Thin Air,” Time, April 14, 1980. 22. Notes from a meeting with Milton Friedman, January 21, 1980, folder “Meese, Ed—Campaign Planning—Meetings, January 1980,” Box 103, Ronald Reagan Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers, 1965–1980, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 23. Arthur Laffer, “The Laffer Economic Report,” January 11, 1980, Research Policy (Hopkins/Bandow)—[Correspondence], box 453, Ronald Reagan 1980 Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

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

Many American presidents saw in the twentieth-century United States the Kantian superstate of the modern era, the law-giving guarantor of a pax americana.14 Since the 1890s, the messianic and the legalistic strains of Western liberty have combined and collided in American foreign policy. The most eagerly messianic presidents were John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, though Ronald Reagan started no major war during his presidency and found a way to conduct arms control and other negotiations with the despised Soviets. JFK, LBJ and George W. Bush all indulged in high-level military adventures, wars of choice or wars dictated by a love of liberty. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were messianic-legalistic, balancing military ventures with the furtherance of international order and the construction of multilateral arrangements and institutions.

To be sure, neoclassicism is no longer the answer. The 1998 Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center stands near the National Mall and is an entirely uninspired assertion of the neoclassical style. It completes the Federal Triangle project of 1929 to 1938, which added a suite of heavy neoclassical buildings to the space between the White House and the National Mall. The enormous Department of Commerce occupies one point on this triangle. It was completed in 1932, and the 1935 Department of Justice grimly occupies another corner. The Ronald Reagan Building of Pei, Cobb, Freed and Parthers hints mutely at a presidential and diplomatic narrative.

It contains a Woodrow Wilson Plaza and is home to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Its oversized, anachronistic neoclassicism could be said to underscore the West of Woodrow Wilson and the West of Ronald Reagan, putting them in close proximity to the West of the National Mall. (Wilson and Reagan were both fans of free and international trade.) If so, the Ronald Reagan Building makes these associations with the West without creativity, amounting to an architecturally elevated place for work, for conventions and for the tourists passing through en route to the city’s true monuments and memorable set-piece buildings.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

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

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

Summitry on the Beach: Schmidt, Carter, Callaghan, and Giscard at Guadeloupe, 5 January 1990 (Jimmy Carter Library) 5.2. G7 Summit, Bonn, 17 July 1978 (Bundesbildstelle) 5.3. A Sweet Embrace, and SALT II: Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna, 18 June 1979 (AP) 6.1. Reagan and Gorbachev in Red Square, 31 May 1988 (Ronald Reagan Library) 6.2. Reagan-Gorbachev fireside chat at Fleur d’Eau, Geneva, 19 November 1985 (Ronald Reagan Library) 7.1. Bush and Deng in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, 26 February 1989 (AP) 7.2. Gorbachev overshadowed in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, 15 May 1989 (AP) 8.1. On Tree Trunks in the Caucasus: Kohl and Gorbachev, 15 July 1990 (Bundesbildstelle) 8.2.

Simon Miles, ‘“Quiet Diplomacy:” The Reagan Administration’s Initial Engagement with the Soviet Union’, unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Lexington, Kentucky, 21 June 2014; James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York, 2009). 4. ‘National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75: US relations with the USSR, 17 January 1983’, in Jason Saltoun-Ebin, ed., The Reagan Files: Inside the National Security Council (Santa Barbara, CA, 2nd edn, 2014), 217. 5. David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (New York, 2009), 44. 6. ‘Minutes, NSC Meeting, Sanctions, 18 June 1982’, in Saltoun-Ebin, The Reagan Files, 185. 7. ‘Letter, Ronald Reagan to Liuba Vaschenko, 11 October 1984’, in Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York, 2003), 380. 8.

‘Letter, Ronald Reagan to Liuba Vaschenko, 11 October 1984’, in Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York, 2003), 380. 8. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley CA (henceforth RRPL), Robert McFarlane files, Reorganized Archival Collection (henceforth RAC) Box 3, Memorandum, Shultz to Reagan: USG-Soviet relations, 3 March 1983. 9. Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and his Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005), xi, 37–8. 10. John F. Burns, ‘Gromyko rejects Reagan arms plan’, New York Times, 3 April 1983, 10. 11. Reagan, Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Civilian Airliner, 5 September 1983, The American Presidency Project (henceforth APP) website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?


pages: 655 words: 156,367

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

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

., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 55–84. 20.On Reagan’s pre-presidential career, see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003); Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Iwan Morgan, Reagan: American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Leo Sands, “Governor Ronald Reagan and the Assault on Welfare” (undergraduate dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2016). 21.Ronald Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit,” July 17, 1980, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8IWm8m2F8M, accessed September 2, 2020. Reagan spoke these words: “I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.” See also Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 22.Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (1987; New York: Penguin Press, 2000); Debora Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 23.Gerald Ford, a Republican, succeeded Nixon in 1974, but he was never elected, losing his only race for the presidency in 1976. 24.Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chapters 9–10; Dan T.

Even before the pandemic struck, developments that ten years earlier would have seemed inconceivable now dominated politics and popular consciousness: the election of Donald Trump and the launch of a presidency like no other; the rise of Bernie Sanders and the resurrection of a socialist left; the sudden and deep questioning of open borders and free trade; the surge of populism and ethnonationalism and the castigation of once-celebrated globalizing elites; the decline of Barack Obama’s stature and the transformational promise that his presidency once embodied for so many; and the widening conviction that the American political system was no longer working, and that American democracy was in crisis—a crisis that the January 6, 2021, assault by a mob on the Capitol so shockingly dramatized. In this dizzying array of political developments, I discern the fall—or at least the fracturing—of a political order that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s and achieved dominance in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. I call this political formation a neoliberal order. Ronald Reagan was its ideological architect; Bill Clinton was its key facilitator. This book is a history of this political order’s rise and fall. It offers a history of our times. The phrase “political order” is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.

Reaching back to the New Deal order at the beginning of this book also serves the useful purpose of throwing into sharp relief how much the neoliberal order of recent times has differed from what preceded it.1 I then turn to the main event itself—the construction of the neoliberal order. This story unfolds in three acts: The first is the rise in the 1970s and 1980s of Ronald Reagan and the free market Republican Party he forced into being; the second is the emergence in the 1990s of Bill Clinton as the Democratic Eisenhower, the man who arranged his party’s acquiescence to the neoliberal order; and the third explores George W. Bush’s determination to apply neoliberal principles everywhere, in projects as radically dissimilar as building a post–Saddam Hussein Iraq and making America a more racially egalitarian nation.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

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

This non-American cannot understand what the fuss is about: in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, receipts were 18.2 per cent of GDP. Tax revenue has to rise substantially if the deficit is to close.” Astonishing indeed, but deficit reduction is the demand of the financial institutions and the superrich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that’s what counts.21 Though the deficit crisis has been manufactured for reasons of savage class war, the long-term debt crisis is serious, and has been ever since Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility turned the United States from the world’s leading creditor to the world’s leading debtor, tripling the national debt and raising threats to the economy that were rapidly escalated by George W.

., who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration of “the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”19 One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, backed by Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, that instituted a murderous and brutal national security state there. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, encompassing the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship—Ronald Reagan’s favorite Latin American regime. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” of the Hoover Institution scholars, who is now revered for his achievements. The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin Wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy of liberation theology, the culmination of a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.”

Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington “had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action,” which, to general approbation, he termed “a legitimate response” to “terrorist attacks.”9 A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an “act of armed aggression” (with the United States abstaining).10 “Aggression” is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership. A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced “the evil scourge of terrorism,” again to general acclaim from “the world.”11 The “terrorist attacks” that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections.12 Tunis was a preferable target, however; it was defenseless, unlike Damascus.


pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

His first words were about his wife, who had returned home: Ronald Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” October 22, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33594&st=&st1=. No one could have missed how distracted Reagan was: Ronald Reagan, “Statement by Assistant to the President for Press Relations [Marlin] Fitzwater on the Stock Market Decline,” October 19, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33582&st=&st1=. On Black Monday, he had fielded reporters’ questions: Ronald Reagan, “Informal Exchange with Reporters,” October 19, 1987, American Presidency Project website, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

We must move quickly before the connection gets settled in the mind of the average citizen” (FI003, FI004, FG006-07, 615488PD, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives). “Certainly, when more than half of the loss has already been regained”: Ronald Reagan, “Informal Exchange with Reporters,” October 21, 1987, American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=33591&st=&st1=. an effort to deliver a more coherent message: Ronald Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” October 22, 1987, American Presidency Project website at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

Bartlett reported that Christopher Cox, then a deputy counsel to Reagan and later SEC chairman under President George W. Bush, “is aware of the concerns I have and has tried to address them.” Memorandum for Gary Bauer from Bruce Bartlett, November 3, 1987, FG999/FI003, FG006-07, 54666480, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives. “it may just get lost in the shuffle”: Memorandum for Gary Bauer from Bruce Bartlett, Subject: Brady Commission, October 29, 1987, FI003, No. 611055 PI, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives. The commission staff, which quickly grew: Anise C. Wallace, “Pension Fund Group Links Specialists to Stock Plunge,” New York Times, December 8, 1987, p. D1. A month earlier, Binns attended a meeting of the CFTC’s financial product advisory committee in Washington to defend program trading.


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

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

For a concise overview, see Ken Hughes, “Richard Nixon: Domestic Affairs,” Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/president/nixon/domestic-affairs, accessed October 27, 2017. 9. Paul Lewis, “Nixon’s Economic Policies Return to Haunt the G.O.P.,” New York Times (August 15, 1976). 10. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Candidacy for the Republican Presidential Nomination” (November 13, 1979); “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit” (July 17, 1980). 11. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address” (January 20, 1981). 12. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation” (January 11, 1989). 13. An image of the ad is available at https://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us?

As the war faded into memory, much of the energy stoked by the events of the Sixties dissipated or was redirected toward trivial pursuits. The nation moved on, only superficially changed by the turmoil it had endured. Dick and Ron Put Things Right Nothing better illustrates the process by which postwar normalcy was restored than the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. During the Cold War, only three presidents managed to win two terms. Nixon and Reagan were two of those three. Their electoral success was well deserved: Nixon and Reagan were, in fact, the nation’s two most consequential chief executives of the late twentieth century, even if more recent events have greatly diminished their legacies.

Although tensions between the United States and the USSR eased in the mid-1980s, few observers possessed the imagination to conceive of a world in which the Cold War might become a mere memory. For national security professionals, especially those charged with thinking unthinkable thoughts about World War III, the one thought that remained truly beyond the pale was the prospect of the Cold War actually ending. As late as 1988, even with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acting like best buddies, Pentagon propagandists were still insisting that the Kremlin’s “long-standing ambition to become the dominant world power” remained intact, as did its commitment to “a basically adversarial relationship” dictated by the “Marxist dialectic.”


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

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

It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of: Simply put, it called for each side to keep enough nuclear weapons at the ready to obliterate each other, so that if one attacked, the second had enough bombs left to annihilate its adversary in a matter of minutes. We were a button push away from oblivion." Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 13. 7 Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), June 7, 1981. 8 Martin Anderson, presentation, Oct. 11, 2006, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, "Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary." Also, communication with author, Sept. 10, 2008. 9 Tony Thomas, The Films of Ronald Reagan (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1980), pp. 98-99. 10 Laurence W. Beilenson, The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the United States and European Nations (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), pp. 212, 219-221. 11 The author covered the Reagan campaign as a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and never picked up on Reagan's nuclear abolitionist views.

Here, he attends a May Day celebration, date unknown. [Ksenia Kostrova] Katayev in the 1990s. [Ksenia Kostrova] A Katayev drawing on modular missiles. [Hoover Institution Archives] President Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the concept of missile defense on February 11, 1983. The president wrote in his diary that night, "What if we tell the world, we want to protect our people, not avenge them...?" [Ronald Reagan Library] Reagan unveiled his vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative in a televised speech on March 23, 1983. [Ray Lustig/Washington Post] The nuclear accident at Chernobyl in April 1986 was a turning point for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

[Hoover Institution Archives] At the Reykjavik summit, October 11-12, 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan came closer than any other leaders of the Cold War Period to agreements that would slash nuclear arsenals. [Ronald Reagan Library] They parted without a deal after Reagan insisted that his cherished dream of missile defense could not be limited to research in the laboratory. [Ronald Reagan Library] Yevgeny Velikhov (right), an open-minded physicist, helped break through the walls of Soviet military secrecy. With Thomas B. Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, near the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, July 1986.


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1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

Key Sources NSA The National Security Archive is a non-governmental research and archive organisation located at George Washington University, Washington DC. The NSA publishes vast numbers of documents in series of Workbooks, many of which are available online. See: www.nsarchive.gwu.edu REAGAN The Public Papers of Ronald Reagan are held in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. All his speeches can be found online in date order. See: www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches CARTER The key speeches of Jimmy Carter are available online at the American Presidency Project at the University of California. See: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ BUSH The key speeches of George H.

By the time the film came out this possibility had been closed off, allowing the US Air Force to claim that events depicted in the film could never happen. 11 Excellent accounts of the Cuban missile crisis can be found in Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight; Michael Beschloss, Kennedy Versus Khrushchev; Robert Smith Thompson, The Missiles of October; and from the Soviet side Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’. 12 Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p.245ff. 13 Ronald Reagan, An American Life, p.257 & p.13. 14 See the Acknowledgements for a more detailed outline of the making of the television documentary and the work of the National Security Archive. 15 Octopussy, directed by John Glen, produced by Albert Broccoli, written by George MacDonald Fraser, Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, and starring Roger Moore and Maud Adams with Steven Berkoff as General Orlov; see Jeremy Black, The World of James Bond. 1 Reagan 1 REAGAN: Inauguration Address, 20 January 1981; and see Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, pp.410–12. 2 The films were Knute Rockne, All American (1940), in which he played a football player, George Gipp, who died of pneumonia, and which gave him one of his most famous lines–‘Win one for the Gipper’; Santa Fe Trail (1940); and Kings Row (1942), during which, after awaking from an operation in which both his legs had been amputated by a sadistic doctor, he screamed the famous question ‘Where’s the rest of me?’

No matter how sophisticated the systems were, how thoroughly the structures governing the use of nuclear weapons had been prepared and the protocols rehearsed, it was always in the end an individual who had his finger on the button. There was always a single person who had to interpret the situation and ultimately decide what to do. Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980. He summed it up: ‘The decision to launch the [nuclear] weapons was mine alone to make. We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis.


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Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

But it was active in the microeconomy, ensuring that its industries were able to thrive in the new conditions. Just as the Fed did, Carter initially focused simply on inflation. But Republican Ronald Reagan and primary challenger Edward Kennedy argued that Carter had no real plan to improve the economy, and they were right. The upcoming election forced him to face the nation’s problems that the Fed could ignore. CHOOSING CANDIDATES IN HARD TIMES Ronald Reagan emerged from a large field of Republican contenders who sensed the president’s vulnerability in 1980. Perennial candidate Harold Stassen thought that his time was now.

Busch, Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 130. 6. Washington Post, Nov. 6, 1980, Bi. 7. During his first term, defense outlays increased by one third. 8. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Economy,” Feb. 5, 1981, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), 78–83. 9. Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery,” Feb. 18, 1981, in Public Papers (1981), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43425. 10. Don Fullerton, “Inputs to Tax Policy-Making: The Supply Side, the Deficit, and the Level Playing Field,” in American Economic Policy in the 1980s, ed.

A collection of essays, America in the 1970s, declared, “It was during the 1970s in the backlash of political and economic crisis that Americans dealt with a productive uncertainty about the meanings of happiness, success, patriotism, and national identity.”3 A book on the Nixon years attributes the president’s success to “Americans’ yearning for quiet,” but also “anger and resentment.”4 Political and economic crises are simply the background to the culture’s quest for sanity, meaning, or sleep. Other scholars trace rightward trends, culminating in the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. Since 1992, when Michael Kazin enjoined historians to write more about conservatism, the profession has answered the call.5 Because most historians today are closer to the left than to the right, many treat their subjects the way anthropologists do theirs. A few argue that post-World War II political culture was never as liberal as assumed.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

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

Kissinger, Diplomacy, 742–47; Sestanovich, Maximalist, 207. Chapter 16. Ronald Reagan: The Revivalist 1. Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 63; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1, From Grantham to the Falklands (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 580. For the full address, see Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum (hereafter Reagan Library), https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/60882a. 2.

After eight years at the pinnacle of power, Kissinger’s weakness understandably reflected the accumulations of enemies, mistakes, envy, and honest differences.101 The realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger also needed a complementary blend of ideas from other American diplomatic traditions. CHAPTER 16 Ronald Reagan The Revivalist The Journey to Westminster President Ronald Reagan arrived at the Royal Gallery in London’s Palace of Westminster around noon on June 8, 1982. Earlier that warm summer day, the president had toured the grounds of Windsor Great Park on horseback with Queen Elizabeth II. Reagan had originally hoped to speak at Parliament’s Westminster Hall, but the Labour Party and others blocked the president from that venue.

See Skinner, Life in Letters, 396 for four points; Wilson, Triumph of Improvisation, 5. 38. Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment, 22–29, 53; “Can Capitalism Survive?” Time, July 14, 1975, 52–63. 39. See Brands, Reagan, 734 for quote on FDR; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 205 on the economy; idem., “Address to a Joint Session of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada,” April 6, 1987, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, January 1 to July 3, 1987 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 339 on free markets; Skinner, Life in Letters, 391 on four wars. See also Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment, 175–76; Wilson, Triumph of Improvisation, 14, 26. 40.


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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

America is great because America is good—and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” 48 Although these sentences do not appear in Tocqueville’s work, 49 they proved popular with subsequent presidents, especially Republicans. Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush all used them on inspirational occasions, often when speaking to religious audiences. 50 In a 1984 address to a convention of Christian evangelicals, Ronald Reagan drew explicitly on the providential basis of the slogan: All our material wealth and all our influence have been built on our faith in God and the bedrock values that follow from that faith. The great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, 150 years ago, is said to have observed that America is great because America is good.

See John Pitney, “The Tocqueville Fraud,” The Weekly Standard , November 12, 1995, at weeklystandard.com/john-j-pitney/the-tocqueville-fraud . 50. Counting variations of the quote, Gerald R. Ford used it six times as president, Ronald Reagan used it ten times, and George H. W. Bush used it six times. Incidence of use was calculated using the searchable document archive of the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, at presidency.ucsb.edu/advanced-search . 51. President Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Columbus, Ohio,” March 6, 1984, at presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-annual-convention-the-national-association-evangelicals-columbus-ohio . 52.

Gerhard Schröder, December 31, 2002, quoted in Yascha Mounk, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 220–21. Translated by Mounk. See also pp. 1–6. 13. Mounk, ibid., quote at p. 30; see generally pp. 28–37. 14. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a White House Briefing for Black Administration Appointees,” June 25, 1984, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/260916 ; Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Tax Reform,” May 25, 1985, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259932 . 15. William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council,” December 3, 1993, the American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu/node/218963 ; Obama used some version of the phrase 50 times during his presidency, Reagan 15 times, Clinton 14 times, George W.


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

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

REVOLUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE 36. THE MALTA SUMMIT 37. REDRAWING THE MAP OF EUROPE 38. THE NEW GERMANY 39. BALTIC TRIANGLE 40. THE THIRD MAN BREAKS LOOSE 41. A NEW WORLD ORDER? 42. ENDINGS POSTSCRIPT Select Bibliography Notes Index List of Illustrations 1. Ronald Reagan at his inauguration in January 1981 (By courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library) 2. Secretary of State George Shultz in 1985 (Photo by Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) 3. General Secretary Yuri Andropov (Photo by ADN-Bildarchiv/ullstein bild via Getty Images). 4. Konstantin Chernenko with Boris Ponomarëv and Haile Mariam Mengistu in December 1984 (AFP/Getty Images) 5.

Key to the map of Soviet medium- and short-range nuclear-missile sites (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 13. Detail of the 1988 map of Soviet medium- and short-range nuclear-missile sites (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 14. Reagan’s letter to Gorbachëv, 11 March 1985 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives) 15. Gorbachëv’s letter to Reagan on 10 June 1985 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives) 16. Fireside conversation between Reagan and Gorbachëv: Geneva, November 1985 (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images) 17. Sergei Akhromeev’s poster (January 1986) offering his plan for the stage-by-stage global elimination of all nuclear weapons (Kataev Papers, Hoover Institution Archives) 18.

Stepanov-Mamaladze Papers Edward Teller Papers Understanding the End of the Cold War: Reagan/Gorbachev Years: An Oral History Conference 7–10 May, 1998, Brown University: a compendium of declassified documents and chronology of events, comp. and ed. V. Zubok, C. Nielsen, G. Grant (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, Brown University, 1998) Dmitri A. Volkogonov Papers Zelikow-Rice Papers National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC Ronald Reagan Presidential Papers (CD-Rom: BACM Research) (abbreviated as RRPP) Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (abbreviated as RRPL) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow (abbreviated as RGASPI) Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford University (abbreviated as RESCA) Anatoli Chernyaev Papers Online sources CIA, At Cold War’s End: US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991, www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/at-cold-wars-end-us-intelligence-on-the-soviet-union-and-eastern-europe-1989-1991/art-1.html End of the Cold War Forum (abbreviated as ECWF) B.


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What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

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

And Democrats, running away from their own history, had no message to unite us. Part III The Loneliness of the Reagan-Era Do-Gooder Chapter 13 Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. —Ronald Reagan, August 1986 Ronald Reagan wiped the political slate clean, erasing the history of American class conflict and the Democratic Party’s legacy of standing with the common man. Reagan made Republicans the populists, the party that protected the little guy against a bigger enemy, only this time it was Big Government—taxing your hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it—not Big Business.

It had been accepted by every American president for thirty years afterward, until Richard Nixon brilliantly divided the New Deal coalition, largely around race. In the early days, polls showed that the Occupy movement’s grievances were broadly shared, even by the white working class, which Nixon and then Ronald Reagan had lured to the GOP. Yet how long before the 99 percent would cleave back into the 51 and the 48 percent? I couldn’t know. For the moment, though, it was amazing to see such broadly shared political discontent surfacing at all. As I headed down the dark canyon of Wall Street itself, I decided to climb the steps of Federal Hall to get a better view of blue-helmeted cops behind barricades, waiting for trouble that never came that day.

When Romney released 2010 tax returns showing that while he made $21 million off investments, he only paid a 13.9 percent tax rate—a lower rate than middle-class workers—he offered the nation a crash course in our plutocratic tax policy. Unfortunately, some of the politicians who’d worked hardest to protect Romney’s low investment tax rate were Democrats, a complication that hinders the party’s attempt to channel the interests of the 99 percent. Even some of the white working class, the group Ronald Reagan had turned into Reagan Democrats by railing against “welfare queens” everyone knew were black, seemed to be waking up. Right-wing author Charles Murray, who in the 1980s blamed government for encouraging sloth and single parenthood in the black community, published a best seller that said the same thing about the white “lower class”: they were suffering from declining wages and higher unemployment not because of a changed economy, but because they had come to prefer slacking and shacking up to hard work and marriage.


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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

They brought California governor Ronald Reagan to power to put an end to it. Instead, in ways that neither his supporters nor his detractors have ever fully understood, he rescued it. Part II THE NEW CONSTITUTION 5 Debt The counterculture in middle age—Reaganism: a generational truce—Reaganomics: a political strategy—What did the debt buy?—Immigration, inequality, and debt—Immigration and the failure of democracy—The changing spirit of civil rights—“People of color” and “African-Americans”—Immigration and inequality—The quest for a new elite The victory of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980 was not just the reaction of an older America against Baby Boom enthusiasms.

the Obama administration would pay her: Jason Furman and Jim Stock, “New Report: The All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy as a Path to Sustainable Economic Growth,” White House press release, May 29, 2014. “an implicit deal”: William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Quill, 1991), 14. “The national debt tripled under Reagan”: John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: Norton, 2007), 178. “The answer to a government”: Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery,” April 28, 1981. Online at reaganlibrary.gov. Its origins in a restaurant: “Laffer Curve Napkin,” National Museum of American History. Online at americanhistory.si.edu.

This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for. That seemed to worry people. Skepticism about the civil rights revolution spread quickly in the wider public, if slowly among opinion leaders. In 1966, former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, an opponent of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, unseated California governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, a popular public servant and master campaigner. The episode was so bewildering to the educated classes that Commentary magazine commissioned the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson, himself a native Californian of humble origins, to write a “Guide to Reagan Country” for its readers.


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The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

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

., #11 (Winter, 1998), 5–14. 62 Interview, CNN Cold War, Episode 19, “Freeze.” 63 I have drawn, in the following two sections, upon arguments developed in further detail in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 353–79. 64 Speech at Notre Dame University, May 17, 1981, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982), p. 434. 65 Speech to members of the British Parliament, London, June 8, 1982, Reagan Public Papers, 1982, pp. 744—47. For the drafting of this speech, see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 197–200. 66 Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, p. 364; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 569–70. 67 The figures are in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 393–94. 68 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, p. 23; Reagan, An American Life, p. 13. 69 Radio-television address, March 23, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, pp. 442—43. 70 Ibid., p. 364.

For the drafting of this speech, see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 197–200. 66 Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, p. 364; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 569–70. 67 The figures are in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 393–94. 68 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, p. 23; Reagan, An American Life, p. 13. 69 Radio-television address, March 23, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, pp. 442—43. 70 Ibid., p. 364. Lettow, Ronald Reagan, provides the best discussion of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism. 71 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 528. 72 Ibid., p. 523. 73 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 583–99. 74 Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 118–31. 75 Ibid., pp. 138—41; Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991, updated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 65—68. 76 Radio-television address, January 16, 1984, Reagan Public Papers, 1984, p. 45.

English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 46; Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 69–70. 81 For more on the movie, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086637/. 82 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, pp. 179–86. 83 Chernyaev diary, January 16, 1986, in Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, pp. 45—46. 84 See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 359. 85 Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 191, 193. 86 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, pp. 217–26; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 366n. 87 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 419. 88 Remarks on Signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, December 8, 1987, Reagan Public Papers, 1987, p. 1208. 89 See the Chernyaev transcript of the Bush-Gorbachev meeting at Malta, December 3, 1989, CWIHP Bulletin, #12/13 (Fall/Winter, 2001), p. 236.


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America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Neoconservatives were in their origin (mostly) Jewish intellectuals who loved to read, write, argue, and debate; in a sense, it was their intellectual brilliance, their ability to reflect, and the nuance and flexibility associated with intellectual debate that was most notable about them, and what set them apart from the paleoconservatives. Of the two presidents in question, Ronald Reagan in my view more clearly qualifies as a neoconservative. Much as his enemies are loath to admit it, Ronald Reagan was an intellectual of sorts: in the first decade or so of his career, all he had to offer were ideas and arguments about communism and the free market, American values, and the defects of the reigning liberal orthodoxy. He also bore a similarity to the City College crowd insofar as he came to anticommunism from the left: he started out as a Democrat and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and was a labor leader as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

He and his students thus played a critical role in translating a broad, general set of neoconservative ideas into specific foreign policy preferences. Through Wohlstetter's influence on people like Robert Bartley, the long-time Wall Street Journal opinion page editor, these preferences came to define the hard-line alternative to Kissinger and detente and were incorporated into policy when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The Neoconservative Legacy A constant thread running throughout Wohlstetter's work was the impact on warfare of increasing targeting precision. At the nuclear level, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) made possible a counterforce strike at hardened missile silos, while in conventional warfare precision targeting made obsolete the need to flatten entire cities and their civilian populations as occurred during the Allied bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan.

Henry Kissinger was a classical realist, a position he held consistently from his doctoral dissertation on Metternich to his magnum opus on diplomacy. 18 His attempt, as national security advisor and then as secretary of state, to seek detente with the former Soviet Union reflected his view that the latter was a permanent fixture in world affairs. The United States and other democracies would have to learn to accommodate themselves, according to The Neoconservative Legacy Kissinger, to its power. It is thus not surprising that most neo-conservatives were broadly supportive of Ronald Reagan's effort to remoralize the struggle between Soviet communism and liberal democracy and did not wince in embarrassment when he spoke of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." On the other hand, from the late 1970s on it became increasingly hard to disentangle neoconservatism from other, more traditional varieties of American conservatism, whether based on small-government libertarianism, religious or social conservatism, or American nationalism.


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Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

In an era when the ‘limits to growth’ were proclaimed, the gnostic supply-siders made claims to knowing the secret of endless wealth: the magic of the market place . . . a theory for the multitude of go-getters, promising that the cornucopia was bottomless.35 This optimism helped Ronald Reagan to get elected, despite George Bush labelling supply-side theories as ‘voodoo economics’ when he was a rival candidate for presidential nomination in the 1980 primaries. Reagan’s campaign advertisements promised tax cuts that would make everyone better off: Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings, and investment like never before. As a result, we have less work, less savings, and less invested.36 Like monetarism, supply-side economics failed to deliver on its promises in practice.

Coors was on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), managed plants where unions were banned, and was a staunch Reagan supporter. UK newspaper The Guardian referred to Coors as an ‘ultraconservative businessman who, for all practical purposes, bought the White House for Ronald Reagan in 1980’. Coors supported Ronald Reagan from the 1960s and Reagan often visited the Coors’ family home. The Coors Corporation sponsored Reagan’s radio shows, while the Heritage Foundation supplied him with many of his policy ideas. After Reagan was elected president, ‘Joe became a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, offering staffing and policy suggestions . . .’.4 The initial leadership of the Heritage Foundation was drawn from the youthful staff of conservative politicians in Washington, including Paul Weyrich, who served as the foundation’s first president, and Edward Feulner, who has been the foundation’s long-term president since 1977.

By 1968 it was running annual Youth Forums in 12 states where high school students learned about ‘the incomparable advantages of the American system, why and how it produces far more than any form of Socialism or Communism, and how it must be protected from the Communist conspiracy which seeks to destroy it’.40 In the 1970s, while continuing its annual Freedom Forums and their Youth equivalents, the National Education Program also produced ‘full-color animated cartoons’; flannel board presentations; a monthly newsletter; a weekly column for newspapers and trade publications; audio-taped and printed speeches; a DoIt-Yourself Materials Kit for organizing a one-day forum; and a number of films on topics such as A Look at Capitalism and The Spirit of Enterprise. One film – The Truth about Communism – was hosted and narrated by Ronald Reagan.41 It distributed ‘Activity Suggestions for Citizenship Leaders’ with advice on how to form a group and recruit people to it and become politically active: High School Juniors and Seniors are mature enough to join the crusade to eliminate citizenship ignorance and apathy. Some of the National Program films, or others on citizenship subjects, should be scheduled for school assembly periods, or in history, civics, and economics classes. . . .


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

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

(“Movies Watched at Camp David and White House,” Aug. 19, 1988, 1st Lady Staff Office Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.) WarGames was an unusual choice; he usually watched adventures, light comedies, or musicals. But one of the film’s screenwriters, Lawrence Lasker, was the son of the actress Jane Greer and the producer Edward Lasker, old friends of Reagan from his days as a Hollywood movie star. Lawrence used his family connections to get a print to the president. (Interviews.) The following Wednesday morning: Office of the President, Presidential Briefing Papers, Box 31, 06/08/1983 (case file 150708) (1), Ronald Reagan Library; and interviews. This meeting is mentioned in Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 38, but, in addition to getting the date wrong, Cannon depicts it as just another wacky case of Reagan taking movies too seriously; he doesn’t recount the president’s question to Gen.

CHAPTER 2 “It’s All About the Information” CHAPTER 3 A Cyber Pearl Harbor CHAPTER 4 Eligible Receiver CHAPTER 5 Solar Sunrise, Moonlight Maze CHAPTER 6 The Coordinator Meets Mudge CHAPTER 7 Deny, Exploit, Corrupt, Destroy CHAPTER 8 Tailored Access CHAPTER 9 Cyber Wars CHAPTER 10 Buckshot Yankee CHAPTER 11 “The Whole Haystack” CHAPTER 12 “Somebody Has Crossed the Rubicon” CHAPTER 13 Shady RATs CHAPTER 14 “The Five Guys Report” CHAPTER 15 “We’re Wandering in Dark Territory” Acknowledgments About the Author Notes Index for Brooke Gladstone CHAPTER 1 * * * “COULD SOMETHING LIKE THIS REALLY HAPPEN?” IT was Saturday, June 4, 1983, and President Ronald Reagan spent the day at Camp David, relaxing, reading some papers, then, after dinner, settling in, as he often did, to watch a movie. That night’s feature was WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick as a tech-whiz teenager who unwittingly hacks into the main computer at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and, thinking that he’s playing a new computer game, nearly triggers World War III.

And because of the seamless worldwide network, the packets, and the Internet of Things, cyber war would involve not just soldiers, sailors, and pilots but, inexorably, the rest of us. When cyberspace is everywhere, cyber war can seep through every digital pore. During the transitions between presidents, the ideas of cyber warfare were dismissed, ignored, or forgotten, but they never disappeared. All along, and even before Ronald Reagan watched WarGames, esoteric enclaves of the national-security bureaucracy toiled away on fixing—and, still more, exploiting—the flaws in computer software. General Jack Vessey could answer Reagan’s question so quickly—within a week of the meeting on June 8, 1983, where the president asked if someone could really hack the military’s computers, like the kid in that movie—because he took the question to a man named Donald Latham.


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

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

The Goldwater offices, down to the most ragged and irregular, were being irrigated by Reagan cash; whenever the show ran, people just sent money to whatever Goldwater outfit they could find. The Arizona Mafia fielded humiliating letters. A friend wrote Kitchel: “In my 30 years in politics I have never heard such glowing tributes as the accolades for Ronald Reagan’s speech.” Another dropped Kitchel a note of congratulations on how he had handled the campaign. “Incidentally,” he added, “Ronald Reagan was terrific.” It was one of the few times in his life that Goldwater was jealous. He never did thank Ronald Reagan, a wounded Nancy Reagan later noted. Wirt Yerger, blunt as ever, called up one of the media chiefs in Washington and asked what it would cost to underwrite another network broadcast of the thing.

A voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan.” There was a convention-style dais draped with red, white, and blue bunting; Goldwater posters on the walls of a hall at USC converted into a soundstage; an expectant crowd sitting in neat rows, seeded, as props, with the kind of hastily lettered signs you’d see at a “real” campaign rally; Goldwater Girls in white cowboy hats (partisans, recruited as extras). Track had been laid down for a dolly camera—one of several cameras. The extras received their instructions; action was called. Ronald Reagan hit his mark. And it was clear within five seconds that this was like no other Goldwater TV show before.

.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 232, 242-47; and Lemuel R. Boulware, “The New Requirement for Business Success,” speech, in HR, Boulware Folder. 123 “Today,” he would say: Ronald Reagan and Richard Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1965), 303. “Let’s give it a try”: Anne Edwards, Early Reagan: The Rise to Power (New York: Morrow, 1987), 455. 123 “Shouldn’t someone tag”: Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), 315-16. “The inescapable truth”: Edwards, Early Reagan, 543-46. 124 For southern California’s competitive edge over the East and statistics, see James L.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

Kennedy——A Time for Greatness 1964: Barry Goldwater——In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right A Choice, Not an Echo 1964: Lyndon Johnson——The Stakes Are Too High for You to Stay at Home All the Way with LBJ Vote, As If Your Whole World Depended on It 1968: Richard Nixon——Nixon’s the One 1972: George McGovern——Come Home, America 1972: Richard Nixon——Now More than Ever Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion [against McGovern] 1976: Gerald Ford——He’s Making Us Proud Again 1976: Jimmy Carter——A Leader, for a Change 1980: Ronald Reagan——Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago? 1984: Ronald Reagan——It’s Morning Again in America 1984: Walter Mondale——America Needs a Change 1988: George Bush——A Kinder, Gentler Nation 1992: Bill Clinton——Putting People First It’s the Economy, Stupid 1992: Ross Perot——United We Stand Ross for Boss 1996: Bill Clinton——Building a Bridge to the Twenty-first Century 1996: Bob Dole——The Better Man for a Better America 2000: Al Gore——Prosperity and Progress Prosperity for America’s Families 2000: George W.

There is certainly a time and a place for high-flown, literary language. But to capture a listener’s attention the language doesn’t need to be urbane or erudite—or use words like, well . . . urbane or erudite. It does not necessarily need the uplifting, ennobling tone of Ted Sorenson (John F. Kennedy’s friend and speechwriter) and Peggy Noonan (gifted scribe for Ronald Reagan), the two great speechwriters of our time. The lofty language of Sorensen and Noonan transcends ideologies and generations, moving listeners just as much today as when their words were first spoken by others decades ago. Noonan was once asked to reflect on the craft of wordsmithing and speechwriting, and I think she had it right: Most of us are not great leaders speaking at great moments.

They haven’t seen the volumes of internal memos that you’ve seen or the pages and pages of talking points that have been developed on your behalf. It needs to sound as fresh and vital to your audiences as it did to your own ears the first time you said it. When it comes to repetition, politicians are seemingly addicted to communication variation. Ronald Reagan was the only politician I ever saw who seemed to enjoy saying the same words over and over again as though it was the first time he had ever spoken them. His message never wavered, and that was a major reason he sustained personal credibility even though a majority of Americans opposed many of his policies during his administration.


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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

By the time the election came around in 1980—after Iranians took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and kept fifty-two Americans hostage for a year, and a brief economic recession sealed the deal—it wasn’t a big shock when Ronald Reagan won. But exactly what was that election’s “mandate” concerning the political economy? The campaign had run a TV ad with an excellent supply-side-for-dummies voice-over. “Ronald Reagan believes that when you tax something, you get less of it. We’re taxing work, savings, and investment like never before. As a result we have less work, less savings, and less invested.” See, if you pay less in taxes—and only if you pay less in taxes—America’s economic prosperity and stability will be restored.

By portraying low taxes on the rich and unregulated business and weak unions and a weak federal government as the only ways back to some kind of rugged, frontiersy, stronger, better America. And by choosing as their front man a winsome 1950s actor in a cowboy hat, the very embodiment of a certain flavor of American nostalgia. Of course, Ronald Reagan didn’t cheerfully announce in 1980 that if Americans elected him, private profit and market values would override all other American values; that as the economy grew nobody but the well-to-do would share in the additional bounty; that many millions of middle-class jobs and careers would vanish, along with fixed private pensions and reliable healthcare; that a college degree would simultaneously become unaffordable and almost essential to earning a good income; that enforcement of antimonopoly laws would end; that meaningful control of political contributions by big business and the rich would be declared unconstitutional; that Washington lobbying would increase by 1,000 percent; that our revived and practically religious deference to business would enable a bizarre American denial of climate science and absolute refusal to treat the climate crisis as a crisis; that after doubling the share of the nation’s income that it took for itself, a deregulated Wall Street would nearly bring down the financial system, ravage the economy, and pay no price for its recklessness; and that the federal government he’d committed to discrediting and undermining would thus be especially ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic and its consequences.

* * * — On the first Sunday of 1976, Washington journalism’s elder statesman at the time, James Reston, the former editor of The New York Times and then its main political opinion writer, wrote a column called “Presidential Job Description.” He said that “a new majority in America,…increasingly self-concerned and even cynical, is not impressed by…the smooth theatrical conservative nostalgia of Ronald Reagan.” Yet over the next month Reagan ran an extremely close second to President Ford in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries and very nearly won the nomination. As that presidential election got going, another leading political journalist noted that “layered over everything” in the political landscape “are apathy, nostalgia and cynicism.”


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

There were CEOs like Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who bought a Rolls Royce one week and a top-of-the-line Mercedes the next. And of course there were Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft, who came to exemplify a new sort of corporate leader: young, nonconformist, and astoundingly rich. Then there was the man who gave his name to the era, Ronald Reagan, crusader against big government, defender of deregulated markets, standard-bearer of what he called “the decade of the entrepreneur.” For the Great Communicator, no place or industry better exemplified American free enterprise at work than Silicon Valley, and he was particularly enthusiastic about extolling its virtues to foreign audiences.

From Horatio Alger to Andrew Carnegie to Henry Ford, politicians and journalists lifted up the figure of the ingenious, bootstrapping entrepreneur as an example and inspiration of what Americans could and should do. Only in America could you rise from rags to riches. Only in America could you be judged on your own merits, not your pedigree. In this telling, Silicon Valley seemed just like the latest and greatest example of the American Revolution in action. * * * — Ronald Reagan was right. The high-tech revolution was an only-in-America story. And he and so many others were right to laud people like Jobs and Gates and Hewlett and Packard as entrepreneurial heroes. Silicon Valley could never have come to be without the presence of visionary, audacious business leaders.

Woodside’s early 1960s fight against the power lines occurred about the same time that Palo Altans were mobilizing against a proposed expansion of the Stanford Industrial Park; by the early 1970s, local activism had resulted in a host of local measures up and down the San Francisco Peninsula that controlled growth and protected open spaces. And, as we will see later, semiconductor pioneers politically mobilized when their industry was in peril. But the chipmakers largely remained aloof from broader regional affairs. They were, as Joan Didion later wrote of the restless and rootless Californians surrounding Ronald Reagan, “a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.”21 ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL In Boston, it was a lot harder to remain unencumbered by history. The high-tech companies of Route 128 not only sat amid Revolutionary War battlefields and nineteenth-century mill towns, but also in a regional economy anchored in the past.


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

How could he reject his partner of two terms on the one thing Cheney cared about most? For a man who valued loyalty above almost all else, it cut against the grain. To help make a decision, Bush personally asked White House lawyers to reexamine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who had also served in the same role for Ronald Reagan, and William Burck, his deputy who had been a federal prosecutor in New York, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised. Now they were in the Oval Office to report back that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” Burck was saying to Bush, tempering his “he did it” judgment just a bit.

He could be unguarded with friends, “but if he told you something and it leaked and he suspected you leaked it, you didn’t get a second chance. Finished.” Bush at that point had yet to win public office and was still evolving into the politician he would later become. When he visited the West Wing in those days, he would stop by offices of aides he knew, plop down on a couch, and put his cowboy boots on the coffee table. Ronald Reagan, who had met the Bush children, thought that if any of them had a bright political future, it would be George’s brother Jeb. Their brother Marvin once gave his assessment of each sibling. “George?” he said. “George is the family clown.” Indeed, after their father won the presidency, the younger George attended a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, lifted his pant legs to show her his cowboy boots, and proudly declared that he was the black sheep in the family.

“He didn’t care much for me, because I was the roadblock to his doing what he wanted to do and thought ought to be done, because everything got filtered through me and he never liked the outcome of those policy debates,” Cheney said years later. He also thought a vice president should not participate in meetings of advisers because it would warp the discussion. Heading into a difficult election year with Ford facing a challenge from Ronald Reagan on the right, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided the White House had grown dysfunctional and drafted a blistering twenty-six-page memo urging Ford to stop speaking bureaucratically, “be presidential,” and “fire someone visably [sic].” To clear the way, they offered their own resignations. “The bulk of the problems,” they wrote, “involve Hartmann, the Vice President or Kissinger.”


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

No amount of tax cuts will save American consumers from the ravages of inflation if Congress refuses to eliminate fiscal deficits. Even Ronald Reagan, with all of his rhetoric about scaling back the size of government, was reluctant to pay the political price of confronting Congress over spending. The bubble economy was simply passed to the next generation. The Crisis Managers Volcker, a self-described “Brooklyn Democrat” who was born in Cape May, N.J., was inherited by Ronald Reagan, a converted Democrat and former labor leader and California governor. Reagan understood the connection between money and inflation.

During the conflict, Washington ran the private economy with a heavy hand. Rationing and shortages were the shared experience of a generation of Americans. Wartime profits were high for businesses and their executives. “Excess profits” were taxed at punitive rates. In California, a new movie star named Ronald Reagan found that the government took 92 percent of his pay. The Fed Regains Independence Part of the reason for the reluctance of private investors to invest during the Depression was the government’s aggressive manipulation of interest rates through the 1940s. “In April 1942, after the entry of the United States into World War II, the Fed publicly committed itself to maintaining an interest rate of 3/8 percent on Treasury bills,” wrote Bob Hetzel and Ralph Leach of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in a 2001 research paper.

In 1966, the Fed tightened interest rates to slow domestic price increases, almost leading the United States into a serious recession a year later. Mortgage money was tight, consumer prices were rising, and civil rights protests drove many Southern white voters into the arms of the Republican Party. The GOP picked up several governorships including Ronald Reagan in California and Spiro Agnew in Maryland. The Fed subsequently loosened policy and Congress moved to increase domestic spending in 1967. The intense public protests against the Vietnam War and the slack economy eventually caused President Johnson to declare his decision not to seek another term in March 1968.


pages: 485 words: 148,662

Farewell by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud

active measures, car-free, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, index card, invisible hand, kremlinology, Lao Tzu, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

That France was capable of providing the United States with information that would play a critical role in the orientation of the alliance activities and the consolidation of its means of defense was an entirely new situation, and I was especially aware of it.”13 Marcel Chalet was not mistaken about the impact of the file he had transmitted. When Ronald Reagan was eventually informed by his friend William Casey about the importance of the dossier, he was totally astounded. “This is the biggest fish of that kind caught since the war!” he acknowledged, even though this admission was obviously not to the advantage of American secret services.14 This dossier, indeed, made it necessary to revise many of the certitudes held by the free world. The American president, who was no fan of communist regimes, was thus encouraged to be yet more forceful with the Eastern Bloc. Ronald Reagan’s opinion of François Mitterrand changed radically.

Portrait of the Hero as a Criminal CHAPTER 31. Unveiled CHAPTER 32. The Game Is Up CHAPTER 33. “The Network” CHAPTER 34. The Farewell Affair Under the Magnifying Glass of the KGB and DST CHAPTER 35. Hero or Traitor? FOREWORD BY RICHARD V. ALLEN In 1976, five years before the Farewell case, Ronald Reagan nearly unseated President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. The major salient of his attack on Ford was on foreign and national security policy. Reagan rejected “détente,” not because he opposed a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union, but because under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger “détente” had taken on a special, nearly theological meaning—a supposedly ineluctable process of gradually making the Soviets completely dependent on trade and technology from the West, hence causing them to moderate their behavior in terms of global expansion and military procurement.

To the contrary, the West was now enjoying a major advance into Soviet front lines. For the past few months, France had had a mole, code name “Farewell,” operating at the heart of one of the most sensitive divisions of the KGB. During a face-to-face meeting, Mitterrand shared this secret with Ronald Reagan and revealed to him the scope of global Soviet industrial pillage. At the time, the American president did not fully understand the impact of the dossier, but he was a fast learner. Soon after, he would refer to it as “the greatest spy story of the twentieth century.” Mitterrand-Reagan private conversation in Ottawa on July 19, 1981.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Trump Organization: no new deals for foreign properties “Full Transcript of Trump Press Conference,” BBC.com, January 11, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/​news/​world-us-canada-38536671. Reagan’s Prophecy Fulfilled New Yorker: Trump golf cover Françoise Mouly, “Cover Story: ‘Broken Windows,’ By Harry Blitt,” New Yorker, March 31, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​culture/​cover-story/​cover-story-2017-04-10. Ronald Reagan: “government is not the solution, it is the problem” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, “The Reagan Presidency,” accessed April 10, 2017, https://reaganlibrary.gov/​sreference/​facts-admin. Rob Ford and smoking crack “Raw Video Released of Rob Ford Smoking Crack,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 11, 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/​news/​news-video/​video-raw-video-released-of-rob-ford-smoking-crack/​article31375481/.

A near-impenetrable sense of impunity—of being above the usual rules and laws—is a defining feature of this administration. Anyone who presents a threat to that impunity is summarily fired—just ask former FBI director James Comey. Up to now in US politics there’s been a mask on the corporate state’s White House proxies: the smiling actor’s face of Ronald Reagan or the faux cowboy persona of George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney/Halliburton scowling in the background). Now the mask is gone. And no one is even bothering to pretend otherwise. This situation is made all the more squalid by the fact that Trump was never the head of a traditional company but has, rather, long been the figurehead of an empire built around his personal brand—a brand that has, along with his daughter Ivanka’s brand, already benefited from its merger with the US presidency in countless ways.

And if that’s all true, why not wreck the place before you leave—figuratively if not literally. It’s a reminder that Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics. It’s absolutely true that the system is corrupt. It is a swamp. And people know it.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

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

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

If the market is no longer delivering the prosperity promised the citizen in the American dream, then the political system bears more responsibility than our leaders want to admit for the relentless redistribution of income and wealth from the bottom and the middle of the pyramid to the top. Most dangerous of all, such an acknowledgment encourages discussion about who our political representatives actually represent. The Democrats are no more eager to have this conversation than the Republicans are. Ronald Reagan’s election, like Franklin Roosevelt’s half a century earlier, profoundly changed the way that Americans think collectively about the future. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed thoroughly discredited the system of unregulated financial speculation that had driven the country and the world to its economic knees.

Increasingly sophisticated attacks from the Republican Right and the growing indifference from within the Democratic Party itself put the New Deal on the defensive. Its intellectual energy sputtered just as the country needed to address the market signals of the erosion of U.S. economic power. Jimmy Carter was the transitional figure. He prepared the ideological ground for Ronald Reagan just as Herbert Hoover had prepared it for Franklin Roosevelt. Contrary to popular impression, Hoover was not a laissez-faire conservative. As secretary of commerce in the 1920s, he increased the regulation of business, advocated more progressive taxation of the rich, and supported a pension for every American.

But to impress conservatives, he also cut taxes for business and increased military spending. On election day of 1980, despite the daily headlines about the crisis of the Americans being held hostage in Iran (including Carter’s botched rescue attempt), the voter exit polls showed that the economic woes were the chief reasons voters gave for voting for Ronald Reagan. Two months before the election, 62 percent of voters had cited the “high cost of living” as the most important problem facing the nation. Fully 52 percent of American voters supported the imposition of wage-price controls. In his history of Carter’s economic policies, Georgia Institute of Technology economist W.


pages: 233 words: 73,772

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

• Neil Bush, the son of one American president and the brother of another, who one newspaper observed ran numerous business ventures that had “a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.” Nonetheless, Bush’s family name has led various natural resource companies to hire him to broker deals in Asia and Africa. • Bretton Sciaroni, a portly American and former ideologue of Ronald Reagan’s White House who played a little-known but vital role in the Iran–Contra scandal but now resides in Phnom Penh, where he is an official adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge cadre, and opens doors for Western natural resource firms. In large part because they inhabit the shadows of the energy world, the oil literature has largely consigned such middlemen and other characters to the margins of attention, or omitted them entirely.

During the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s Rich brokered a deal by which Iran secretly supplied Israel, which proved to be a vital economic lifeline.6 Rich also periodically lent a hand to the Mossad’s clandestine operations, among them the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the 1980s. Rich made a fortune by buying oil from Iran during the hostage crisis and from Libya when Ronald Reagan’s administration imposed a trade embargo on Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, as well as from supplying oil to apartheid South Africa. An inveterate sanctions-buster, Rich used offshore front companies and corporate cutouts to try to stay below the radar. He also pioneered the practice of commodity swaps, like the uranium-for-oil deals he brokered in the 1980s between apartheid South Africa and Iran.

One Western investor I talked to described the situation as “a nightmare,” saying, “Anything having to do with licenses, natural resources, or concessions—that’s where you have problems and where you always have military and government officials looking for money.” For major Western companies trying to navigate this complicated and perilous investment climate, this is where Bretton Sciaroni comes in. The portly Sciaroni makes a most unusual power broker in contemporary Cambodia. A former ideologue of Ronald Reagan’s White House, he played a little-known but vital role in enabling Oliver North’s weapons shipments and assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s. Yet now he is an official adviser to the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge cadre. The Cambodian government has bestowed upon Sciaroni the titles of minister without portfolio and his excellency.


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

To say that America was a far more unequal society in 1989 than it was in 1973 is a simple statement of fact, not an attack on Ronald Reagan. Think about the parable of the fishermen and the prospectors: The greater inequality of the latter society did not come about because it has worse leadership but because it lives in a different environment. And changes in the environment—in world markets, or in technology—might change a society of middle-class fishermen into a society with dismaying extremes of wealth and poverty, without it necessarily being the result of deliberate policies. In fact, it’s pretty certain that this is what has happened in the United States. Ronald Reagan did not single-handedly cause the incomes of the rich to soar and those of the poor to decline.

I’m not saying that Clinton’s policies led to that result—they accounted for only part of the good news about the deficit, and hardly any of the rest. But the point is that the supply-siders were absolutely sure that his policies would produce disaster—and indeed, if their doctrine had any truth to it, they would have. Nor, I would argue, do supply-side views spread because they are good politics. True, Ronald Reagan won on a supply-side platform—but one suspects he would have won on almost any platform, and that the taunts of “voodoo economics” actually cost him some votes. Today, the supply-side label is a clear liability. Even promoters of the concept shy away from the label. In 1994, Republican leaders like Gingrich and Dick Armey chose to conceal the extent of their tax-cutting fervor from the voters, who they judged would not trust an economic program based on supply-side assumptions.

After all, back in 1993 Roberts, in lockstep with other supply-siders, predicted nothing but disaster from Clintonomics: “a bigger deficit, higher unemployment, rising inflation, and a currency crisis to boot.” Faced with the reality of a Dow near 8,000, the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, and the smallest deficit since, well, Ronald Reagan’s first budget, some people would have tried to change the subject. Roberts, however, is made of sterner stuff. But then, what choice did he have? The standard (and true) riposte to Clintonian triumphalism is that Clinton presides over a prosperity he did not create, that the credit for the good news belongs partly to Alan Greenspan but mainly to the resilience and flexibility of America’s private sector.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

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

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

“Greed is good,” the fictional Gordon Gekko declared in 1987, but now real people insisted that their moneymaking lust and skill were not merely useful in the aggregate but made them virtuous individually. The year after Wall Street came out, Reagan was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. Oh, Ronald Reagan, lovable, shrewd, twinkly, out-of-it, blithe, brilliant Ronald Reagan. The transmutation of presidential politics and governing into entertainment had started a generation earlier, in the 1960s, with John Kennedy. JFK was like a movie star and like a fictional character. He was young and dashing, witty and sexy. He’d been a war hero, and Hollywood made a movie about those heroics, PT 109, while he was president, a production on which he gave notes.

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

And indeed, at the height of the First Great Delirium, the strangest and most astoundingly successful new American religion arose. * * * *1 A century later, in a commencement address at his alma mater, a celebrity alumnus told the story as actual eyewitness history, attributing it to Thomas Jefferson. The 1957 commencement speaker was Ronald Reagan. Later, as president, when he repeated the story at length in a Fourth of July essay he published, his handlers evidently persuaded him to call it a “legend” and delete the Jefferson attribution. *2 It was a high-strung time and place. Two miles away and six years later, former U.S. senator and future president Andrew Jackson won a duel with a man who’d called him a coward and suggested his wife was a slut


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If the nation had been unblighted by Boomer sociopathy, how well could we have been doing? Shockingly well, as it turns out. INTRODUCTION The difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place. —Ronald Reagan (1979)1 The Gipper believed many silly things—in voodoo economics and, in the case of his White House astrologer, just plain voodoo—but one thing Reagan truly knew was that the Americans he would lead were optimistic people, and that their optimism made an otherwise disparate and divided land a functional and thriving nation.

Thanks to the competent stewardship of prior generations—a mix of the Greatest Generation, the earlier Silents, and a few nineteenth-century fossils—the optimism that led to the Boom in the first place found seemingly endless confirmation in American success. In the three decades following World War II, it would have been ridiculous to pose the question, as Ronald Reagan would when seeking the presidency in 1980, “Are you better off [now] than you were four years ago?”5 The answer was “yes,” always and emphatically. The Boomers’ first decades saw rapid and near-continuous gains in prosperity, education, health, technology, and civil justice, the products of revolutionary choices by earlier generations, underwritten by their saving and sacrifice.

Spouses could and did collude to work the system, with one falsely alleging cruelty and the other admitting to it, a strategy that while effective required no little perjury. The whole system was unworkable and in 1969, California pioneered “no-fault” divorces, which allowed spouses to part based solely on irreconcilable differences. This law was signed by then governor Ronald Reagan, whose own divorce had paved the way to union with Nancy (or “Mommy,” as he took to calling her).28 Easier divorce was certainly a social good—and one pioneered by earlier generations, not the Boomers. The frequency with which Boomers resorted to divorce, however, proved alarming and generationally unusual.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

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

Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 456, 426. 8. Memoirs, 480. 9. FTC, i. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Memoirs, 605. 13. Ibid., 503. 14. Ibid., 504. CHAPTER 21 1. Memoirs, 209–210. 2. Martin Anderson, Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 164. 3. Ronald Reagan, Reagan: In His Own Hand (New York: Free Press, 2001), 267. 4. Ronald Reagan, Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 96. 5. Milton Friedman, “The Path We Dare Not Take,” Reader’s Digest (March 1977), 110. 6. Milton Friedman, “What Is America?” Saturday Evening Post (October 1978), 16. 7. Milton Friedman, “Will Freedom Prevail?”

A significant outcome stemming in part from the indexation idea, though, was the indexation of tax brackets to account for inflation. Previously, as a result of inflation, individuals’ tax rates effectively rose with higher average prices (taxpayers were pushed into higher brackets of income taxation). When, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, indexation of tax brackets was implemented as part of the Tax Reduction Act of 1981, a major systemic demand for inflation by politicians was removed. Since then inflation has markedly declined and stayed low, though there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between indexed tax rates and inflation.

He remarked during Jimmy Carter’s presidency that “reducing oppressively high marginal rates would do far more to promote effective use of resources” than Carter’s economic plans. He also said at that time, in response to a question about what to do to increase productivity: “Reduce the top rate of the personal income tax (from 70 percent) to 25 percent.”21 During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the top income tax rate was reduced to 28 percent. Friedman writes of the “disastrous effects on incentives”22 of high tax rates. He has always been a “supply-sider”—a term that came in vogue in the late 1970s to contrast with the Keynesian emphasis on demand—as he favors reduction in tax rates to increase productivity and advocates a stable monetary environment.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In the worst formulation, they described the poor as devious “welfare queens.”100 As the next chapter will show, Ronald Reagan, long an opponent of welfare programs, made those associations and claims central tenets of his administration. Under the pressure of neoliberalism, the Great Compression quickly began to unravel. CHAPTER 7 The Triumph of Neoliberalism: 1979–1999 Stagflation and the oil shocks of the 1970s had brought economic malaise to the United States, setting the stage for widespread acceptance of a new, “neoliberal” theory of prosperity, divorced from both equality of condition and equality of opportunity. Over the course of the next decade, Ronald Reagan’s severe tax cuts and George H.

When the Family Assistance Plan stalled and died, the political will to broaden the social safety net evaporated under economic pressure. Stagflation, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and deindustrialization brought malaise to the United States. These conditions enabled widespread acceptance of an alternative theory of prosperity, discussed in Chapter 7. Divorced from both equality of condition and equality of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, military spending, safety-net slashing, and “trickle-down” economics promoted the idea that the freest markets were most efficient, and the most efficient markets produced the most prosperity. Although direct subsidies to income only represented a very small percentage of the annual U.S. budget, welfare programs and the people who used them came under attack.

The discourse around the proposal demonstrated that conservatives feared the government was overreaching and that federalized child care threatened the sanctity of the family.78 By the mid-1970s, the residual poverty that remained was largely concentrated in states that had set lower standards for themselves for helping the poor, and the programs were funded by more generous states. Unsurprisingly, residents of wealthier states resented the differential. WELFARE REFORM IN THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION As economic conditions in the United States worsened throughout the 1970s, resentment of welfare expenditure grew. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, running in the 1976 Republican presidential primary, hit on a winning formula by transforming one particular welfare recipient, 47-year-old Linda Taylor, into the embodiment of everything that was wrong with government aid. Reagan never mentioned Taylor’s name on the campaign trail but always invoked a litany of her crimes: “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 social security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands.”


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

It was a different reality. But incomes were growing more unequal in America then, and they continue to grow more unequal in America today. That story hasn’t changed at all. What did change over the years were the speculative explanations as to why incomes were becoming more unequal. It was Ronald Reagan’s fault. No, it was the inevitable result of a maturing global economy. No, it was caused by computers. No, it was caused by the twin epidemics of teenage pregnancy and divorce. Some people denied the Great Divergence was happening at all. Others said it was a fleeting phenomenon. Still others said all would be well once the economy became more productive (i.e., once there was a significant increase in output per hour worked).

Even if you could get a raise, it had to be pretty big to keep up with inflation, which averaged more than 9 percent during the second half of the 1970s. This was largely due to oil prices, which continued to rise briskly even after the oil embargo was halted early in 1974.27 In short, the economy was lousy for everyone. All Ronald Reagan really had to do to win the 1980 general election was say the following (in his debate with President Jimmy Carter): When he was a candidate in 1976, President Carter invented a thing he called the misery index. He added the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation, and it came, at that time, to 12.5% under President Ford.

—Former Procter & Gamble lobbyist Bryce Harlow, in a 1984 essay describing the business of corporate representation LEFT-OF-CENTER POLITICIANS AND ACTIVISTS have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by “federal government,” they generally mean Republicans, who have controlled the White House for most of the past thirty years. According to this narrative, the policy changes initiated by President Ronald Reagan and carried forward by the Bush presidencies, père et fils, effected a long-term shift in American demographics. The leftist intellectual Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, once summarized these policies as “a bizarre anti-welfare-state Keynesianism for the rich.” There can be no question that Reagan and his Republican White House successors, in attempting to reduce government’s size, made it less beneficial to people at lower income levels and more accommodating to people at higher income levels.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

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

Martin’s Press, New York, 1988), p. 140. 15 Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, p. 44. 16 Milton Friedman, “The Goldwater View of Economics,” The New York Times, October 11, 1964. 17 Paul Samuelson, The New York Times, October 25, 1964. 18 Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), Hollywood actor, California governor, and 40th president of the United States. 19 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, The Reagan Revolution (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1981), p. 237. 20 Ibid. 21 Ronald Reagan, “Time for Choosing,” address broadcast on television, October 27, 1964. 22 Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich (1943– ), born Newton Leroy McPherson. After completing a doctoral dissertation on Belgian education policy in the Congo from 1945 to 1960, he taught at West Georgia College before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1978.

ALSO BY NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (2007) Older: The Biography of George Michael with Timothy Wapshott (1998) Carol Reed: A Biography (1994) Rex Harrison (1991) The Man Between: A Biography of Carol Reed (1990, in United Kingdom) Thatcher with George Brock (1983) Peter O’Toole: A Biography (1981; in United Kingdom, 1983) KEYNES HAYEK Nicholas Wapshott W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK ■ LONDON TO ANTHONY HOWARD CONTENTS PREFACE ONE The Glamorous Hero How Keynes Became Hayek’s Idol, 1919–27 TWO End of Empire Hayek Experiences Hyperinflation Firsthand, 1919–24 THREE The Battle Lines Are Drawn Keynes Denies the “Natural” Order of Economics, 1923–29 FOUR Stanley and Livingston Keynes and Hayek Meet for the First Time, 1928–30 FIVE The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Hayek Arrives from Vienna, 1931 SIX Pistols at Dawn Hayek Harshly Reviews Keynes’s Treatise, 1931 SEVEN Return Fire Keynes and Hayek Lock Horns, 1931 EIGHT The Italian Job Keynes Asks Piero Sraffa to Continue the Debate, 1932 NINE Toward The General Theory The Cost-Free Cure for Unemployment, 1932–33 TEN Hayek Blinks The General Theory Invites a Response, 1932–36 ELEVEN Keynes Takes America Roosevelt and the Young New Deal Economists, 1936 TWELVE Hopelessly Stuck in Chapter 6 Hayek Writes His Own “General Theory,” 1936–41 THIRTEEN The Road to Nowhere Hayek Links Keynes’s Remedies to Tyranny, 1937–46 FOURTEEN The Wilderness Years Mont-Pèlerin and Hayek’s Move to Chicago, 1944–69 FIFTEEN The Age of Keynes Three Decades of Unrivalled American Prosperity, 1946–80 SIXTEEN Hayek’s Counterrevolution Friedman, Goldwater, Thatcher, and Reagan, 1963–88 SEVENTEEN The Battle Resumed Freshwater and Saltwater Economists, 1989–2008 EIGHTEEN And the Winner Is . . .

He appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve a lifelong Democrat, Paul Volcker,96 with a mission to raise interest rates to choke off the demand that was thought to be the root of inflation. Carter’s failure to bring prices under control in time for the November 1980 election was a gift to his Republican rival, the handsome, affable, twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan, who asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The answer was a resounding no. It was not only Carter who was on trial, but also John Maynard Keynes. Thirty-four years after the great man’s death and more than forty after publication of his General Theory, Keynesianism appeared to have run its course.


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

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

And for the ultimate example in standing alone, we conservatives owe a great debt to a towering figure from Arizona, Senator Barry Goldwater, who more than fifty years ago stood alone when it was extremely difficult to do so, and in so doing started a movement of conservatives that twenty years later would see the election of one of our greatest presidents, Ronald Reagan. That this book takes its name from Senator Goldwater’s seminal book is an homage to both his fierce independence and his visionary leadership. Goldwater’s fight was for the soul of the country, and so, too, is ours. When he wrote this in his own time, he may as well have been writing it in ours: “Though we Conservatives are deeply persuaded that our society is ailing, and know that Conservatism holds the key to national salvation—and feel sure the country agrees with us—we seem unable to demonstrate the practical relevance of Conservative principles to the needs of the day.”

The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline….These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation….To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle’s Politics are out of date. —BARRY GOLDWATER, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960 Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. —RONALD REAGAN, March 1961 AS A KID, for as long as I can remember, a 3x5 card, stained with vegetable oil, cookie dough, and brownie mix, was pasted on our refrigerator. It read: “Assume the best, Look for the good.” To-do lists, wedding invitations, school pictures, ribbons from the county fair came and went over the years, but that card remained.

But if I didn’t know better, I would say that we had not been in our right minds in the days leading up to the presidential election in 2016. What does it say about conservatives that our message by then was so different from the words that my parents taught me, so different as to amount to a rejection of the optimistic vision of Ronald Reagan or the extraordinary decency of George H. W. Bush, or the principled constitutionalism of Barry Goldwater? What does it say that we had instead succumbed to what can only be described as a propaganda-fueled dystopian view of conservatism? And what does that, in turn, say about our stewardship of America and its institutions?


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Indeed the fortunes of these two sectors have been moving in opposite directions—as finance has triumphed, manufacturing has slumped. The economic policies pursued by both Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—from a high exchange rate to financial and labour market de-regulation—were highly favourable to finance. One of the effects of Reaganomics was an overvalued dollar, hardly dream conditions for exporters. William Benedetto, head of corporate finance for Dean Witter Reynolds—one of America’s largest stock brokerage and securities’ firms—called Ronald Reagan’s eight-year Presidency ‘an investment banker’s dream world.’96 But while Wall Street flourished, key industrial sectors from timber and steel to chemicals and high-technology, sweated.

The question of inequality was and remains a sensitive one in the United States, a nation that likes to see itself as having created the most opportunistic society in the world. ‘Even mentioning income distribution leads to angry accusations of “class warfare”’ is how Krugman put it.17 In 1989, George H W Bush had succeeded Ronald Reagan as President and continued the broad economic policies of his predecessor—a mix of freer markets, smaller government and lower taxes. Republican administrations from the 1980s had long claimed that ‘Reaganomics’—as President Reagan’s free-market experiment was known—had been highly successful, helping to boost growth and prosperity for all.

Under their influence, she came to believe that Britain had created an economic model that killed incentives and stifled enterprise, that only freer markets and personal wealth accumulation would bring a more efficient, entrepreneurial and prosperous nation. A year after coming to power she was joined in this crusade by an even more powerful soul-mate, Ronald Reagan. The new American President, who was also heavily influenced by neoconservative thinkers, shared Mrs Thatcher’s belief in the dangers of big government and the virtues of a weakened state and low taxes. Central to this new economic philosophy was the idea that the rich should be allowed to get richer.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

And when Washington’s bureaucrats aren’t wasting your tax dollars on idiotic projects that they always bungle, they are telling you how to run your business, compiling regulation upon regulation into a bookshelf of legalese that no one can ever hope to understand or obey. “Every businessman has his own tale of harassment,” thundered Ronald Reagan in 1964. “Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.” It has been forty-five years now since Reagan’s electrifying vision of homegrown tyranny fueled Barry Goldwater’s run for the nation’s highest office; it has been four decades since a diluted version of it propelled Richard Nixon to the presidency.

Admittedly, cynicism seems like an unlikely quality to find in a movement whose rank and file get misty-eyed contemplating the flag, the family, the founding fathers, and the Boy Scouts, and who can be moved to hold candlelight vigils to protect Ten Commandments monuments. Change the subject to government, though, and you will have opened the floodgates of sarcasm, disbelief, contempt, and ridicule. It was sunny Ronald Reagan who claimed to find terror in the phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” And it was Reagan’s economic adviser David Stockman who, in 1981, penned this bitter verdict on the Carter administration that he was preparing to terminate. “Much of the vast enterprise of American government was invalid, suspect, malodorous,” he wrote with disgust.

Jamba was officially sponsored by a long-forgotten Washington group called Citizens for America whose leading members were typical conservative plutocrats: oil barons, Wall Street kings, and agribusiness lords. The group’s founder, Jack Hume, was one of the California millionaires who had funded Ronald Reagan’s political career from the beginning. (“He made a substantial investment and has backed Reagan ever since” is one apt description.)46 To represent its conservatism to the world, though, this 24-karat group did not choose a contented white yachtsman snoozing in an easy chair, but a black African fond of camouflage and handguns; a ferocious warrior who single-handedly kept a real rebellion burning against the government of his country year after year.


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Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government by Paul Volcker, Christine Harper

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, income per capita, inflation targeting, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, Nixon shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning

To his credit, only once did he express concern about our tightening of policy. Ronald Reagan: A New President By the beginning of 1981, with a new Republican president in office, we were back in the trenches, fighting to restrain monetary growth. The much predicted recession finally arrived in full force. But it was hard to see progress on the inflation front. Interest rates and the money supply, while increasing at a slower rate, remained stubbornly high. The Fed board remained determined to carry on. There had been, of course, much speculation about President Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and California governor, and his new administration’s attitude toward economic policy.

The president recorded that: see entry for Tuesday, June 7, 1983 in Ronald Reagan, “The Reagan Diaries” (HarperCollins, 2007), 158. It split symmetrically: CQ Almanac, 1983, https://library.cqpress.com/cq almanac/document.php?id=cqal83-1198874. I was summoned to a meeting: The 3:30 p.m. July 24, 1984, meeting in the library is recorded in Reagan’s daily schedule, although it says Edwin Meese, Richard Darman, and Michael Deaver were present and to my memory they were certainly not. Reagan didn’t write anything about the meeting in his daily diary. See https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/white-house-diaries/diary-entry-07241984/.

April 28, 1980 First Pennsylvania Bank announces it has received a $1.5 billion rescue, sponsored by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve. May 22, 1980 In midst of sudden recession, Fed rolls back most of the credit controls implemented in March. October 2, 1980 Monetary policy tightening ahead of the election incites mild presidential criticism. November 4, 1980 Ronald Reagan elected president. January 20, 1981 Reagan takes office, nominates Donald Regan as Treasury secretary. January 23, 1981 Volcker has lunch with Reagan at the Treasury Department along with Donald Regan, Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) chief Murray Weidenbaum and others. June 30, 1982 Mexico is world’s largest borrower, with $21.5 billion owed to US banks alone.


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Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

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

His atrocities were revealed in this book so conclusively that "only the most light-headed and cold-blooded Western intellectual will come to the tyrant's defense," said the Washington Post. Remember, this is the account of what happened to one man. Let's say it's all true. Let's raise no questions about what happened to the one man who says he was tortured. At a White House ceremony marking Human Rights Day, he was singled out by Ronald Reagan for his courage in enduring the horrors and sadism of this bloody Cuban tyrant. He was then appointed the U.S. representative at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where he has been able to perform signal services defending the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments against charges that they conduct atrocities so massive that they make anything he suffered look pretty minor.

There was an article in the local Marin County newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and I think that's all. No one else would touch it. This was a time when there was more than a few "lightheaded and cold-blooded Western intellectuals" who were singing the praises of Jose Napoleon Duarte and of Ronald Reagan. Anaya was not the subject of any tributes. He didn't get on Human Rights Day. He wasn't appointed to anything. He was released in a prisoner exchange and then assassinated, apparently by the U.S.-backed security forces. Very little information about that ever appeared. The media never asked whether exposure of the atrocities-instead of sitting on them and silencing them-might have saved his life.

Here was an Iraqi democratic opposition who ought to have some thoughts about the matter. They would be happy to see Saddam Hussein drawn and quartered. He killed their brothers, tortured their sisters, and drove them out of the country. They have been fighting against his tyranny throughout the whole time that Ronald Reagan and George Bush were cherishing him. What about their voices? Take a look at the national media and see how much you can find about the Iraqi democratic opposition from August through March (1991). You can't find a word. It's not that they're inarticulate. They have statements, proposals, calls and demands.


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

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

As of spring 2016, the lowest spending for national defense during the 1970s was $76.7 billion in FY1973; the highest was $116.3 billion in 1979. By FY1983, the defense budget had exceeded $200 billion; by FY1989, it had exceeded $300 billion. 5.Opening phrase of a 1984 campaign ad for Ronald Reagan, at Museum of the Moving Image, “The Living Room Candidate: 1984 Reagan vs. Mondale,” www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1984/prouder-stronger-better (accessed Mar. 20, 2016). 6.Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981,” American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130 (accessed Mar. 20, 2016). 7.For the story of the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph and its subject, see BBC News, “Picture Power: Vietnam Napalm Attack,” news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4517597.stm (accessed Apr. 5, 2016). 8.As of early 2008, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) began to deliver public testimony in a campaign called Winter Soldier, which culminated in a four-day event in March 2008 near Washington, DC; see www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier; www.ivaw.org/blog/press-releases; www.ivaw.org/blog/press-coverage (accessed Apr. 5, 2016).

Astronautics can also lead to military systems which, once developed and deployed, may make hopes of disarmament, arms control, or inspection more difficult to fulfill.” Quoted in Sean N. Kalic, US Presidents and the Militarization of Space 1946–1967 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 44. 29.Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” Mar. 23, 1983, transcript, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1983/32383d.htm (accessed Apr. 22, 2017). 30.Steven R. Weisman, “Reagan Proposes U.S. Seek New Way to Block Missiles,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1983. 31.“Boost-phase intercept has the big advantage, especially for small states, that is for North Korea, that you can get close.

During the first few years following the 1973 peace accord and the departure of combat troops, the war’s opponents may have expected that the US military budget would stage a retreat. Yet Office of Management and Budget figures show only a brief pause before a renewed escalation in spending—an escalation that became dramatic during the next administration.4 Soon, promised the soon-to-be president, Ronald Reagan, it would be “morning again in America.”5 Reagan’s first inaugural address, in 1981, officially heralded the era of ubiquitous heroism and insistent patriotism—heroes, whose “patriotism is quiet but deep,” were to be met “every day . . . across a counter.”6 People hung the Stars and Stripes from their porches.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

.: Economic Policy Institute, 2008), pp. 220–24. 6 More than half of all the money: See Lawrence Bebchuk, “The Growth of Executive Pay,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 21, no. 2 (2005): 283–303. 7 By 2007, financial and insurance companies: See Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) Tables, Section I: Domestic Product and Incomes, “Real Gross Value Added by Industry,” 2009. 8 In 2009, the twenty-five best-paid hedge-fund managers: See AR: Absolute Return + Alpha, annual survey, 2009. 9 in 2007, Ford’s financial division: Securities and Exchange Commission Filings. 10 according to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan campaign address, “A Vital Economy: Jobs, Growth, and Progress for Americans,” October 24, 1980. 11 Moreover, they had no clear memory: See Technology Triumphs, Morality Falters, Section 5: “America’s Collective Memory,” the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 3, 1999. 8.

Others see the reversal of the pendulum as the inevitable result of declining confidence in government. In their view, the era that began with the Vietnam War and continued with the Watergate scandal culminated in the tax revolts and double-digit inflation of the late 1970s—which, according to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, occurred not because Americans were living too well but “because the government [was] living too well.” Confidence in government did drop, but proponents of this view have cause and effect backward. The tax revolts that thundered across America starting in the late 1970s were not so much ideological revolts against government—Americans still wanted all the government services they had had before, and then some—as against paying more taxes on incomes that had flattened.

The rich and powerful also had substantial influence “in conditioning the attitude taken by people as a whole toward [the] rules,” as Eccles wrote in describing the pre-Depression years. They generously financed think tanks, books, media, and ads designed to persuade Americans that free markets always know best. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, and other apostles of free-market dogma reiterated a simple story: The choice was between a free market and big government. Government was the problem. Free markets were the solution. But how could the public have been so gullible as to accept this story?


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

“Playboy Interview: Donald Trump,” Playboy, March 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990. 44. Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland,” July 6, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-people-poland/. 45. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Canadian Elections and Free Trade,” November 26, 1988, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/112688a. Chapter Four: White Terror 1. Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to Orlando Shooting,” Washington Post, June 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/13/donald-trump-suggests-president-obama-was-involved-with-orlando-shooting/. 2.

Naipaul astutely said of Eva Perón: “Even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope.”34 But Trump lacked the emotional toughness of Evita. Trump desperately craved the elite admiration that a more astute demagogue would have despised and refused. Trump could have made political capital out of being the first president since Ronald Reagan not to have attended Yale or Harvard. But no. Instead of seizing the opportunity to identify more closely with his supporters, Trump revealed himself, as journalist Jonathan Chait bitingly observed, as a snob who secretly despised his supporters. Chait spotted an especially revealing moment at a Trump rally in West Virginia in 2018.

While the job goes undone, the United States and the world careen toward conflict and crisis. Chapter Three World War Trump American presidents have more power over foreign affairs than domestic policy. Much more than at home, it is abroad that a president can define the United States according to his own ideas. Those ideas—Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights; Ronald Reagan’s anticommunism—shape the world and the future. Donald Trump, too, had a vision, and we all will be coping with those consequences for many years to come. For Donald Trump, life is a struggle for dominance. In every encounter, one party must win, the other must lose. The tough will prevail. The weak will be victimized—and they will deserve it.


pages: 465 words: 140,800

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy

company town, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Vita, our animated young Ukrainian guide, first takes us to the 30-kilometer exclusion zone and then to the more restricted 10-kilometer one—two circles, one inside the other, with the former nuclear power plant at their center and a radius of 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) and 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), respectively. We get to see the Soviet radar called Duga, or Arch—a response to Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative—by today’s standards a low-tech system. It was designed to detect a possible nuclear attack from the East Coast of the United States. From there we proceeded to the city of Chernobyl, its nuclear power station, and the neighboring city of Prypiat, a ghost town that once housed close to 50,000 construction workers and operators of the destroyed plant.

The Central Intelligence Agency in the United States had made even grimmer estimates, putting the growth rate at 2 to 3 percent, and later reducing even that estimate to approximately 1 percent.3 With its goals for communism nowhere in sight, the economy in a tailspin, the Chinese launching their economic reforms by introducing market mechanisms, and the Americans rushing ahead not only in economic development but also in the arms race, under the leadership of the unfailingly optimistic Ronald Reagan, the Soviet leadership had lost its way. The people, ever more disillusioned with the communist experiment, had become despondent. And yet, with the communist religion in crisis, it suddenly appeared to have found a new messiah in a relatively young, energetic, and charismatic leader: Mikhail Gorbachev.

A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.” The common wormwood, after which the town of Chernobyl was named, is not exactly the same shrub as the wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) mentioned in the Bible, but it was close enough for many, including President Ronald Reagan, to conclude that the Chernobyl accident was prophesied in the Bible.5 The biblical prophecy aside, Chernobyl remained the capital of the north Ukrainian wilderness for most of its history. In early modern times, the rule of Kyivan princes over the region was replaced by that of Lithuanian grand dukes, and then of Polish kings.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Slight, quick-witted, and irascible, he viewed the tortuous derivations of general equilibrium theory as largely a waste of time and effort: to him, the efficacy of free markets was self-evident. Martin Anderson, one of Ronald Reagan’s economic advisers, has described Friedman as “the most influential economist since Adam Smith.” That may be an exaggeration, but nobody did more than Friedman to resurrect laissez-faire ideas. In academic venues, in his long-running column in Newsweek, and in two much-read books, Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962, and Free to Choose, which he and his wife, Rose, put out in January 1980, just as Ronald Reagan was beginning his successful run for the White House, Friedman furnished conservative politicians with a consistent and well-articulated set of ideas and policy proposals.

But among economists there was still a deep and pervasive faith in the vitality of American capitalism, and the ideals it represented. For decades now, economists have been insisting that the best way to ensure prosperity is to scale back government involvement in the economy and let the private sector take over. In the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched the conservative counterrevolution, the intellectuals who initially pushed this line of reasoning—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Sir Keith Joseph—were widely seen as right-wing cranks. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and many other progressive politicians had adopted the language of the right.

Frank Nothaft, the chief economist at Freddie Mac, ran through a list of “economic fundamentals” that he said justified high and rising home prices: low mortgage rates, large-scale immigration, and a modest inventory of new homes. “We are not going to see the price of single-family homes fall,” he said bluntly. “It ain’t going to happen.” As the housing boom continued, Nothaft’s suggestion that nationwide house prices were unidirectional acquired the official imprimatur of the U.S. government. In April 2003, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, in Simi Valley, California, Alan Greenspan insisted that the United States wasn’t suffering from a real estate bubble. In October 2004, he argued that real estate doesn’t lend itself to speculation, noting that “upon sale of a house, homeowners must move and live elsewhere.”


pages: 851 words: 247,711

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

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

The West, in the summer of 1979, was in poor condition, and Europe was not producing the answers. Creativity would have to come from the Atlantic again, and it did. Margaret Thatcher emerged in May, and Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. 21 Atlantic Recovery: ‘Reagan and Thatcher’ Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher each brought to bear some of the core beliefs of their civilization, which included (among others) Hollywood and a belief in facts. Ronald Reagan had been an actor, a Rooseveltian Democrat, and he had escaped from a past in a way that commanded respect - his father a drunken failure, his mother a shrew. He had pushed his way forward, via a degree in simple-minded verities at an obscure college, through sports-commentating, to Hollywood.

General Galtieri (centre) with Admiral Lambruschini (left) and Brigadier General Graffigna, Buenos Aires cathedral, May 1980; Arthur Scargill, Orgreave colliery, May 1984 44. and 45. Couples. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, June 1984; Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu with folkloric Romanian children, c. 1985 46. and 47. More couples. Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987 48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985 50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year It was of course a racial matter.

Still, he had only managed to win the nomination because the other candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, scored black marks for divorcing his wife of thirty-one years, and Goldwater manoeuvred himself into what appeared to be grotesquely reactionary positions - the abolition of graduated income tax, the bombing of North Vietnam, a denunciation of Eisenhower’s administration as a ‘dime store New Deal’. His electoral ship sank with all hands, though Ronald Reagan found a lifebelt. The mood was now for political change, though, looking back, it is difficult to see quite where the urgency for this lay. The racial problem in the USA was indeed a great blot, and had been seen as such even in the days when the Constitution proclaimed equality. But there was much to be said for taking things carefully, even just applying the existing laws that protected individuals in the Anglo-Saxon manner.


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The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

That is why the “city on a hill” is the image from Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not “members of the same body.” No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of “mourn together, suffer together.” City on a hill, though—that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that’s why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that’s why we are Ronald Reagan. Remember this? In 1987, when President Reagan finally went on national TV to apologize for his underlings’ secret and illegal weapons sales to Iran in exchange for hostages and to purchase weapons for anticommunist Nicaraguan death squads, he said, “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages.

According to Foxe, when Tilleman saw the large pile of kindling that was to be used to burn him alive, he asked his executioner if most of the wood “might be given to the poor, saying, ‘A small quantity will suffice to consume me.’ ” In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time also when Christians . . . must give beyond their ability.” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times.” (It is so curious that this sermon, in my lifetime, would become so identified with the Communist-hating, Communist-baiting Ronald Reagan, considering Winthrop just proclaimed that a follower of Christ must be willing to renounce property. Utter Commie talk.) After the Old Testament Israelites, the colonists’ second-favorite biblical role models are the first-century churches founded by Christ’s apostles and the missionary Paul.

To him, the city on the hill was also something else, something worse—a warning. If he and his shipmates reneged on their covenant with God, the city on a hill would be a lighthouse of doom beckoning the wrath of God to Boston Harbor. Talking about Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” without discussing Ronald Reagan would be like mentioning Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and pretending Whitney Houston doesn’t exist. Whitney and Reagan’s covers were way more famous than the original versions ever were. Winthrop’s sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

He had gone out of fashion in the 20th century as the rise of communism showed the potential of the economic model set out by Karl Marx (Chapter 3), while the Great Depression of the 1930s encouraged policymakers to seize on the writings of John Maynard Keynes (Chapter 5), who argued for more government intervention to correct the failures of the market. However, by the 1980s communism was in retreat across Russia and Eastern Europe and the dominance of the state and the trade unions was seen as a brake on economic growth. Enthusiasm for his theories received a second wind. Two politicians, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US – and their advisers – seized on his ideas to justify rolling back the state and deregulating labour and financial markets. According to a popular urban myth, Thatcher was said to carry a copy of The Wealth of Nations in her famous handbag, and in her own book, Statecraft, she described Adam Smith’s invisible hand as a ‘bracing blast of freedom itself’. 20 The Great Economists According to Bruce Chapman, one of Reagan’s Deputy Assistants in the White House, Smith was a hero to Reagan since he studied classical economics at college.

Speaking at a memorial service for Reagan, Chapman also recalled that ties with little Adam Smith busts on them ‘festooned every male conservative chest in Washington. You had a wide range of choices: there were green Adam Smith neckties, maroon Adam Smith neckties, red, white and blue Adam Smith neckties. If Ronald Reagan had been allowed to run for a third term I imagine there would have been Adam Smith hats and Adam Smith raincoats.’1 The interpretation by some modern writers that Smith in his famous phrase about the butchers and bakers was saying that self-interest – or even greed – alone was a sufficient guide to human economic actions has caused a furious debate.

In 1981 she told the House of Commons that she was a ‘great admirer’ of Professor Hayek and urged ‘some’ of her fellow MPs to read his works. In a letter to congratulate Hayek on his 90th birthday in 1989, she wrote that the ‘leadership and inspiration that your work and thinking gave us were absolutely crucial and we owe you a great deal’. Across the Atlantic the new US President Ronald Reagan counted both Hayek and Friedman as friends. He too took a leaf out of Hayek’s book in devising his election campaign, telling voters that he would ‘get the government off our backs [and] out of our pockets’. He took an axe to the federal government and cut taxes – although critics said that his massive increase in defence spending provided a classic Keynesian boost to aggregate demand.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

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

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

It was July 1984, and the second-term Arkansas governor, not yet forty years old, knew where to find opportunity. The convention itself would be a morose affair, with party regulars dutifully ratifying former vice president Walter Mondale as their nominee. Four years earlier, Mondale had been number two on the Jimmy Carter–led ticket that surrendered forty-four states to Ronald Reagan. For a while, Democrats had believed Reagan’s triumph to be a fluke, especially when a nasty recession pushed unemployment to over 10 percent early in his term. But by the summer of ’84, the economy was resurgent, patriotism was in full bloom (Los Angeles would soon host the Summer Olympics), and America’s grandfatherly president was enjoying some of the best poll numbers of his tenure.

People wouldn’t mind if they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” It was all too much. The Arkansas governorship still came with a two-year term back then, and when Bill Clinton faced the voters again in 1980, he did so with the presidential race at the top of the ticket. Nationally, Ronald Reagan trounced President Jimmy Carter, piling up victories in every corner of the country. Most stunning was Reagan’s strength in the South, a region where the Republican Party had barely existed since the Civil War. The GOP had been gaining strength in Dixie, but Carter, the old Georgia peanut farmer, had seemingly restored his party’s grip on the region in 1976.

“We need a message that the Democratic Party is a home for them, and that’s what Cuomo is saying.” Those watching at home, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, “saw yet another star born on TV: Mario Cuomo, the keynote speaker and New York governor who might this morning lay claim to the title Son of the Great Communicator. “Like Ronald Reagan, the absolute standard by which all others are judged, Cuomo appears to have mastered the art of speaking directly to the television audience while only appearing to be speaking to an assembled throng.” Mario Cuomo had come to San Francisco just another Democratic governor from the Northeast.


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Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Valley of the Heart’s Delight: “Valley of the Heart’s Delight: Santa Clara Valley, California,” http://santaclararesearch.net. CHAPTER 7: THE BIG CON Edwin J. Gray: Ronald Reagan, “Nomination of Edwin J. Gray to Be a Member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,” February 17, 1983, Public Papers of the Presidents. Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation: Kenneth B. Noble, “Political Foot Soldier; Reagan’s Friend at the Bank Board,” New York Times, May 29, 1983. “All in all, I think”: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act,” October 15, 1982, Public Papers of the Presidents. an astonishing array of schemers: William K.

After it became apparent that the Justice Department was in the process of terminating Lerach’s legal career, Dillon called Lerach to inform him that there was still a book to be done, but it would be about Lerach, not coauthored by him. Pat subsequently called Carl and invited him to be his coauthor. Carl, who had just days before finished a book with his father, Lou Cannon, comparing the presidencies of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, gave his friend a succinct initial response: “No.” Obviously, that answer was not the last word. Pat subsequently informed Bill Lerach that he and Carl had signed a contract to write a book about Lerach’s life and career. Lerach’s response was, “Well, I guess if someone is going to do it, I’m glad it’s going to be you two.

The Methodists and their lawyers were about to run into the buzz saw named Lerach. Before this case was over, he would present so much compelling evidence that the Methodists would sue for peace before they could even put on their first witness. THE CASE WAS ASSIGNED to Judge Ross G. Tharp, a folksy Ronald Reagan appointee with a handlebar mustache and a resemblance to the comedic actor Dabney Coleman. Tharp’s unease with the case was almost physical, and he did nothing to hide his discomfort at presiding over the lawsuit against a venerated Protestant denomination. The Methodists’ legal defense consisted of three lines of argument: the first was procedural, the second constitutional, and the third an assertion that was more a public policy position than a legal theory.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

It looked beautiful hanging there. Then Artie came over. As soon as he saw it, he started snorting and acting pissed off. “Ugh,” he said, “what a fool.” I said, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, Reagan, I mean, Jesus.” “That’s a great picture. I found it in Tijuana.” He said, “Do you know who this is?” “Well, it says below, ‘Ronald Reagan.’ ” “He’s the governor of the state of California.” I said, “Really! That’s amazing. That’s twice as good. I have the governor of the state of California hanging here.” “Yeah, he used to be in Westerns,” Artie said. — With Franco as my training partner, I could concentrate on my competition goals.

You could put down $100,000 to buy something for $1 million, and the next year it would be worth $1.2 million, so you’d made 200 percent on your investment. It was crazy. Al Ehringer and I flipped our building on Main Street and bought a city block for redevelopment in Santa Monica and another in Denver. I traded up my twelve-unit apartment building for a thirty-unit one. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and the economy slowed, I’d achieved another piece of the immigrant dream. I’d made my first million. — Conan the Barbarian might still be stuck in the comic books today if John Milius hadn’t reentered the picture in 1979. He took Oliver Stone’s script, chopped it in half, and rewrote it to cost much less, but still $17 million.

I’d had my Jeep outfitted with a loudspeaker and siren for showing off or scaring other drivers out of my way. But now when we drove around town, I’d sink a little lower in the seat, hoping that no one would see me. It was weird pulling up at the gym every day: like most of the people there, I was known as a Republican, and now here I was with the Teddy stickers. Personally, I was hoping that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, but no one was asking my opinion; it was Maria they wanted to see. Hollywood, of course, is a big liberal town, and her family connections went deep. Her grandfather Joe Kennedy had been heavily involved in movies, running no fewer than three studios in the 1920s, and the Kennedys were famous for involving entertainers in political campaigns.


pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 26 “called her ‘The Margaret Thatcher of financial regulation’”: Wendy Gramm, Mercatus Center Distinguished Senior Scholar, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, mercatus.org/wendy-gramm. 27 “Unfortunately, this legislation does not deal”: Ronald Reagan, Remarks on Signing the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, October 15, 1982, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1982/101582b.htm. 28 “Ronald Reagan’s dream of carrying out a sweeping”: Richard Hornik, “Shortening the Tether on Bankers,” Time, August 17, 1987. 29 “the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act restrictions on securities activities”: Ronald Reagan, Statement on Signing Competitive Equality Banking Act of 1987, August 10, 1987, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

They never had a chance, though; they were facing a juggernaut: The combined power of the Wall Street lobbyists allied with popular President Clinton, who staked his legacy on reassuring the titans of finance a Democrat could serve their interests better than any Republican. Clinton’s role was decisive in turning Ronald Reagan’s obsession with an unfettered free market into law. Reagan, that fading actor recast so effectively as great propagandist for the unregulated market—“get government off our backs” was his signature rallying cry—was far more successful at deregulating smokestack industries than the financial markets.

A tip-off to the answer might be that the lobbying forces—the power of that massive wealth to control politics which Obama in his speech referred to as “the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation”—did not stop functioning with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and that to some degree, even a politician who read the danger signs so well could succumb to the very forces that he had earlier decried. CHAPTER 2 The High Priestess of the Reagan Revolution Ronald Reagan called her his favorite economist, and Wendy Lee Gramm seemed to deserve the praise. Both while she was an academic economist and after Reagan appointed her to various regulatory positions in his administration, she excelled in articulating antiregulatory rhetoric that marked her as a true believer in what would later be labeled the “Reagan Revolution.”


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

But it would be wrong to overlook the impact on the victims, who endure a lasting “culture of terror [that] domesticates the expectations of the majority” and undermines aspirations towards “alternatives that differ from those of the powerful,” in the words of the Salvadoran Jesuits who survived the project of “democracy promotion,” in a conference they sponsored in 1994. This book is concerned with the immediate consequences of Ronald Reagan’s war on terror, declared as he entered office. The war was redeclared by George W. Bush. The immediate consequences should be too well known to review, and should not have surprised those who are familiar with the continuities of policy and the way they are interpreted within mainstream articulate opinion.

The doctrine of “change of course,” which allows any past horror to be cheerfully dismissed, is highly functional within a terrorist culture. It is presented in its most vulgar form by 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer, who assures us that “today’s America is not Teddy Roosevelt’s or Eisenhower’s or even that imagined by Ronald Reagan, the candidate.” Now “democracy in the Third World has become, for the right as well as the left, a principal goal of American foreign policy.” While it is true that “liberty has not always been the American purpose,” now all has changed: “We believe in freedom,” and the past can be consigned to oblivion along with all that it teaches us about American institutions and the way they operate.7 As for the present, it will be rendered with the same scrupulous concern for accuracy and honest self-criticism that was exhibited during past eras when, we now concede in retrospect, there may have been an occasional blemish.

It is the conclusion that anyone who gave the matter a moment’s thought would at once draw from the story that had been displayed on the television screen and the front pages for the preceding months. But the media were oblivious to these truisms. Doves and hawks alike pondered the prospects in ways to which I will return, but without any recognition of the fundamental absurdity of a “peace plan” under which Nicaragua disarms in exchange for a pledge of good behavior from Ronald Reagan and his cohorts.13 It was assumed on all sides that the Reagan administration would undergo the familiar miraculous conversion, that it would suddenly change course, would become law-abiding and would comply with agreements without monitoring or any meaningful supervision. There were concerns that Nicaragua would lie and cheat in the manner of all Communists, but no questions about the likelihood that the United States would live up to an unverifiable commitment.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But it was in the United States that the Volcker shock caused the first political casualties. Construction of new homes fell by half. Auto sales, running at an annual rate of fourteen million units in October 1979, dropped below ten million. The unemployment rate jumped nearly two percentage points. Although the recession would be brief, it was enough to elect Ronald Reagan president.7 RONALD REAGAN WAS AN ICON OF THE RIGHT. A FORMER ACTOR and corporate pitchman, he had served two terms as governor of the fast-growing state of California. He said the right conservative things, praising free enterprise and small government, and even the blunt promise to “send the welfare bums back to work,” which had carried him to the governorship in 1966, came with a smile and a friendly wave.

The global political climate warmed to market-oriented thinking because other ideas appeared to have failed. The demand for smaller government, personal responsibility, and freer markets transformed political debate, upended long-established public policies, and swept conservative politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl into power. In the rich world, the postcrisis years brought a massive shift in income and wealth in favor of those who owned capital and against those whose only asset was their labor. In the poor world, they fueled a boom and subsequent bust among countries eager to join the advanced economies.

But as domestic automakers and auto parts manufacturers shed some three hundred thousand jobs during the course of 1980, and as automobile output fell by one-fourth, the pressure for government action ahead of the November 1980 presidential election was impossible to ignore. In the midst of a closely fought campaign, Carter, who had publicly opposed sanctions against car imports from Japan, changed his stance. His opponent, Ronald Reagan, proudly heralded his support for free trade, but he told workers at a Chrysler plant in Detroit that autos were a special case; the US government, Reagan asserted, should “convince the Japanese one way or another, and in their own best interests, the deluge of their cars into the United States must be slowed while our industry gets back on its feet.”27 Faced with the implicit threat of US trade sanctions, MITI announced “voluntary restraints” on car exports to the United States on May 1, 1981, barely three months after Reagan’s inauguration.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

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

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

These unprecedented political and economic traumas destroyed the classical laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and created a different version of the capitalist system, embracing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and the British and European welfare states. Then, forty years after the Great Depression, another enormous economic crisis—the global inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s—inspired the free-market revolution of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, creating a third version of capitalism, clearly distinct from the previous two. Forty years after the great inflation of the late 1960s, the global economy was hit by another systemic crisis, in 2007-09. The argument of this book is that this crisis is creating a fourth version of the capitalist system, a new economy as different from the designs of Reagan and Thatcher as those were from the New Deal.

Yet the many conservative politicians, financiers, and business leaders who vehemently denounce the credit expansion of the precrisis period as a fraud and illusion never seem to consider the logical implication: If most of the wealth created from the 1980s onward was a fraud, the same must be true of the free-market reforms that supposedly created this imaginary wealth. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher allegedly reversed the structural deterioration of Anglo-Saxon capitalism that began in the late 1960s by creating the free-market system described in this book as Capitalism 3.0. But postcrisis conventional wisdom implies that the Thatcher-Reagan reforms merely disguised the capitalist system’s malaise behind a froth of financial bubbles.

In the past forty years, dozens of relatively small events could have changed the course of history and transformed economic conditions the world over. Imagine if Deng Xiaoping had died in the Cultural Revolution alongside his mentor Liu Shaoqi. Or if Gorbachev had been passed over for the Soviet leadership. Or if John Hinckley’s bullet had been aimed an inch higher at Ronald Reagan’s chest. Or if Argentina had not invaded the Falklands, saving the government of Margaret Thatcher. Or if the hanging chads in Florida had fallen for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush. Any of these events would certainly have transformed the pace of change, but would they have moved history in a different direction?


pages: 441 words: 136,954

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

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

What is tragic right now is that we have people—leading people—who choose to leave audiences in ignorance or even encourage stupidity.” That same ignorance can be found in sectors of the business community, where scorn for the government and regulation has become the norm. Who can ever forget Ronald Reagan’s famous campaign line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Of course, every businessperson in America wants lower taxes and less regulation. Most Americans do. But every one of us also benefits from, indeed depends upon, the five pillars of the American formula.

That will require us to cut spending, to raise taxes, and to invest in the sources of our strength, all in a coordinated way. But before we discuss that, let’s step back for a moment and ask: How in the world did we get into this position? Present at the Creation From the end of World War II until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, American budget history was pretty boring. The federal government ran manageable annual budget deficits and the economy steadily grew, so our debt-to-GDP ratio fell. Since the big change occurred during the Reagan presidency, we decided to ask someone who was present at the creation: David Stockman, the budget director during Reagan’s first term and a sharp critic of recent American fiscal policy.

Recall the words of former vice president Cheney, whom we quoted earlier: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Reagan not only did not prove that deficits don’t matter; he did not believe that deficits don’t matter. This is a fiction that would be manufactured later by a new generation of conservatives either out of ignorance or for their own selfish or ideological reasons. “Ronald Reagan never called them taxes,” recalled former senator Bennett, the Utah Republican. “They were ‘revenue enhancements.’ [Senator] Pete Domenici described it to me once: he said, ‘We went down to the White House and said, “Mr. President, we can’t survive on this level of revenue.” And, Reagan said, “Okay, maybe we ought to have some ‘revenue enhancements.’”’


pages: 475 words: 156,046

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

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

Look at the way each sentence sets up the next: the Battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Then the final two sentences that flow inexorably on to their conclusion in the speech’s title. This is his finest hour. You are on fire, sir. RONALD REAGAN Tear Down This Wall The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 12 June 1987 The most successful electoral politician of any era of American politics, Ronald Reagan was, to use a coinage of George W. Bush, the most mis-underestimated president of modern times. He was also, as much as Wilson and Eisenhower, a war leader. Reagan’s war was the Cold War and it ended in a decisive victory.

Kennedy: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, Washington DC, 20 January 1961 Barack Obama: I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America, Grant Park, Chicago, 7 November 2012 Pericles: Funeral Oration, Athens, Winter, c. 431 BC David Lloyd George: The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice, Queen’s Hall, London, 19 September 1914 Woodrow Wilson: Making the World Safe for Democracy, Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 2 April 1917 Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987 Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588 Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787 Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947 Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964 Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991 William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908 Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936 Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963 Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?

Critics have drawn a straight line that runs through the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. Kennedy’s rhetoric has both a lineage and a legacy. The lineage runs in the commitment to liberating the oppressed around the globe, which is an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The legacy ensues in the echoes from 1963 that are audible in the first inaugural addresses of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and in George W. Bush’s rhetoric against tyranny in his second Inaugural, after 9/11. ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That could have been Kennedy; in fact it was Bush. Bear in mind, though, that the calculation changes over time, and the same words in defence of liberty have one charge in 1961 and quite another forty years later.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They didn’t have the educational background or the qualifications to move somewhere else—nor did they have the financial means. The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. Margaret Thatcher came into office in May 1979, right around the time I realized I was part of the working class. Ronald Reagan followed soon after, in January 1981. Together, Thatcher and Reagan dominated the 1980s, my teenage years and early adulthood and my transition to university.

In the 1980s, in the same timeframe as factories closed and demand for labor declined in the United Kingdom and the United States, the USSR faltered. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan precipitated the end of the Soviet Union as well as the Cold War through the pressures their interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev imposed on him, at a time when he was attempting the reform of the entire Communist system. But in fact, domestically, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all engaged in the same reform project—out with the old, in with the new. Each adopted a top-down approach notable for its absence of broader social consultation and its politically polarizing effects.

America is a rich country where millions of people have become so desperate and starved of opportunity, and others so disillusioned with the existing system of government, that they cling to whatever populist messages political leaders serve them, no matter how absurd or harmful. Postindustrial decline in the United States began with global economic and technological shifts away from large-scale heavy and extractive industry in the 1980s under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Over the next four decades, this affected some localities far more than others. It hollowed out towns and communities in specific regions through the steady loss of employment and educational and other opportunities. Economic or spatial inequality (the term economists and geographers use for geographic economic disparities) in the United States was further exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2008–2010.


How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

Earlier in the week on the local news, the irrepressible television anchor Sue Simmons openly wondered, “Just what is wrong with Rock Hudson?” He had raced to the American Hospital in Paris for secret treatment for “fatigue and malaise,” she told us, and while there he took a phone call from his old friend Ronald Reagan, wishing him well. At the office we wondered if he was chasing Montagnier’s experimental AIDS drug HPA-23. Of course we wished it was AIDS. We wished the worst for poor Rock Hudson. We had also wished catastrophe for Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, both of whom had received blood transfusions after foiled assassination attempts recently. We prayed for a day when the disease struck someone who mattered, prayed for a weaponizing of AIDS, and when I finally saw the Post headline I knew our terrible wishes had come true: “ROCK HAS AIDS—And He’s Known for a Year.”

In the early 1950s: See Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher, The Virus and the Vaccine (New York, NY: Macmillan, 2004); and David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). These were grave: Correspondence, Jonas Salk to President Ronald Reagan, November 6, 1986. He invited: Crewdson, Science Fictions, 288–89. Numerous Nobel Prize: Jonas Salk, correspondence to President Ronald Reagan, November 6, 1986, included letters forwarded from David Baltimore, Paul Berg, Renato Dulbecco, Robert Holley, Salvador Luria, Daniel Nathans, Howard Termin, Lewis Thomas, and Rosalyn Yallow. It did little good: Jonas Salk, correspondence to James Watson, February 19, 1987.

“If world-famous Ryan”: “Aids and Passive Genocide: 30,534 Unnecessary Deaths from PCP Due to Scandalous Failure to Prophylax: Testimony Given at FDA Hearing Concerning the Approval of Aerosol Pentamidine as Prophylaxis Against PCP,” first published in AIDS Forum 2, no. 1 (1989). “It is a national”: MC, “AIDS Research: Missed Opportunities, and Misplaced Priorities.” Ronald Reagan was: Frank Newport et al., “Ronald Reagan from the People’s Perspective: A Gallup Poll Review,” Gallup, June 7, 2004. he and Dworkin: Email from RD to author, June 16, 2014. Sometimes it seemed: MC, “Gay Pride Rally Speech, June 29, 1991,” MCUA. On Saturday, June 25: Phil Zwickler, “Lesbian and Gay Pride 1988,” NYN, July 11, 1988.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

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

The Islamists condemned the rule of infidel powers that tried to prevent the return of Muslims to God. In the United States neoconservatives raged against the compromises with evil that the Nixon Administration had carried out. America, they claimed, was selling its birthright for a short period of peace with the enemy. The Soviet Union, claimed Ronald Reagan in his race against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, had its sights set on global hegemony. It was for the United States to resist it. “We did not seek world leadership,” Reagan said, “it was thrust upon us. It has been our destiny almost from the first moment this land was settled.

The Soviets were furious, but Kissinger told them that the Administration would overcome these problems. In the election campaign of 1976 Ford came under increasing pressure from fellow Republicans who wanted to repudiate détente. The problem with Nixon’s approach, they claimed, was that it made the United States into just another country in the world. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California who ran against Ford for the nomination in 1976, claimed on the campaign trail that under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.… Our nation is in danger.

The Cold War was still uppermost in his mind. In the end he settled on a military rescue operation, which failed spectacularly when two US aircraft collided in the Iranian desert. The botched effort in April 1980 led to Vance’s resignation as secretary of state and probably doomed Carter’s chances for reelection. A month later Ronald Reagan, vowing to break with détente and make America great again, won the Republican nomination for president. But if the Americans had trouble with Islamism in Iran, the Soviets faced such trouble of their own farther north. In Afghanistan a Marxist party had come to power through a military coup in April 1978.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

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

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

Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, DC: Brassay’s, 2000), p. 287. 26 Ronald Reagan, Reagan: A Life in Letters, eds. Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 143 (“won’t fly”). 27 Ronald Reagan with Richard G. Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965), p. 273 (“most electric house”); Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 111 (“more refrigerators”), ch. 6; Nancy Reagan with William Novak, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 128 (Hoover Dam). 28 General Electric, “Ronald Reagan and GE,” webpage at http://www.ge.com/reagan/video.html.

Government policies at both federal and state levels started to promote greater efficiency through tax incentives, regulations, and mandates. California was a pioneer. The state was rocked hard by the 1973 oil crisis not only because of its dependence on the car but also because its utilities burned a lot of oil. The next year, Governor Ronald Reagan, convinced by arguments about frugality and reducing energy waste, overruled his own staff and approved the establishment of the California Energy Commission. Thus did Ronald Reagan become the progenitor of the commission that set about writing increasingly strict rules for energy efficiency that became a model across the United States. Other states followed.8 Utilities began to promote conservation through information programs and by sending energy auditors out to poke around in attics, measuring insulation, and in basements, to check out furnaces.

They did succeed in creating a whole new federal bureaucracy, an explosion in regulatory and litigation work for lawyers, and much political contention. But the controls did little for their stated goals of limiting inflation—and did nothing for energy security. In 1979, after a bruising political battle, President Jimmy Carter implemented a two-year phase-out of price controls. When Ronald Reagan took over as president in January 1981, he speeded things up and ended price controls immediately. It was his very first executive order. This shift from price controls to markets was not just a U.S. phenomenon. In Britain, the government shifted from a fixed price for setting petroleum tax rates to using spot price.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

That paved the way for the aberration of communism but also for the third great revolution: the invention of the modern welfare state. That too has changed a great deal from what its founders, like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, imagined; but it is what we in the West live with today. In Western Europe and America it has ruled unchallenged since the Second World War—except for during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, inspired by classical liberal thinkers like Milton Friedman, temporarily halted the expansion of the state and privatized the commanding heights of the economy. We dub this a half revolution because, although it harked back to some of the founding ideas of the second “liberal” revolution, it failed in the end to do anything to reverse the size of the state.

A comprehensive history of how the West established its lead in state making would be a monumental undertaking: Samuel Finer’s great history of government, which he left unfinished when he died, runs to 1,701 pages.1 Here we have decided to eschew any attempt to be comprehensive: We plan to focus on the three great reinventions that have redefined Western government and to view those reinventions through the prism of three great thinkers: Thomas Hobbes (an anatomist of the Nation-State who also paved the way for the Liberal State), John Stuart Mill (the philosopher of the Liberal State, who also foreshadowed the Welfare State), and Beatrice Webb (the godmother of the Welfare State, who also personified its excesses). In chapter 7 we examine the half revolution against government through Milton Friedman, whose ideas had such an impact on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These thinkers occupied different positions in the spectrum from theory to practice. Hobbes wanted to produce a philosophy of politics. The Webbs wanted to change the world. Mill and Friedman occupied a position halfway between the two—they produced profound works of political economy but also played an active role in politics, Mill as a member of Parliament and Friedman as an adviser to presidents and prime ministers.

The Washington Post conceded in 1963, “No other American economist of the first rank can match Freidman’s forensic skills and persuasive powers.”8 Partly because he knew how to get his message out. He wrote a regular column in Newsweek and frequently contributed to newspapers. And partly because he was not scared of politics. He was a leading adviser to Barry Goldwater in 1964 and a close ally of Ronald Reagan thereafter: In 1973 he joined Reagan in giving a series of stump speeches in favor of California’s Proposition 1 (which limited the size of the budget).9 The bond was personal: Reagan “just could not resist Friedman’s infectious enthu­siasm.”10 Confronted by this onslaught, even Friedman’s sparring partner, Galbraith, admitted that “the age of Keynes” had given way to the “age of Friedman.”11 The most important reason for Friedman’s success, though, was that history was increasingly on Friedman’s side.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

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

He rolled to the convention, winning forty-four primary contests. In the general election, Helms’s Congressional Club spent $4.6 million on Reagan’s campaign as he marched to victory over Carter.60 “Jesse Helms and Tom Ellis saved Ronald Reagan’s career,” recalled Reagan adviser Charlie Black; “without them, he wouldn’t have been president.”61 Veteran political analyst Mark Shields concurs, writing that “without Jesse Helms’s all-out support in Ronald Reagan’s losing 1976 presidential primary fight with President Gerald Ford, the Gipper would never have won the White House in 1980 and 1984.”62 Reagan seemed to agree, too. On Helms’s seventieth birthday, in 1991, the president wrote him a letter.

Today, he is floated as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.30 Negative partisanship is neatly summed up in the popular phrase “Own the libs,” which has become a depressingly accurate three-syllable encapsulation of how politics works today. Around 2016, the phrase went viral because it captured the glee conservatives took in actions and words that “triggered” liberal “snowflakes”—such as wearing, to Whole Foods, a T-shirt featuring Ronald Reagan portrayed in the famous Che Guevara pose.31 But as the political scientist Lilliana Mason details in her essential book Uncivil Agreement, this is more or less how our political system functions today.32 Theoretically, neither negative partisanship nor polarization advantages one party over the other.

The fact that Republicans appear to be effectively locked out of California’s Senate seats for the foreseeable future is part of the larger problem facing their party, and a result of choices they have made in recent years. Republicans used to regularly win statewide office in California—think Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. They held the governor’s mansion as recently as 2011. But as a party, the GOP has decided to focus its appeal on an ever-narrowing slice of the white population rather than seeking ways to compete in diverse states like California, often against the advice of many in their party who have urged a different approach.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

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

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

When we expand our view beyond income to take in the broader canvas of the winner-take-all economy, the argument for thinking that the gains of America’s top-heavy economic growth “trickled down” becomes even weaker. This is not just a story of relative income erosion. The fallout of the winner-take-all economy has reached broadly and deeply into the security of the middle class—and, as recent events reveal, the entire American economy. Trickle-Up Economics Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Our own version of the question is, “Are you better off than you were a generation ago?”—or, more specifically, “How much better off are middle- and lower-income Americans than they were a generation ago?” The answer has substantial implications for how we judge the economic trends of the last thirty years.

Extremely generous new depreciation rules and a vast expansion of tax loopholes sharply reduced overall taxes on corporations. Top income tax rates came down sharply, as did the capital gains tax (again). The top rate of taxation on the estate tax was cut from 70 percent to 50 percent, and the level of the individual exemption was raised substantially. ERTA was Ronald Reagan’s greatest legislative triumph, a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s tax laws in favor of winner-take-all outcomes. But in a deeper sense it was the nature of the conflict that had changed the most. Both parties were now locked in a determined struggle to show who could shower more benefits on those at the top.

The story of this imbalanced struggle—and how it has furthered the politics and economics of winner-take-all—is the next part of our saga. Part III Winner-Take-All Politics Chapter 7 A Tale of Two Parties If any political figure is associated with the post-1970s transformation of American politics and the rise of a new (and newly unequal) economy, it is surely Ronald Reagan. To detractors and admirers alike, he is the obvious leading man in the drama of the New Deal’s demise. Reagan was simultaneously the conservatives’ most eloquent advocate and their most successful candidate. He was, in a word, a game-changer. There was American politics before Reagan, and American politics after Reagan.


pages: 98 words: 27,201

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Money-making becomes sexy This academic work was being done against the backdrop of the ‘loadsamoney’ culture of the 1980s, which heralded an era of self-gratification and the pursuit of material goods. This happened on both sides of the Atlantic with the economic boom ushered in by the Margaret Thatcher–Ronald Reagan reforms. Blatant money-making became culturally acceptable – even desirable – and the new mindset started to colonize the business world. Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan swept aside many of the constraints on business and liberalized the economy in a celebration of corporate success. At the same time, tax rates were slashed. Ronald Reagan reduced the US top rate of tax from 70 per cent to 28 per cent and cut corporate tax from 48 per cent to 34 per cent. Similarly, when Margaret Thatcher became UK prime minister in 1979, she cut the top rate of income tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent – seen at the time as a huge concession to top earners.

Margaret Thatcher was elected in the UK amid a backlash against organized labour and was set on crushing trade union power to set free the supposed entrepreneurial spirits she wanted to foster among the corporate set. She also launched a series of privatizations of companies such as British Gas and British Telecom, which saw the former civil servants running these businesses suddenly pitched into the premier pay league. Similarly, Ronald Reagan came to power during a period of deep recession and stagflation – characterized as double digit economic downturn accompanied by double digit rate of inflation – in 1981. He was convinced that tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of markets and business, and control of the money supply to counter inflation, would improve the economy for all through the so-called ‘trickle-down effect’.

David Cameron, Conservative prime minister of the UK coalition government in 2010, was quick to scrap the 50p top rate of tax that was briefly imposed in April 2010 by Gordon Brown’s Labour administration to help pay for the banking crisis. Donald Trump has passed an extensive tax bill in the US that marks the biggest changes to the tax base since Ronald Reagan’s reforms in 1986, slashing top rates in a direct benefit to the wealthy. The bill includes a deep cut to corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Unions and campaigners have strongly argued for some of those tax breaks to be passed on to the workforce and a handful of companies have increased wages, but this has not been widespread.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

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

If the USSR were to warn about the threat posed by Denmark or Luxembourg to Soviet security and the need to “contain” this dire threat, perhaps even declaring a national emergency in the face of this grave danger, Western opinion would be rightly enraged. But when the mainstream U.S. press and a liberal Congress, echoing the Administration, warn ominously of the need to “contain” Nicaragua, the same thinkers nod their heads in sage assent or offer mild criticism that the threat is perhaps exaggerated. And when in May 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a “national emergency” to deal with the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” posed by “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua,” the reaction in Congress and the media—and in much of Europe—was not ridicule, but rather praise for these principled and statesmanlike steps.

One, regularly invoked to frighten the domestic population, is that Ho Chi Minh (or whoever the current sinner may be) will climb into a canoe, conquer Indonesia, land in San Francisco, and rape your grandmother. While it may be difficult to believe that these tales are presented seriously by the political leadership, one should not be too sure. Leaders of the calibre of Ronald Reagan may well believe what they say. The same may be true of more serious political figures, for example, Lyndon Johnson, probably the most liberal President in American history and in many ways “a man of the people,” who was undoubtedly speaking honestly when he warned in 1948 that unless the U.S. maintained overwhelming military superiority, it would be “a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife”; or when he said in a speech in Alaska in 1966, at the height of U.S. aggression in Vietnam, that “If we are going to have visits from any aggressors or any enemies, I would rather have that aggression take place out 10,000 miles from here than take place here in Anchorage,” referring to the “internal aggression” of the Vietnamese against U.S. military forces in Vietnam: There are 3 billion people in the world [Johnson continued] and we have only 200 million of them.

It was necessary to respond in the usual manner: by international terrorism, embargo, pressures on international institutions and allies to withhold aid, a huge campaign of propaganda and disinformation, threatening military maneuvers and overflights as part of what the Administration calls “perception management,” and other hostile measures available to a powerful and violent state. Near hysteria was evoked in the U.S. government when Nicaragua accepted the draft of the Contadora treaty in 1984, shortly after Ronald Reagan had informed Congress that the purpose of the contra war was to compel Nicaragua to accept the treaty and Secretary of State Shultz had praised the draft treaty and denounced Nicaragua for blocking its implementation. Hysteria reached a still higher peak when Nicaragua conducted elections described by the professional association of U.S.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Salaries were rising, and the higher tax rates had fallen and fallen for those who were paid enough to be affected; the generous cuts came at the start of the decade, but the biggest of all was in 1988, when the top rate went down from 60p to 40p, which put up the disposable income of the well-off by up to one-fifth overnight. It was one of those rare cases when London led the way, and Washington followed. When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the USA in January 1981, the phenomenon known in Britain as Thatcherism was already almost two years old. The politics of the 1980s was dominated by Margaret Thatcher – who was prime minister from May 1979 to November 1990 – in a way that no other decade is associated with one individual.

President Jimmy Carter was at first reluctant to sell, having staked his reputation on disarmament talks, but changed his mind after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. A deal was announced in the Commons on 15 July 1980. Four months later, Carter was defeated by his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Reagan and Thatcher were soulmates. In time, their relationship would be the closest there had ever been between an American president and a British prime minister. But in the short term, Reagan’s arrival complicated her plans because he wanted to scrap the old Tridents and replace them with updated versions.

‘I cried a lot in the car, saying I couldn’t get out, couldn’t cope,’16 she later told her biographer, Andrew Morton. When the couple paid a visit to the White House, the press corps stationed outside was twice as large as it had been for the Pope a week earlier, though Diana was not yet so famous that Ronald Reagan had remembered her name – he raised a toast to ‘Prince Charles and Princess Andrew.’ Early in her first pregnancy, Diana slipped out of the palace to buy wine gums; the photographers spotted her, and the news was all over the tabloids. This worried the palace to such an extent that the editors of twenty-one national newspapers, plus the BBC and ITN (but not including Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun) were called to the palace to hear a plea from Michael Shea, backed up by the Queen, for the Princess to be allowed privacy.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Liberal activists have repeatedly been followed by more conservative successors—FDR by Dwight Eisenhower (by way of Truman), Lyndon Johnson by Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan. America’s powerful tradition of laissez-faire liberalism also reasserted itself after the Second World War. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) was condensed in Reader’s Digest and read by millions. Milton Friedman became a television star. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the idea that government was the problem rather than the solution. But can America continue to preserve its comparative advantage in the art of creative destruction?

The American people had already given up on him by the time he discovered his inner crusader. They looked to a new man to deliver America from the furies that had consumed them. Ronald Reagan was not only determined to do battle with the devils that were destroying America, he also had something positive to bring to the equation—a burning faith in the power of entrepreneurs to revive American capitalism. Ten THE AGE OF OPTIMISM RONALD REAGAN WAS ONE of America’s most unusual presidents. He was trained in Hollywood rather than in an Ivy League university or an established political machine. He didn’t bother himself with the details of government: whereas Jimmy Carter worried about who should be allowed to use the White House tennis courts, Reagan talked metaphorically about building a city on a hill.

America has the world’s highest standard of living apart from a handful of much smaller countries such as Qatar and Norway. It also dominates the industries that are inventing the future—intelligent robots, driverless cars, and life-extending drugs. America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today. The American economy is as diverse as it is huge. The United States leads the world in a wide range of industries—natural resources as well as information technology, paper, and pulp as well as biotechnology. Many leading economies are dangerously focused on one city: most obviously the United Kingdom but also South Korea and Sweden.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

., Steve Wynn called his friend Donald Trump over and introduced him to a man who would soon set the course for his unlikely political rise: David Bossie. — By the time he met Trump in the late 2000s, Bossie, then still in his early forties, was already a hardened veteran of Washington’s political wars. Smitten with Ronald Reagan as a teenager growing up in Boston, he became youth director of Bob Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign, and then a foot soldier in Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution when the GOP took back the House of Representatives in the 1994 election. Not long afterward, the beefy, buzz-cut, hyperintense Bossie (who still resembles a Dick Tracy villain) landed a job as chief investigator for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

Foster in the gulf, his darkening view of the wider world grew to encompass his civilian commanders—above all Carter, whose pusillanimous hesitancy, and failure of leadership when he did finally act, Bannon held directly responsible for damaging American prestige. Bannon’s experience as a naval officer in the gulf did more than sour him on Democratic politics. It pushed him into a different party. He became enraptured with a hawkish, outspoken, confrontational, and struttingly pro-military Republican, Ronald Reagan, whose searing critique of Carter’s weakness matched his own views. Bannon’s years abroad also opened his eyes to what struck him as a gathering threat. It was not the sort of immediate, existential danger posed by the Soviet Union. Rather, this was a more distant menace that loomed just over the horizon: Islam.

The two decades in between, he realized, had done nothing to stanch the threat of radical Islam to the United States—in fact, Islamic terrorists had struck with greater force than anyone imagined they could and had chosen as a target of their attack the very Wall Street financial district where he had long toiled for Goldman Sachs. The Iranian hostage crisis first impelled Bannon toward Ronald Reagan, whose strength he was certain was vital to preserving America’s safety and influence in the world. Having long ago left the military, he didn’t have any obvious outlet to respond to the new attacks—a middle-aged Hollywood investment banker can’t exactly walk into a recruiter’s office and reenlist.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them. To quote Linz, they must be willing to “join with opponents ideologically distant but committed to the survival of the democratic political order.” In normal circumstances, this is almost unimaginable. Picture Senator Edward Kennedy and other liberal Democrats campaigning for Ronald Reagan, or the British Labour Party and their trade union allies endorsing Margaret Thatcher. Each party’s followers would be infuriated at this seeming betrayal of principles. But in extraordinary times, courageous party leadership means putting democracy and country before party and articulating to voters what is at stake.

The Democrats, whose initial primaries were volatile and divisive, backtracked somewhat in the early 1980s, stipulating that a share of national delegates would be elected officials—governors, big-city mayors, senators, and congressional representatives—appointed by state parties rather than elected in primaries. These “superdelegates,” representing between 15 and 20 percent of national delegates, would serve as a counterbalance to primary voters—and a mechanism for party leaders to fend off candidates they disapproved of. The Republicans, by contrast, were flying high under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Seeing no need for superdelegates, the GOP opted, fatefully, to maintain a more democratic nomination system. Some political scientists worried about the new system. Binding primaries were certainly more democratic. But might they be too democratic? By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters, binding primaries weakened parties’ gatekeeping function, potentially eliminating the peer review process and opening the door to outsiders.

Prominent insiders and conservative opinion leaders began to make the case against Trump. In March 2016, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a high-profile speech at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in which he described Trump as a danger to both the Republican Party and the country. Echoing Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, Romney declared that Trump was a “fraud” who had “neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.” Other party elders, including 2008 presidential candidate John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, warned against Trump. And leading conservative publications, including the National Review and the Weekly Standard, rejected Trump in blistering terms.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

,” asked Joseph Stiglitz: “That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means.”39 5 It Takes a Democrat Let me suggest a different framework for understanding the Clinton years, something even grander than The Clinton Wars, or Nasdaq!, or even Bill’s Postpartisan Journey to Self-Discovery. Here is what I propose: How the Market Order Got Cemented into Place. It wasn’t Ronald Reagan alone who did it. What distinguishes the political order we live under now is consensus on certain economic questions, and what made that consensus happen was the capitulation of the Democrats. Republicans could denounce big government all they wanted, but it took a Democrat to declare that “the era of big government is over” and to make it stick.

Anyone inquiring how an obscenity like this came to pass—how it is that the home of the free outstripped what we used to call “captive nations” as well as countries philosophically dedicated to wholesale imprisonment like apartheid South Africa—anyone looking into these things soon realizes that this cannot be laid simply and neatly at the doorstep of the Republican Party and Those Awful Wingers. It is true that the Republican Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and that the Republican Ronald Reagan escalated it. But the Democrat Bill Clinton—the buddy of Bono and Nelson Mandela, the man repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—easily bested both of these Republicans as well as all other presidents in his zeal to incarcerate.8 Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law: Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier.

“The United States has arrived at a new consensus,” wrote Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in an influential 1998 book on (what they believed to be) the eternal battle between markets and government: in their minds, markets had won a complete victory.17 It wasn’t the microchip that brought us this togetherness, or optical fiber, or the Internet. The economics department of the University of Chicago didn’t win this victory, nor did the fall of the Berlin Wall bring it about. Not even the election of Ronald Reagan was sufficient, on its own, to make the market consensus happen. It required something else—it required the capitulation of the other side. That the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism is not some perverse conviction held by out-of-touch eggheads like me.


pages: 261 words: 64,977

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

Instead of the global embrace of market forces that historians see beginning in the seventies, we were now to understand that socialism had never been vanquished at all, that nearly every so-called conservative politician in those years was actually a liberal in disguise, that no one (with the peculiar exception of Ronald Reagan) had really been faithful to the free-market dogma.7 The era of regulatory permissiveness that allowed the financial crisis to happen had to become unmentionable, deliberately erased. It could not have happened, since conservatives knew now that progressives and crypto-socialists had controlled both parties and called the shots from the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke.

Like family farmers before them, entrepreneurs are thought to be sacred: they are individualism in the flesh, the plucky strivers who have always made the American economy go. If you put aside details like the benefits that mom-and-pop stores generally don’t provide their workers, small business can sometimes seem like the last redoubt of Jefferson’s independent yeomanry. In a 1983 speech commemorating Small Business Week, for example, Ronald Reagan started off by saying, “Every week should be Small Business Week, because America is small business.”* It just got sappier from there: “entrepreneurs are forgotten heroes”; they’re “the faithfuls who support our churches, schools, and communities, the brave people everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our homes and families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America.”15 Oh, they’re the salt of the earth.

Obvious realities would be disregarded in the bureaucrat’s zeal for rule-following; time would be wasted; business would not get done. It was as though our government wished to punish productive effort! Stories of Invasive Regulators were a constant feature of the comfortable midwestern milieu into which I was born. Ronald Reagan tossed them off all the time on his way to the White House. The plot of Ghostbusters (1984) turned on just such a small-business set piece. And the Republican Revolution of 1994 was largely driven by small-business anecdotes like these—that is, if the account of that revolution written by the then president of the U.S.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

What happened instead was a great boom in private spending, home purchases in particular, that kept the economy humming until the Great Depression was a distant memory. And it was the fading memory of the Depression that set the stage for an extraordinary rise in debt, beginning roughly in 1980. And yes, that coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan, because part of the story is political. Debt began rising in part because lenders and borrowers had forgotten that bad things can happen, but it also rose because politicians and supposed experts alike had forgotten that bad things can happen, and started to remove the regulations introduced in the 1930s to stop them from happening again.

And thanks to regulation, banks grew much more cautious about lending than they had been before the Great Depression. The result was what Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the “quiet period,” a long era of relative stability and absence of financial crises. All that began to change, however, in 1980. In that year, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected president, signaling a dramatic rightward turn in American politics. But in a way Reagan’s election only formalized a sea change in attitudes toward government intervention that was well under way even during the Carter administration. Carter presided over the deregulation of airlines, which transformed the way Americans traveled, the deregulation of trucking, which transformed the distribution of goods, and the deregulation of oil and natural gas.

First, even though the United States avoided a debilitating financial crisis until 2008, the dangers of a deregulated banking system were becoming apparent much earlier for those willing to see. In fact, deregulation created a serious disaster almost immediately. In 1982, as I’ve already mentioned, Congress passed, and Ronald Reagan signed, the Garn–St. Germain Act, which Reagan described at the signing ceremony as “the first step in our administration’s comprehensive program of financial deregulation.” Its principal purpose was to help solve the problems of the thrift (savings and loan) industry, which had gotten into trouble after inflation rose in the 1970s.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”32 The sense of humanity and social responsibility that Carter encouraged took on a different tone after his term ended in defeat. As economist Jeffrey Sachs pointed out during an interview on Tavis Smiley on PBS, the 1980s introduced a dramatic and calculated shift in the War on Poverty: “But then came [President Ronald] Reagan and the backlash … when Ronald Reagan came into office, and he came into office on a platform that said government is not the solution, it’s the problem… . He started to dismantle. He gave tax cuts to the rich, started to cut the base out of our education spending, social safety net; [he] stopped investing in infrastructure—the things that make America productive.”33 Reagan was “no friend to America’s cities or its poor,” Peter Dreier, chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, boldly asserted in a commentary shortly after the former President’s death.

Johnson declares “War on Poverty” 1969 13.7 percent Johnson’s Great Society efforts help reduce poverty 1973 11.1 percent National poverty rate at an almost 20-year low 1979 12.4 percent Vietnam War, Conservative backlash, poverty ticks up 1983 15.2 percent A recession from mid-1981 to late 1982 takes its toll on the poor 1989 13.1 percent Economy steadies, poverty rate drops in Ronald Reagan’s 2nd term 1992 14.5 percent Reagan drastically slashes government benefit programs, poverty rises 1993 15.1 percent Ten-year gains reversed; Poverty back to 1983 level 1994 14.5 percent Economy perks, poverty level slightly reduced 1996 13.7 percent Poverty rate drops, Clinton introduces drastic welfare reform efforts 2000 11.3 percent Poverty rates fall dramatically due mostly to the opulent 1990s 2007 12.5 percent Poverty ticks up, 37.3 million in poverty before the recession begins 2008 13.2 percent Another 2.5 million fall below the poverty line 2009 14.3 percent 6.3 million more in poverty since 2007 2010 15.1 percent The largest percentage of long-term poor in five decades Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate: 1959 to 2010 The biggest blows to the already shrinking middle class were record unemployment and a housing bubble that burst, resulting in the foreclosure of nearly 4 million homes.

In the runup to his re-election in 1996, Clinton out-GOP’d the GOP by signing a draconian welfare-to-work reform bill. Although the legislation reduced the numbers on welfare, it pushed unskilled people into a workforce that had no use for them. The effort may have helped win an election, but it reduced poverty by only 2.5 percent—from 13.7 percent in 1996 to 11.2 percent in 2000. Ronald Reagan may have shifted the dialogue and outreach to the poor, but what’s amazing, as Jeffrey Sachs noted during the PBS interview, is that the dialogue of denial, denigration, and dismissal of the poor continued throughout the Clinton administration: “The Bush era with more tax cuts, and tragically, it’s continued through the first years of the Obama administration.”


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

The violence of Latino immigrants, the perceived permissiveness of cocaine users, and the threat to the innocence of American children galvanized conservatives into a firm rebuttal of liberal America. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President, and in the autumn the Republicans also took control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. In 1981, then Vice-President George Bush Sr launched a special task force to take on the traffickers, firing the first salvo in an invigorated war on drugs. In the decade that followed, the political agenda was defined by ‘culture wars’ between liberals and conservatives. The latter emphasized moral renewal and respect for the law. But as it pertained to the growing market for illegal drugs, Ronald Reagan’s crusading zeal was to have many unforeseen consequences.

I thought about the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States and this era of drug prohibition, and it led me to think that prohibition, in the way that we were going about it, was doing more harm than good.’ Eric Sterling was a legal counsel to Congress in 1986 and was instrumental in drafting that year’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. He too has gone on to become a trenchant critic of how the law has been manipulated to serve the war on drugs. ‘Historically, federal law enforcement was limited to smuggling, robbery of the mails, and counterfeiting money,’ he told me. ‘The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was the first federal drug law.

The United States Congress was less gung-ho in its support for the Contras, however, and passed amendments which prohibited the use of government funds ‘for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua’. This meant that the Contras were strapped for cash to buy weapons. The Iran-Contra scandal is a well-known blot on Ronald Reagan’s copybook. Colonel Oliver North was found to have sold weapons to the Iranian government, supposedly an enemy of the White House, in order to raise money for the Contras. A lesser known chapter in the story, and one that throws the integrity of the Republicans’ war on drugs into real doubt, is that the CIA also approved and supported the Contras’ trafficking of cocaine into the United States.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

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

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

But they were the seeds of a revolution for the Republican Party, at least when properly cultivated by Ronald Reagan a decade later. Reagan’s first run for the presidency was also a defeat. On November 20, 1975, he announced he would challenge a wildly unpopular president of his own party, Gerald Ford. No one knows for sure whethert sn “ Dw Reagan really thought he could win. But no one expected that he would come so close to dislodging a sitting president. In 1980 he was the logical pick for his party’s nomination. He easily defeated the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter. People forget how important ideas were to Ronald Reagan. By the end of his term, his opponents had painted him as little more than an actor on a very important stage.

Introduction There is a feeling today among too many Americans that we might not make it. Not that the end is near, or that doom is around the corner, but that a distinctly American feeling of inevitability, of greatness—culturally, economically, politically—is gone. That we have become Britain. Or Rome. Or Greece. A generation ago Ronald Reagan rallied the nation to deny a similar charge: Jimmy Carter’s worry that our nation had fallen into a state of “malaise.” I was one of those so rallied, and I still believe that Reagan was right. But the feeling I am talking about today is different: not that we, as a people, have lost anything of our potential, but that we, as a republic, have.

He is among the most prolific legal academics and the most prolific judges in the history of the nation. He is certainly among the most influential. His book Economic Analysis of Law (1973) founded the law and economics movement. Since then he has written fifty more books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of judicial opinions. He was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan thirty years ago. Whatever we can say, we can be certain, Posner is no socialist. Among Posner’s fifty-some books are two that deal specifically with the financial crisis.4 And at the core of Posner’s argument is an insistence that we understand the rationality behind this insanity. As he write.="1ems, criticizing a government report on the crisis: The emphasis the report places on the folly of private-sector actors ignores the possibility that most of them were behaving rationally given the environment of dangerously low interest rates, complacency about asset-price inflation (the bubbles that the regulators and, with the occasional honorable exception, the economics profession ignored), and light and lax regulation.5 This is the idea that I want to pursue here: that the gambling that Wall Street engaged in made sense to them given (1) “the environment of dangerously low interest rates,” (2) “complacency about asset-price inflation,” and (3) “light and lax regulation.”


pages: 453 words: 122,586

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

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

But their weekly contributions, seen as moving pictures, betrayed profound differences not only in their economics but in their world views. Samuelson, like Keynes, had an elegant pen, and the care and pleasure with which he chose his words is evident. Like Keynes, he could draw upon a deep hinterland of knowledge way beyond the dry stuff of economics. Like Ronald Reagan, who began his weekly radio broadcasts with a joke, Samuelson liked to start his columns with a humorous quote, then, having raised a smile, he moved to the substance of his mini-essay. So when, for example, in 1966, commenting on whether the federal government was applying the right fiscal remedies, Samuelson found himself hovering between two minds, he wrote that “like Oscar Wilde, who spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out, I am oscillating.”10 He could mix it with intellectual giants.

Even at the high point of his popularity, he remained pessimistic about the permanence of the shift in public opinion towards conservative solutions. “The reaction may prove short lived and be followed, after a brief interval, by a resumption of the trend toward ever bigger government,”63 he said. 12 No Hollywood Ending Friedman’s monetarism is given another chance by Ronald Reagan, the most conservative postwar president. But Volcker remains in charge at the Fed In November 1980, Jimmy Carter was roundly defeated in the presidential election. While contemporary observers tended to blame his downfall on a bungled rescue of American hostages held in Tehran by Islamist revolutionaries, just as important to Carter’s defeat were the high interest rates imposed by Paul Volcker at the Fed.

As Hayek had predicted, “The politician, acting on a modified Keynesian maxim that in the long run we are all out of office, does not care if his successful cure of unemployment is bound to produce more unemployment in the future. The politicians who will be blamed for it will not be those who created the inflation, but those who stopped it.”1 The ailing U.S. economy was only one of the many reasons voters felt they wanted a fresh start. They chose as president Ronald Reagan, a former movie star and California governor. He knew something about economics, albeit a pre-Keynesian version. As a young man in Illinois, as the Great Depression was about to engulf America, Reagan had studied classical economics and sociology at Eureka College, attaining a C grade. Like Friedman, Reagan had established his conservative credentials by lending his support to the maverick 1964 Goldwater campaign in a masterly televised speech, “A Time for Choosing,”2 which set out his ultraconservative agenda.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

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

It’s now occupied by parallel but separate and often opposing societies—quiet, ultraconservative local wealth; some lingering Hollywood glamour and its consort, decadence; and the latest iterations of fast money earned everywhere from cyberspace to infotainment to the lower depths of the financial industries. They may look askance at each other but they mix and mingle (even in bedrooms); in many ways the apogeal product of their union was Ronald Reagan, the movie star turned politician who emerged as a force in the Republican Party, backed by ultraconservative wealth, and became a Bel Air resident himself in 1989. Though Richard Nixon, another Southern Californian, also moved to La-La Land, and Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton loved to party there, it was Reagan who was the apotheosis of its will to power.

Beverly Park In February 1979, the Teamsters finally lost the Higgins Canyon land; the government-appointed asset manager sold off the 355 troubled acres for $7.9 million to a group of about twenty wealthy investors. The only one publicly identified at the time was Henry Salvatori, a multimillionaire oilman from Bel Air and member of the so-called kitchen cabinet of California conservatives who were then within months of placing Ronald Reagan in the White House—though both his family and the developers now say he wasn’t involved. The investors did include hair salon mogul Vidal Sassoon, a stereo component manufacturer named Bob Craig, local supermarket owner Bernie Gelson, a local car dealer, and Gerald Breslauer, a Hollywood money manager, as well as a number of his clients, including director Steven Spielberg, then flush with cash from Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Schick’s blades were made in Cuba until Fidel Castro took over the island nation and expropriated Schick’s factories that year, turning Frawley into an arch anticommunist and a vocal and financial supporter of conservative politicians and causes, beginning with then vice president Richard Nixon. Frawley and Alfred Bloomingdale of the department store family then put on the largest anticommunist youth rally in history, where the entertainers George Murphy (a song-and-dance man and Frawley protégé), John Wayne, Pat Boone, Ronald Reagan, Dale Evans, and Roy Rogers appeared before a hundred thousand schoolchildren. Frawley subsequently became a nationally known figure of controversy when he tried to cancel a million-dollar advertising deal with ABC after it ran a program he felt was anti-Nixon. Frawley was renowned for his business prowess if not always for his politics or ethics.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

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

* There was one huge difference, which was that money did not leave the country; instead, it left the private sector for the safety of U.S. Treasury obligations. But the effect on the private sector financial system was the same. 3 WALL STREET RISING 1980– In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. —Ronald Reagan, inaugural address, January 20, 19811 On December 9, 1985, the cover of Business Week featured John Gutfreund, the CEO of Salomon Brothers and “The King of Wall Street.” “Merrill Lynch remains the best-known Wall Street house and Goldman Sachs the best-managed, but Salomon Bros. is the firm most feared by its competitors,” wrote Anthony Bianco.

Instead, like many historical phenomena, this development emerged from a confluence of factors: exogenous events, such as the high inflation of the 1970s; the emergence of academic finance; and the broader deregulatory trend begun in the administration of Jimmy Carter but transformed into a crusade by Ronald Reagan. The eventual result was an out-of-balance financial system that still enjoyed the backing of the federal government—what president would allow the financial system to collapse on his watch?—without the regulatory oversight necessary to prevent excessive risk-taking. Like many major trends, this one was not entirely visible to its participants at the outset.

Jagdish Bhagwati argued in 1998 that trade in dollars was not the same as trade in goods, because free capital flows would generate financial crises whose potential costs needed to be taken into account.48 But the belief in free movements of capital, like the belief in efficient markets, became strong enough in some circles to shrug off the need for empirical justification.49 The Efficient Market Hypothesis, like the doctrine of free capital flows, provided ready ammunition for anyone who wanted to argue that banks should be allowed to do as they pleased, that financial innovations were necessarily good, and that free financial markets would always produce optimal social outcomes. Even so, it might have remained only a cry in the academic wilderness or an esoteric Wall Street doctrine. But it had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time—of coinciding with a once-in-a-generation shift in the American political climate. The election of Ronald Reagan marked a crucial turning point in American political history. Although Richard Nixon had already shown how to build a new Republican majority by capitalizing on resentment against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the culture of the 1960s, it was Reagan who gave that movement a usable political ideology.


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Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

Phil Condit, who’d risen to sales and marketing roles, talked about leapfrogging the A320 with futuristic “prop-fan” planes (with engine blades whirling in the open like a submarine’s rotors) that never came to fruition. Sutter, by then the industry’s éminence grise, visited the White House twice, in 1985 and in 1986. On the first occasion it was to accept the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan, who leaned in and spoke softly into the engineer’s ear as he handed over the medal. (Asked later what was said, Sutter had to tell people Reagan had explained where to find the footmarks on the floor to pose for photographs.) The next year, he was named to the White House commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster, alongside Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, and other aerospace luminaries.

Executives displayed posters of the keys in their offices and held contests for the best examples of self-renewal. In 1988, Sandy sent a survey to managers about a system of voluntary contributions he’d developed, in hopes of cutting the federal deficit. Participants would get “Modern American Patriot” certificates, lapel pins, and medallions stamped with President Ronald Reagan’s signature for their participation. “I sent mine back demanding a statue of Reagan that glowed in the dark,” C. W. Bradshaw, a former McDonnell Douglas human resources manager, told the Los Angeles Times. “The St. Louis corporate mentality is amazing. They are suckers for anyone with a new fad that will put them at the forefront of corporate culture and make the business magazines.”

Most galling to Boeing veterans was the influence amassed by what they saw as a failed rival: John McDonnell and Stonecipher became Boeing’s two largest individual shareholders. They both joined the board, as did two other former McDonnell Douglas directors, giving them four of the twelve board seats—a powerful decision-making bloc. The others were Ken Duberstein, the former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, and John Biggs, a St. Louis native who ran the investment firm TIAA-CREF. They brought government and financial connections, in contrast to the Boeing board, traditionally stocked with practical-minded leaders of Pacific Northwest firms like the timber company Weyerhaeuser. Larry Clarkson, then a senior executive at Boeing, recalls running into T.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

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

In my first book, The Russians, I sought to give American readers an intimate human picture of what Russians were like beneath the veneer of Soviet communism and why they behaved the way they did. In The Power Game: How Washington Works, I went inside the American political system and the games politicians played in the era of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter to describe how power really works in Washington and why some leaders succeed and others fail. In this book, I provide a reporter’s CAT scan of the Two Americas today, examining the interplay of economics and politics to disclose how the shifts of power and of wealth have led to the unraveling of the American Dream for the middle class.

—Business Week, May 1978 1978 IS A YEAR LARGELY FORGOTTEN or overlooked by many political commentators, but the legislative session of the Ninety-fifth Congress that year was one of the most pivotal in our modern political history. The power shift in favor of pro-business policies began not under Ronald Reagan and the Republicans in the 1980s, but earlier—under Jimmy Carter, in the Democratic-controlled Congress of the late 1970s. In part, that was because Jimmy Carter came to Washington in 1976 with a reform agenda to help the middle class, but as a one-term governor of Georgia, he was unprepared for the rough-and-tumble of the Washington power game.

But there was a growing sentiment among medium-sized corporations, small businesses, and retailers that labor had gone too far and had gotten too strong. Anti-union feeling was particularly on the rise among the Sun Belt business community, some of it stirred up by the blazingly anti-union rhetoric of Barry Goldwater, the right-wing Republican presidential candidate in 1964, and by Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency in 1976. With employee health and pension costs rising sharply and a growing gap between union and non-union wages, even employers accustomed to unions were taking a harder line. Some business leaders were determined to roll back union power. The National Association of Manufacturers, with thirteen thousand member companies, set up its own Council on Union-Free Environment to try to get rid of unions as the go-between for management’s dealings with employees.


pages: 520 words: 164,834

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

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

Under his leadership, it soon quadrupled its membership and carried significant weight on Capitol Hill. Concurrently, Bill helped the Chamber itself become a lobbying juggernaut. In retrospect, it’s clear that Bill’s high-profile political activism was timely. There is little doubt that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the people” was key to his dramatic victory over Carter in 1980. With a government more in sync with what Bill had outlined, America’s economy boomed during Reagan’s two terms. There was not one federally ordered increase of the minimum wage during those eight years—yet many more low-income workers were employed and were paid higher wages than they had been during the Carter era.

The news photos of two distinguished men in a canoe in a pool were picked up by newspapers across the country. Some called it Bill Marriott’s “Northwest Passage.”1 The opening duties for the Des Moines and Sea-Tac hotels prevented Bill from being present during a historic event for the new president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. His election victory had been a personal victory for the Republican Marriotts. J.W. funded the transportation and lodging for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir so they could appear in the inaugural parade. The Marriotts had invitations to all the inaugural events. Bill and Donna attended the inaugural gala and had grandstand seats for the parade.

Larry Smith, the founder and designer of Scarab powerboats, thought one of his outboards could beat the record, so he approached veteran racer Michael Reagan, considered one of the top five powerboat racers in the world, to be the team leader and primary driver. Reagan was the oldest son of President Ronald Reagan. Michael Reagan was leery of using his celebrity in a stunt race to promote Scarab, so he redesigned the event as a fund-raising effort for the U.S. Olympic Committee. Reagan signed up corporate sponsors, with Anheuser-Busch being the most energetic and generous. As a result, Reagan named the diesel craft Bud Light.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

So how could Congress and the White House agree on serious changes to the tax code when our country is ferociously divided? The fact is, we’ve done it before, in a time of severely divided government. In the mid-1980s, a strong conservative in the White House and a strongly liberal Speaker of the House—that is, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill—reached agreement on the biggest transformation of the federal income tax since the tax was created in 1913. The Tax Reform Act of 1986, passed by a divided Congress and signed by a Republican president, was widely admired; it was precisely the kind of change that almost all tax experts favored.

The government then was divided, with a conservative president from California battling a liberal House of Representatives led by a Democrat from Massachusetts. With leaders of both parties constantly maneuvering for political gain, Washington was gridlocked on the major issues. There wasn’t much hope for significant progress in any policy area and certainly not on tax reform. The election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan, an unabashed tax hater, launched a flurry of tax laws that pushed rates down, up, down again, and up again with no clear pattern. In Reagan’s first months in office, he successfully pressured Congress to pass the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981—known inside the Beltway as ERTA—giving big tax cuts to every individual and corporate taxpayer.

“The trade-off between loophole elimination and a lower top rate became obvious,” Bradley wrote later; “the lower the rate, the more loopholes had to be closed to pay for it.”8 Bradley stuck to the mantra of “broad base, low rates” for years, telling anybody who would listen that a significant cut in tax rates would win the votes needed to broaden the base. “The key to reform was to focus on the attractiveness of low rates, not on the pain of limiting deductions.” The enticement of low rates also helped land a crucially important supporter for tax reform: Ronald Reagan himself. As a major Hollywood star, Reagan had been a member of the financial 1% in the 1950s, when the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. The sting of the annual tax return, Reagan used to say, was one of the factors that converted him from a liberal labor union leader to a conservative champion of business.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The profamily constituency meanwhile could point to their inÂ�fluÂ�enÂ�tial new orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tions like the Moral Majority, the Religious Round Table, and the Concerned Women for America; the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment; and the success of Anita Bryant’s antihomosexual campaign in Florida.9 Disappointed by the nation’s first born-Â�again president, Georgian 3 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART Jimmy Carter, the New Christian Right swung its support to another Sun Belt governor in 1980. The Moral Majority registered 2.5 million new evangelical voters, the new conservative political action committees raised 8 million dollars, and Ronald Reagan informed evangelical opinion-Â�makers in Dallas, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”10 Reagan’s overwhelming victory and the growth of his evangelical base forced a sea change in the political and cultural landscape, moving the right from marginal fringe to controlling center. The new Republican coalition comprised a pair of strange bedfellows: laissez-Â�faire champions of the free market unevenly yoked to a broad base of evangelical activists.

“Business is in poor repute these days,” counseled a retail industry magazine, “and for some obvious reasons: anti-Â�establishment social upheavals spurred by Vietnam, Watergate and its attendant corporate scandals, oil price inÂ�flaÂ�tion, consumerism and the ecology movement.”3 “The young take for granted the affluence which is the rule,” groused Newsweek, and California governor Ronald Reagan wanted to know what gave these arrogant children the right to sneer at the very men who had brought them the world’s highest standard of living.4 Although business’s crusade against economic illiteracy in the 1970s 145 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART was not entirely new, the source of hostility to business ends and means came as a shock.

On average Benson’s activities pulled in $1 million annually from donors like Gulf Oil; defense contractor Boeing Aircraft gave the program $1 billion.96 In a 1961 report that censured a national campaign of “rabid, bigoted, one-Â�sided” presentations illegally incorporating active-Â�duty military ofÂ�fiÂ�cers to red-Â� bait the federal government, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara singled out Benson for criticism along with professional anticommunists like Billy James Hargis, the fundamentalist radio preacher who memorably libeled the National Council of Churches as a communist front, and Fred Schwarz, founder of the Christian Anti-Â�Communist Crusade and an early promoter of Ronald Reagan.97 The Journal of Higher Education observed disapprovingly in 1967 that Harding served as “a kind of war college .€.€. dedicated to the teaching of conservatism.”98 But in Searcy this was now a compliment. The NEP spawned Harding’s American Studies program, with over half a million dollars in operating funding for the first five years.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Why would we be more likely to vote for a handsome young president but not a good-looking young congressperson? Data in presidential versus congressional elections indicates that youth voter turnout isn’t the culprit. Some sort of creeping mistrust of the elderly or the advent of televised elections aren’t skewing the results, either. The oldest-elected president, Ronald Reagan, took office at age 69, with the fourth-oldest, George H. W. Bush, succeeding him at 64. They brought up the average. Gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws don’t seem to explain the data, and the losers in presidential elections actually tend to be the same average age as the winners.

Here they are: President Years in Elected Political Office Zachary Taylor 0 Ulysses S. Grant 0 Herbert Hoover 0 William Howard Taft 0 Dwight D. Eisenhower 0 George Washington 1 Chester Arthur 1 Woodrow Wilson 2 Abraham Lincoln 2 Grover Cleveland 5 George W. Bush 5 Franklin D. Roosevelt 5 Rutherford B. Hayes 7 Jimmy Carter 8 Ronald Reagan 8 Here we have one-third of our presidents, most of whom had less time in elected office than it takes to get a political science degree. Now let’s look at what they did before president: President Occupation(s) Prior to Presidency Zachary Taylor US Army Lieutenant > Major General > President Ulysses S.

Eisenhower Military Officer > WWII Supreme Allied Commander > University President > President George Washington Continental Congress Delegate > General > President Chester Arthur New York Port Collector > Vice President > President Woodrow Wilson University President > Governor > President Abraham Lincoln State Legislator > Congressman > Prairie Lawyer > President Grover Cleveland Sheriff > Mayor > Governor > President George W. Bush Businessman > Governor > President Franklin D. Roosevelt State Senator > Assistant Secretary of the Navy > Governor > President Rutherford B. Hayes Military Officer > Congressman > Governor > President Jimmy Carter Peanut Farmer > State Senator > Governor > President Ronald Reagan Actor > Governor > President The first thing you’ll notice is that no two presidents in this group had the same climb up the ladder. You may have also noticed that there are a lot of military men in this list. And governors, too. Then there are some weird ones. Philanthropist? University president?


pages: 249 words: 79,740

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going by George Friedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, It's morning again in America, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

D863.F75 2011 909.83’1—dc22 2010043116 eISBN: 978-0-385-53295-2 v3.1 For Don Kuykendall, Friend I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are. —FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. —RONALD REAGAN It is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity. —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AUTHOR’S NOTE INTRODUCTION: REBALANCING AMERICA CHAPTER 1 THE UNINTENDED EMPIRE CHAPTER 2 REPUBLIC, EMPIRE, AND THE MACHIAVELLIAN PRESIDENT CHAPTER 3 THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE RESURGENT STATE CHAPTER 4 FINDING THE BALANCE OF POWER CHAPTER 5 THE TERROR TRAP CHAPTER 6 REDEFINING POLICY: THE CASE OF ISRAEL CHAPTER 7 STRATEGIC REVERSAL: THE UNITED STATES, IRAN, AND THE MIDDLE EAST CHAPTER 8 THE RETURN OF RUSSIA CHAPTER 9 EUROPE’S RETURN TO HISTORY CHAPTER 10 FACING THE WESTERN PACIFIC CHAPTER 11 A SECURE HEMISPHERE CHAPTER 12 AFRICA: A PLACE TO LEAVE ALONE CHAPTER 13 THE TECHNOLOGICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC IMBALANCE CHAPTER 14 THE EMPIRE, THE REPUBLIC, AND THE DECADE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Major American Trade Relations Countries with a U.S.

Yet at the same time it is the most democratic, as the presidency is the only office for which the people, as a whole, select a single, powerful leader. In order to understand this office I look at three presidents who defined American greatness. The first is Abraham Lincoln, who saved the republic. The second is Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the United States the world’s oceans. The third is Ronald Reagan, who undermined the Soviet Union and set the stage for empire. Each of them was a profoundly moral man … who was prepared to lie, violate the law, and betray principle in order to achieve those ends. They embodied the paradox of what I call the Machiavellian presidency, an institution that, at its best, reconciles duplicity and righteousness in order to redeem the promise of America.

At home he defied a Supreme Court ruling and authorized wiretapping without warrants as well as the interception and opening of mail. Yet his most egregious violation of civil liberties was to approve the detention and relocation of ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. Roosevelt had no illusions about what he was doing. He was ruthlessly violating rules of decency in pursuit of moral necessity. Ronald Reagan also pursued a ruthless path toward a moral purpose. His goal was destruction of what he called the evil empire of the Soviet Union, and he pursued it—in part by ramping up the arms race, which he knew the Soviets could not afford. He then went to elaborate and devious lengths to block Soviet support for national liberation movements in the Third World.


pages: 312 words: 78,053

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

“We’re not very funny people. We’re all work and no play.” “Then could you maybe change your voice? I don’t want to lie here thinking, even for one second, that there’s a possibility of you being hot.” “How does this sound?” Lisa’s voice morphed into that of Ronald Reagan. “Better.” “Well then, Zack, I’d like you to think of me as a friend.” How can you argue with Ronald Reagan? It’s like crushing baby chicks with gumboots; no wonder he ruled the planet for eight years. “Thanks.” “No problem.” “The food here blows.” “Yes, it’s unfortunate-looking, but take solace in knowing that you’re helping science. You’re a hero, Zack.”

“Don’t worry, Zack. Our new blood-removal techniques are invisible and painless.” “How comforting.” I stood up and walked over to the table to poke the green gel rhomboid on my plate. I took a small taste: a broccoli smoothie. “How long am I here for?” “A few weeks, maybe.” “I’ll go nuts.” Ronald Reagan said, “You’ll be helping your country, Zack. I know we can all count on you.” “At least get me a TV.” “No TV, Zack, sorry.” “Some games, then. Magazines . . . a Mac . . . maybe even some books.” “I’m afraid we can’t let you have any information in your room that might skew your mood.” “Not even logos on the furniture and toilet, I noticed.”

A moment of pride here: of all of us, I was the only one who didn’t mind speaking to Lisa, the feminine voice they’d worked so hard to perfect. But then, I’m one of those people who have no problem with the default ring tone on their mobile. I went two years with Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” until friends finally did an intervention at the gym’s fifth birthday party. Zack chose to work with “Ronald Reagan,” which is very Zack; at one point I think he almost convinced Ronald to speak in a Scooby-Doo accent. Julien chose the voice of a French pop star named Johnny Hallyday. Diana chose Courteney Cox Arquette and Harj chose Morgan Freeman, which was probably the best pick. Harj understands hierarchy.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The New Priesthood—The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power. Engineering and Science 1965;28(9):4. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2383/1/books.pdf. 13. Lapp, R, The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. 14. Reagan, R. Address by Governor Ronald Reagan, Installation of President Robert Hill, Chico State College, May 20, 1967. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, n.d. www.reagan.utexas.edu//archives/speeches/govspeech/05201967a.htm. 15. Gleason, R. Bob Dylan: Poet to a Generation. Jazz and Pop, December 1968. pp. 36–37. www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/BibDylan.html. 16. Vonnegut, K. American Notes: Vonnegut’s Gospel.

Billy Graham’s Star Was Born at His 1949 Revival in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/02/local/me-then2. Raven, C. E. John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1942. Reagan, R. Address by Governor Ronald Reagan, Installation of President Robert Hill, Chico State College, May 20, 1967. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, n.d. www.reagan.utexas.edu//archives/speeches/govspeech/05201967a.htm. Reagan, R. Farewell Address to the Nation. Miller Center of Public Affairs, January 11, 1989. http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3418.

The change was particularly evident among the emerging baby-boom generation. With the older generation having lost its moral credibility, the boomers felt the older crowd had no right to tell young people anything. “Today there is great concern among my generation that an era of permissiveness has resulted in unrest among our young people,” said California governor Ronald Reagan on May 20, 1967. “But just to keep things in balance there is a widespread feeling among our young people that no one over 30 understands them.”14 These baby boomers, feeling powerless, needed an outlet for their anger and moral distrust of the older generation, so they adopted the protest songs of folk music.


pages: 1,330 words: 372,940

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

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

Christopher Ogden, Mar. 5, 1990; Kissinger interview by Barbara Walters, “Today” show, May 17, 1976; Robert Keatley, “How Much Longer for Kissinger?” Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1976; James Naughton, “Ford Sees Wisconsin Vote as Kissinger Endorsement,” NYT, Apr. 8, 1976. 3. Ronald Reagan speech, Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla., Mar. 4, 1976; Ronald Reagan television address, NBC network, Mar. 31, 1976; Witcover, Marathon, 401; Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger, 225–31; “Kissinger, in Rebutting Reagan, Calls Charges ‘False Inventions,’ ” NYT, Apr. 2, 1975. 4. Gerald Ford speech, Peoria, Ill., Mar. 5, 1976; Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 548. 5.

Kissinger represents a conservative internationalism that is largely rooted in realism, realpolitik, power balances, and pragmatism. In this book, I have described how the opponents who did him most harm were not those on the dovish left or liberal Democratic side, but rather the neoconservatives or highly ideological Republicans who saw America’s global struggle in crusading, values-based, moral, and sentimental terms. Ronald Reagan, as readers of this book will see, ended up being Kissinger’s most wounding ideological adversary. Although Reagan at various points considered having a rapprochement with Kissinger, in the end he was excluded from the administration. More important, Reagan’s approach to foreign policy—as a crusade for freedom rather than as a quest for a stable balance of power—came to define the Republican view.

In a 1958 Foreign Affairs piece titled “Missiles and the Western Alliance,” Kissinger argued in favor of the European missile idea. “It represents,” he wrote, “the only means by which Europe can gain a degree of influence over its future.” As it turned out, such a deployment became part of NATO policy and remained that way until the late 1980s. (When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev worked out a deal in 1987 to remove these missiles from Europe, Kissinger was opposed.)19 As he was honing his foreign policy ideas, Kissinger was also building a public visibility unusual for a junior professor. His 1958 article on the Western Alliance led to a story with his picture in the New York Times headlined, “Refusal of Missile Bases Seen as Danger to Europe’s Future.”


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

To take the most obvious example, people arguing that we should cut taxes on the rich may pretend to have arrived at that position by looking at the evidence, but that’s not true: there is no evidence that would persuade them to change their view. In practice, they deal with contrary evidence by shifting goalposts—for example, the same people who predicted that Bill Clinton’s tax hike would cause a depression now claim that the Clinton-era boom was part of the long-run payoff to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Or they simply lie, making up numbers and other supposed facts. So how should an economist-pundit deal with this reality? One answer, which I know appeals to many economists, is to continue acting as if we were having a good-faith debate: to lay out the evidence, explain why it means one view is right and the other is wrong, and stop there.

Right now the revenues from the payroll tax exceed the amount paid out in benefits. This is deliberate, the result of a payroll tax increase—recommended by none other than Alan Greenspan—two decades ago. His justification at the time for raising a tax that falls mainly on lower- and middle-income families, even though Ronald Reagan had just cut the taxes that fall mainly on the very well-off, was that the extra revenue was needed to build up a trust fund. This could be drawn on to pay benefits once the baby boomers began to retire. The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn’t quite big enough.

Sicko is a powerful call to action—but don’t count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they’re very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us. These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. Sicko plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly—the program now known as Medicare—would lead to totalitarianism. Right now, by the way, Medicare—which did enormous good, without leading to a dictatorship—is being undermined by privatization.


pages: 261 words: 78,884

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

., running during a time of immense change for the country. There was no doubt he had a way with people. It was in the smoothness of his voice and the way he could lock on to someone, even over the TV. Still, he needed an issue that would capture people’s attention. He needed something with curb appeal. In 1976, Ronald Reagan was trying to oust a sitting president in his own party, a none-too-easy task. As he refined his stump speech, he tested out a theme that had worked well when he ran for governor of California and found that it resonated with audiences all across the country: It was time to reform welfare. Over the years, America had expanded its hodgepodge system of programs for the poor again and again.

While welfare may have led to a small decrease in the rate of marriage among the poor during those years, it could not begin to explain the skyrocketing numbers of births to unwed women. Yet Americans were primed to buy the story that AFDC, a system that went so against the grain of the self-sufficiency they believed in, was the main culprit in causing the spread of single motherhood. And so it was that Ronald Reagan, preparing his run for the presidency during a period when discontent with this stepchild of the welfare state was particularly high, found an issue with broad appeal and seized on it as a way to differentiate himself from his more moderate opponent. His stump speech soon began to feature the “welfare queen”—a villain who was duping the government in a grand style.

Four years later, when Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, left office, the welfare caseloads reached 13.8 million—4.5 million adults and their 9.3 million dependent children. How was it that welfare, an immensely unpopular program, could withstand such an offensive? If welfare’s chief nemesis, Ronald Reagan, had failed, who possibly stood a chance? David Ellwood was comfortable in his role as Harvard professor. He had sharp blue eyes, a scruffy beard, and a slight wave to his hair when it needed a trim. He was the smart kid who came to Harvard for college and never left, landing his first job as a professor there right after graduate school.


pages: 291 words: 87,296

Lethal Passage by Erik Larson

independent contractor, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, The Great Moderation

In one case, the study reported, a six-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a handgun he found “in the purse of a houseguest.” It is widely thought that Sarah Brady, chairperson of Handgun Control Inc., began her crusade against guns immediately after her husband, Jim Brady, was permanently injured in John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. In fact, she told a writer for the New York Times Magazine, the pivotal moment came later, in 1985, when her five-year-old son found a .22 handgun in a pickup owned by a family friend and pointed it at her. At first Brady thought it was a toy, then saw it was real and loaded. Parents, however, seem all too willing to ignore the risks and to assume that their own kids are responsible enough to recognize the harm guns can do and to learn to “respect” them.

ATF had used aggressive, proactive tactics to enforce firearms laws, he said, including undercover stings designed to trap dealers into making illegal sales. The NRA and other members of the gun lobby saw nothing positive in these measures and charged ATF with trampling the constitutional rights of ordinary gun owners. The charge fell on sympathetic ears. In 1981, then-president Ronald Reagan announced his plan to make good on a campaign promise to abolish the ATF. Today a chastened ATF (rescued at the last minute, as I’ll show, by a most improbable angel, the NRA itself) describes its mission in more modest terms. “There’s been a misconception that we’re in the prevention business,” said Jack Killorin, a former law-enforcement agent who now heads the bureau’s public affairs office.

Needless to say, the regulations were withdrawn by Treasury, by the Carter administration, with their tails between their legs.” And ATF was left to cope with $10 million less in its operating budget. Nonetheless, ATF still had the benefit of an administration that at least in spirit favored gun control. But Carter wouldn’t be president forever. During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan made it clear where his sympathies lay. He wooed the NRA with a campaign pledge that if elected president, he would abolish the hated bureau. The NRA and its powerful allies, including Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Rep. John Ashbrook of Ohio, both members of the NRA’s board of directors, moved in for the kill.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

That's based on estimates that do not factor in the higher growth rates we think will become prevalent soon. The next President will determine the most productive investments for this extraordinary national wealth. This election highlights the difference between looking forward to the future or looking backward to the past. Bush tends to look toward the past, primarily by resurrecting the formula Ronald Reagan rode to power twenty years ago. Cutting taxes may have been appropriate back then to stimulate an economy in recession, but cutting taxes significantly in our high growth economy of today is unwise. The Federal Reserve Bank is seeking to do the opposite—tightening credit to slow growth and ward off inflation.

The communist USSR, too, had an anemic economy, but we didn't find out until later because they put out phony statistics. What we could see was that they had invaded Afghanistan the year before and seemed bent on expanding their empire. Meanwhile, the United States couldn't get Iranian revolutionaries to release American hostages held for more than a year. Jimmy Carter was the president in 1980, running against Ronald Reagan, whose campaign slogan was "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The resounding answer was no, and Reagan won in a Republican landslide. Four years later, he changed the slogan of his reelection campaign to "It's morning again in America." Reagan was onto something with that slogan, apart from showing the power of confidence and optimism.

They're going to completely exploit the situation, grind the workers into the ground, squeeze every last penny out of the consumer, and then leave us living in a cesspool of pollution. It's going to be an utter disaster. And the disaster is not just looming here in England. You guys must be seeing the same thing happening back in the states. For god's sake, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States a month ago. What are Americans thinking by electing a bad movie actor as leader of the Free World? He's going to out-Thatcher Thatcher, plus get the world into a war. He's promising to build up the military and take on the Soviets, Give me a break—the Soviet Union has 40,000 nuclear bombs.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Neoliberalism relies on such realism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it is faltering. 17 In the United States, Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s “shock” in 1980, limiting the money supply and hiking interest rates, put tens of thousands of companies out of business. Cities like Youngstown, Ohio, saw more than one in five people out of work. Thatcher’s buddy Ronald Reagan won office that year and followed her path, slashing tax rates and breaking the air-traffic controllers’ union. The economic and political crisis of the 1970s had begun the process of deindustrialization, and Thatcher, Volcker, and Reagan stepped on the accelerator. Production was shut down in the rich countries and shipped elsewhere or automated.

Instead of guaranteed income and rights, we got the “welfare queen” stereotype. Women were considered immoral if they had abortions, but also if they had children outside of the prescribed social conditions, and they were demonized for getting state support. Seeming to underscore the long history of such demonization, Ronald Reagan told a story about the need to cut benefits premised on “a young lady… who on the basis of being a student is getting food stamps, and she’s studying to be a witch.” 48 Turning presumably Black women on welfare into a hate object—claiming that they undermined both the family, by daring to be single mothers, and the work ethic, by not taking a waged job—created a wedge that was slowly driven in to dismantle the entire welfare state and usher in the neoliberal moment.

Now they were not only “unskilled” laborers—their work wasn’t considered work at all. 27 US policy continues to assume that family will be the primary caregivers or assistants for people with disabilities or elders. Medicaid now pays for such services for low-income recipients who qualify; when Medicaid won’t pick up the bill, families are stuck finding the money to pay private carers or agencies. Ronald Reagan, proclaiming an official Home Care Week in 1988, declared that the “death of the family ha[s] been greatly exaggerated,” and his official statement noted that “in the home, family members can supply caring and love.” Such association with “family responsibility” was further solidified by Bill Clinton’s welfare reform program passed in 1996.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

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

In an editorial, The Washington Post charged that the bombing caused millions of Americans “to cringe in shame and to wonder at their President's very sanity.” James Reston, in The New York Times, called it “war by tantrum.” Nixon did have supporters, including Governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Ronald Reagan of California and Republican senators James Buckley of New York, Howard Baker of Tennessee, and Charles Percy of Illinois. John Connally, former governor of Texas and treasury secretary, called Nixon daily to encourage him and assure him that, regardless of what politicians and the media said, the people were behind him.

He received very few Christmas salutations, even from Republicans on Capitol Hill and members of his Cabinet. As a result, he told interviewer David Frost four years later, “it was the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can ever remember, much sadder and much more lonely than the one in the Pacific during the war.” He did make some telephone calls, including one to Ronald Reagan, who complained about CBS News coverage of the bombing and said that under World War II circumstances, the network would have been charged with treason. The day after Christmas, despite urgings from some of his aides and much of the media that he extend the Christmas Day truce, Nixon ordered the biggest bombing raid yet, 120 B-52s over Hanoi.

IRBMs from Turkey and Italy—and that here, as with the Soviet and American response to the strategic dilemmas posed first by the possibility and then by the reality of the ICBM, technology ruled. The presence of mobile Soviet SS-20 IRBMs in Europe from 1977, and the threat of a subsequent tit-for-tat Pershing II deployment by the U.S., loomed large in the logic behind the negotiations between President Ronald Reagan and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that, as we now know, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The logic of the scenarios posited above is debatable. What is not is that ICBM-based mutual deterrence was central to the Cold War, a reality reflected in the strategic vocabulary. Such expressions as circular error probable (CEP), preemptive first strike, survivable second-strike capability, and launch on warning, while not exclusively related to ICBMs, arose within a context shaped by the intercontinental ballistic missile.


pages: 651 words: 161,270

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

American Legislative Exchange Council, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, business climate, centre right, clean water, corporate governance, Exxon Valdez, Gary Taubes, global village, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, laissez-faire capitalism, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two and twenty, urban planning

One White House official told The Atlantic that the AEI played a large part in getting Ronald Reagan elected by making conservatism ‘intellectually respectable’. During the Reagan years, the Heritage Foundation provided information to members of Congress and their staffs, and was extremely influential. Most of its policy recommendations were adopted by the Reagan administration, including a proposal to allow strip mining in designated wilderness areas.63 Edwin Feulner, President of the Foundation, received a Presidential Citizen’s Medal from Ronald Reagan for being “a leader of the conservative movement. . .who has helped shape the policy of our Government”.

They achieved the abolition of the Consumer Protection Agency, the reduction of automobile emissions standards, the deregulation of energy prices and the lowering of corporate taxes.33 In the late 1970s US business was spending a billion dollars each year on propaganda of various sorts “aimed at persuading the American public that their interests were the same as business’s interests”. The result of all this expenditure showed in the polls when the percentage of people who thought that there was too much regulation soared from twenty-two per cent in 1975 to sixty per cent in 1980.34 Ronald Reagan, who was elected President in 1980, owed his success partly to conservative corporate interests, which he served faithfully once in power through a combination of deregulation and political appointments and by directing funding away from agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

They join an international armada of advocates already active in Brussels, including. . . public relations groups, confederations of European trade associations, representatives of US states, German lander and British municipalities, small ‘boutique’ consultancies, in-house representatives of individual US, European, and Japanese companies, European trade unions, agricultural groups, and a growing number of public-interest associations.49 Conservative think-tanks, having been instrumental in bringing Ronald Reagan to power in the US and Margaret Thatcher to power in the UK, have turned their attention to environmental issues and the defeat of environmental regulations. They have sought to cast doubt on the very features of the environmental crisis that had heightened public concerns at the end of the 1980s, including ozone depletion, greenhouse warming and industrial pollution (see Chapters Five and Six).


pages: 538 words: 141,822

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

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

The implications of such a view for the future of democracy promotion are tremendous, for they suggest that large doses of information and communications technology are lethal to the most repressive of regimes. Much of the present excitement about the Internet, particularly the high hopes that are pinned on it in terms of opening up closed societies, stems from such selective and, at times, incorrect readings of history, rewritten to glorify the genius of Ronald Reagan and minimize the role of structural conditions and the inherent contradictions of the Soviet system. It’s for these chiefly historical reasons that the Internet excites so many seasoned and sophisticated decision makers who should really know better. Viewing it through the prism of the Cold War, they endow the Internet with nearly magical qualities; for them, it’s the ultimate cheat sheet that could help the West finally defeat its authoritarian adversaries.

She tapped into the secret desires of many policymakers, who had been pining for an enemy they understood, someone unlike that bunch of bearded and cave-bound men from Waziristan who showed little appreciation for balance-of-power theorizing and seemed to occupy so much of the present agenda. It was Ronald Reagan’s lieutenants who must have felt particularly excited. Having claimed victory in the analog Cold War, they felt well-prepared to enlist—nay, triumph—in its digital equivalent. But it was certainly not the word “Internet” that made Internet freedom such an exciting issue for this group. As such, the quest for destroying the world’s cyber-walls has given this aging generation of cold warriors, increasingly out of touch with a world beset by problems like climate change or the lack of financial regulation, something of a lifeline.

But now that authoritarian governments were also actively moving into this space, it was important to stop them. For most attendees at the Bush gathering, the struggle for Internet freedom was quickly emerging as the quintessential issue of the new century, the one that could help them finish the project that Ronald Reagan began in the 1980s and that Bush did his best to advance in the first decade of the new century. It seems that in the enigma of Internet freedom, neoconservatism, once widely believed to be on the wane, has found a new raison d’être—and a new lease on life to go along with it. Few exemplify the complex intellectual connections between Cold War history, neoconservatism, and the brave new world of Internet freedom better than Mark Palmer.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

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

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

As president, Clinton maintained an interest in religion that would have had him branded a dangerous Jesus freak in Europe. A few weeks after moving to the White House he hosted a private dinner for Billy Graham, whom he credited with bringing him to Jesus.58 Unlike many of his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan, he regularly attended church in Washington, DC. Many members of Clinton’s inner circle were devout Christians. Al Gore was a Southern Baptist who studied theology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. George Stephanopoulos studied theology as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.

These decisions shocked even modernists such as Niebuhr, who complained that Engel “practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools.”39 They infuriated Evangelicals who thought that prayers and scripture were the foundation stones of all real education. Billy Graham called the rulings part of a “diabolical scheme” that was “taking God and moral teaching from the schools.”40 “They say God is dead,” Ronald Reagan quipped during his campaign for the governorship of California. “Well, He isn’t. We just can’t talk about Him in the schoolroom.”41 The Court’s decision on school prayer was made all the more unholy to religious Americans by the fact that it was soon followed by a permissive decision on pornography.

(The Southern Baptist Convention even passed a resolution supporting certain sorts of legalized abortion in 1974.) But the Moral Majority changed this. Viguerie was a Catholic, Phillips a Jew and Weyrich a Catholic Mennonite. In the budding culture wars the enemy of my enemy was my friend. As for the Republicans, the GOP moved somewhat closer to becoming God’s Own Party. Ronald Reagan told an adoring crowd of Evangelicals in Dallas in 1980, “I know you can’t endorse me but I want you to know that I endorse you.” At the close of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention he asked his audience to “begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.”53 His successor, the preppie George Bush, Sr., also posed as a born-again Evangelical.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Their advocates make it sound like, and may often believe that, cyberlibertarian commitments are about limiting power, but this is only true so long as we construe “government” as equivalent with “power,” and “the internet” as being oppositional to power, rather than, at least in significant part, being strongly aligned with it. The most direct way to arrive at this perspective is to accept the definition of government developed by the far right, especially anarcho-capitalist theorists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman, and echoed by politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. According to this view, “government” is inherently totalitarian and tyrannical; indeed, “government” and “tyranny” are essentially synonyms. Cyberlibertarian doctrine did not develop in a vacuum. It fits into, and at best does nothing to resist, the profound rightward drift evident in so much of contemporary politics.

Rather than a balance of powers and regular elections to curb the inherent possibility of abuse of power, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists accept, often without appearing even to realize it, the far-right, libertarian/anarcho-capitalist definition of government that extends from the German social theorist Max Weber (who famously and tendentiously defined the state as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”; see Weber 1919, 33; see also Giddens 1985 for a thorough critique of Weber’s definition) to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address of 1981, in which he famously claimed that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In Why Government Is the Problem (1993), Milton Friedman, a key player in the creation of neoliberal economic doctrine, makes the same case at greater length.

While this matter may have seemed an arcane and technical matter for economists, it ended up underwriting a new form of right-wing practice, where instead of demanding that governments take a “hands-off” policy toward markets as had their predecessors, neoliberals wanted to take control of state power for their own ends: “A primary ambition of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it” (Mirowski 2014, 56). When Friedman was hired as a senior adviser to U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1981, he thus became the chief architect of a program called monetarism, according to which continuous modulation of the money supply controls inflation. Thus Friedman could want “to abolish the Fed” while writing “many pages on how the Fed, if it does exist, should be run” (Doherty 1995). Friedman’s redefinition of inflation started out, like many extreme right-wing political dicta do in our time, as a fringe theory that few took seriously; then it became a backstop against which more mainstream economic theories could rest; then, via the direct exercise of the state power neoliberal theory claims to eschew, it forcibly took over the mainstream when only lukewarm resistance was offered by non-right-wing thinkers.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Ethan Swift, “Young Americans for Freedom and the Anti-War Movement: Pro-War Encounters with the New Left at the Height of the Vietnam War” 2019, MSSA Kaplan Prize for Use of MSSA Collections, 42, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/mssa_collections/19. 5. Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 4. 6. Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” campaign speech, October 27, 1964, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964. 7. J. Hoberman, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (New York: The New Press, 2019), 104. 8. “Cagney Eulogized by Reagan as ‘Success Story’ with AM-Obit-Cagney,” Associated Press, March 30, 1986. 9.

Department of State Historical Documents; James Warren, “Nixon on Tape Expounds on Welfare and Homosexuality,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1999. Chapter 4.2 War Capitalism Hoover Institution—Ronald Reagan’s Dirty Harry Situation—The Office of Technology Licensing and the Privatization of the Cold War University—Wiring the Asian-American Circuit—Computers for Dictators—Iran-Contra Net How did the relatively unimpressive actor Ronald Reagan get picked as the avatar for the new right? Who picked him? Associations of capitalists and asset holders get short shrift in the historical literature compared to labor unions, and it was the former groups that took the offensive.

What had been a sub-$40,000 concern in 1940 had grown to a genuine company, with over 200 employees and $1.5 million in annual revenue at the war’s peak.3 And though the founders were dealing with the Roosevelt government, Packard made sure the company had the profits to expand at 100 percent a year without turning to outside investors. Displaying the capitalist ideological fire that made him a trusted adviser to both Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan, he refused to comply with FDR’s wartime Renegotiation Board. When two bureaucrats came to Palo Alto to tell Packard that the firm fell on the wrong side of regulations against excessive profits, he chewed them out about the free market, appealed above their heads, and got an agreement with “virtually everything we asked for.”4 Once again, Roosevelt’s agents and the social democratic agenda found themselves nullified in California’s Hooverville.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

In countries with honest and effective governments, the view that promoting good government is a worthwhile investment would not strike most observers as absurd. Yet that does not seem to be the position of antigovernment evangelists in the United States, many of whom view government service with thinly veiled contempt. As Ronald Reagan often remarked, “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” The foundation of honest and effective government is a professional civil service that takes pride in its work.

The standard solution is a military arms control agreement, under which both sides pledge to reduce their spending on armaments. Lack of trust is perhaps the biggest barrier to reaching such agreements, and successful ones have almost always granted liberal inspection rights to both sides. As Ronald Reagan liked to say, “Trust, but verify.” 64 PUTTING THE POSITIONAL CONSUMPTION BEAST ON A DIET 65 So far, so good. But this account leaves an important question unanswered. What conditions must be met, exactly, for a military arms race to occur? If someone says there is too much of something, the unspoken implication is that there must be too little of something else.

For example, it may be perfectly rational for a nation’s leaders to refuse to participate in such an agreement if they have no practical way to prevent the opposing side from cheating. It may also be rational to refuse to sign an arms control agreement if leaders believe an arms race would play out to their own side’s advantage. Ronald Reagan, for example, was said to have embraced the development of strategic missile defense systems in the 1980s in part because he believed that pressuring the USSR to follow suit would hasten the economic collapse of America’s principal rival. In sum, there’s all but universal agreement that military arms races between closely matched rivals are wasteful, and that all parties can gain from collective agreements to limit spending on armaments.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Trabacchi was especially providential when he loaned Fermi the radon-gas effluence of a gram of radium, which was at the time worth around $34,000. Hans Bethe (Beta), who won a Nobel for his fusion theory on the origin of starlight and who would become the chief of the Los Alamos theory group (inadvertently thrusting Edward Teller into a career combining Dr. Strangelove with Ronald Reagan), spent most of 1931 with the Fermi team: Fermi worked in the Institute of Physics, which was on a small hill in the middle of Rome, surrounded by a sea of traffic but very quiet on that little hill. There were trees, ponds, a nice garden, a fountain—really quite an oasis in the hectic traffic of Rome.

And from inside the still-burning Reactor #4 itself, one robot emerged covered in a black goo—radiographic fungus, growing ecstatically on the unit’s very walls. 15 Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet AFTER his speeches as a presidential candidate repudiated the live-and-let-live détente of Nixon, Ford, and Carter in favor of hawkish Cold Warrior aggression, Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the Oval Office in 1981 alarmed the Kremlin. Then in the first days of his administration, CIA director William Casey reprised LeMay’s bear-baiting by throwing bombers over the pole into Soviet airspace until Russian radar took notice. Similarly, NATO fighter jets crossed over the empire’s Eurasian border every week, performed a variety of erratic maneuvers, and then vanished . . . until starting up all over again.

Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me. We all know that the dangers facing us today are greater by far than at any time in our long history. The enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns but the deadly power of abused technology.” In his diaries, Ronald Reagan’s sole mention of feeling sad occurs on October 10, 1983, after watching a preview of a TV movie on nuclear horror, The Day After: “It’s powerfully done, all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. . . .


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Yet it did not do better—save for curbing the union movement in Britain, and providing income gains for the rich through tax cuts, as well as through the side effects of wage stagnation, which were truly staggering in magnitude. Why didn’t discontent with neoliberalism’s failure to deliver cause another turn of the political-economic societal-organizational wheel? I believe it lasted because Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Or, rather, I believe it was because soon after Ronald Reagan’s presidency came to an end, the Cold War came to an end, and he was given credit for it. And the manifest failure of ideas in the shop window of possibilities weren’t uniquely being sold by the right. Looking back from today, or from the 1990s, or even from the late 1970s, on the phenomenon of really-existing socialism, perhaps the most striking feature is how inevitable the decay and decline of the system was.

Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973; Harry V. Jaffa, Storm over the Constitution, New York: Lexington Books, 1999. 14. Tim Naftali, “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation with Richard Nixon,” Atlantic, July 30, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-reagans-racist-conversation-richard-nixon/595102; George Stigler, “The Problem of the Negro,” New Guard 5 (December 1965): 11–12. 15. Dan Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 16.

A majority of US Supreme Court justices pretend to believe that these are partisan restrictions imposed by Republican Party legislators to give them an edge over the Democratic Party in the next election, rather than racist restrictions to keep Black men and women down. But considering the ugly reality of American political history even in the later decades of the long twentieth century, this is not that surprising; this was a time, after all, when a Republican Party standard-bearer (Ronald Reagan) referred to diplomats from Tanzania as “monkeys from those African countries,” and an economic policy standard-bearer (the University of Chicago’s George Stigler) damned Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders for their “growing insolence.”14 Plus there is the question that Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices do not ask: If a political party goes all-in to attract bigots, is it then unbigoted to attempt to suppress the votes of those who are repelled by that political strategy?


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

It is about something older and deeper. Deregulation, freer flows of capital, and lower taxes since the 1970s—most people think that these globalizing changes have resulted primarily from grand ideological shifts and deliberate policy choices ushered in by such leaders as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Ideology and leaders matter, but few have noticed this other thing: the role of the secrecy jurisdictions in all of this—the silent warriors of globalization that have been acting as berserkers in the global economy, forcing other nations to engage in the competitive race to the bottom, and in the process cutting swaths through the tax systems and regulations of nation states, rich and poor, whether they like it or not.

They thought, let’s have our cake and eat it, by preserving the rules and constraints at home while permitting this unregulated dollar market to flourish overseas. What they had not appreciated enough was the extent to which this offshore market would rebound back into the United States, with malign effects. By the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power in 1979 and 1981, the political classes in Britain and the United States were losing faith in manufacturing and genuflecting toward finance. Wall Street and the City of London were at the forefront of a global trend of financialization: the reengineering of manufacturing firms as highly leveraged investment vehicles and, soon, the packaging of mortgages into risky asset backed securities for offloading into global markets.

Companies focused especially on the London-centered Eurodollar market but also on Panama, then under a right-wing strongman who venerated Adolf Hitler, and on the Bahamas, where Meyer Lansky had the politicians in his pocket. In the United States, Lansky had close links to the Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, a true American Mafia kingmaker who in turn helped build up the career of several Hollywood actors, including Ronald Reagan. Some large U.S. corporations even opened their own offshore banks. As this happened, the interests of big-time criminals, the intelligence services, wealthy Americans, and U.S. corporations began to converge ever more strongly offshore. The system was working two transformations simultaneously: helping criminal enterprises imitate legitimate businesses, and encouraging legitimate businesses to behave more like criminal enterprises.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

John Maynard Keynes, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23. 20.  Ibid., pp. 215–16. 21.  Ibid., p. 216. 22.  Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master, p. 107. 23.  Ronald Reagan, 1986, ‘Remarks to State Chairpersons of the National White House Conference on Small Business’, 15 August; www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1986/081586e.html 24.  Ronald Reagan, 1986, ‘The President’s News Conference’, 12 August; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37733 25.  Graeme Chamberlin and Linda Yueh, 2006, Macroeconomics, London: Cengage, ch. 4. 26.  Keynes, General Theory, p. 373. 27.  

That era saw the rise of New Classicists and monetarists like Milton Friedman, whose theories explained stagflation and propelled him onto the stage. Keynes’s ideas fell out of favour. There is a parallel in that Keynes’s ideas were in vogue during the 1930s because they could explain the pressing issue of the time, which was unemployment. By 1980, laissez-faire had become the dominant theory in the US with the election of President Ronald Reagan. When he was the Republican candidate for the presidency against the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, he quipped: ‘Recession is when your neighbour loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.’ Reagan won. Still, that decade also saw the emergence of the New Keynesians, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, because unemployment was once again an issue in the aftermath of the economic revolutions that took place under both Reagan and Callaghan’s Tory successor, Margaret Thatcher.

In America, there is a push for more infrastructure investment, although the Republicans in Congress remain concerned about adding to the fiscal deficit. Of course, Republicans traditionally follow a non-interventionist philosophy, and are suspicious about the role of government in both investment and the economy in general. As former Republican President Ronald Reagan observed of government intervention: ‘government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it doesn’t move, subsidize it,’23 and remarked on a separate occasion, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.’24 This explains why the US plan is counting on private investors to help finance its projects.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

John Maynard Keynes, 1937, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51(2), pp. 209–23. 20. Ibid., pp. 215–16. 21. Ibid., p. 216. 22. Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master, p. 107. 23. Ronald Reagan, 1986, ‘Remarks to State Chairpersons of the National White House Conference on Small Business’, 15 August; www.reaganlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/archives/speeches/1986/081586e.htm 24. Ronald Reagan, 1986, ‘The President’s News Conference’, 12 August; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37733 25. Graeme Chamberlin and Linda Yueh, 2006, Macroeconomics, London: Cengage, ch. 4. 26. Keynes, General Theory, p. 373. 27.

That era saw the rise of New Classicists and monetarists like Milton Friedman, whose theories explained stagflation and propelled him onto the stage. Keynes’s ideas fell out of favour. There is a parallel in that Keynes’s ideas were in vogue during the 1930s because they could explain the pressing issue of the time, which was unemployment. By 1980, laissez-faire had become the dominant theory in the US with the election of President Ronald Reagan. When he was the Republican candidate for the presidency against the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, he quipped: ‘Recession is when your neighbour loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.’ Reagan won. Still, that decade also saw the emergence of the New Keynesians, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, because unemployment was once again an issue in the aftermath of the economic revolutions that took place under both Reagan and Callaghan’s Tory successor, Margaret Thatcher.

In America, there is a push for more infrastructure investment, although the Republicans in Congress remain concerned about adding to the fiscal deficit. Of course, Republicans traditionally follow a non-interventionist philosophy, and are suspicious about the role of government in both investment and the economy in general. As former Republican President Ronald Reagan observed of government intervention: ‘government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it doesn’t move, subsidize it,’23 and remarked on a separate occasion, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.’24 This explains why the US plan is counting on private investors to help finance its projects.


pages: 587 words: 119,432

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

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

The opening was not the result of a plan by the four powers that still held ultimate legal authority in divided Berlin: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East. The opening was not the result of any specific agreement between the former US president, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The opening that night was simply not planned. Why, then, was it happening? Enormous crowds were surging toward both the eastern and western sides of the Wall. The East German regime struggled to maintain order not only at the Brandenburg Gate but also at the Wall’s border crossings—for there was no crossing at the gate itself—with armed troops, physical barriers, and other means.

Bush agreed: “I’m not an emotional kind of guy.” By coincidence, that day the president had received advance word from journalist Tim Russert that NBC would shortly be airing the results of a poll on presidential popularity. This poll showed that, as of November 1989, Bush was enjoying higher approval ratings than his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. It must have seemed to Bush like validation for his more cautious approach to foreign policy.72 Perhaps the world leader put in the most awkward position by Schabowski’s surprising announcement, however, was Helmut Kohl. Had anyone in Bonn known the significance of what was happening in East Berlin, Kohl and the bulk of chancellery officials would not have departed for Poland on November 9 for a major, extended visit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the opening months of the Second World War.

Later scholars accepted at face value Krenz’s claim that he had been responsible for it.34 In this narrative, East Germans are passive recipients of a gift handed to them from their leaders on high. A variant of this is the idea that, in some practical way, a detailed road map for the Wall’s opening emerged after President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin, in which he demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.”35 And academics who do acknowledge the chaotic nature of the border-opening process have nevertheless started to discount it and the peaceful revolution of 1989. According to scholars in this camp, if the Leipzig ring road had not opened on October 9 or the Wall had not fallen on November 9, these events would have happened the next day, or the next day, or soon after that.


pages: 431 words: 118,074

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

George Abbey, interview by the author, 20 July 2017. 74. Richard A. D’Errico, “The Legacy of George Low,” Albany Business Review, 1 December 2003. 75. John Noble Wilford, “George M. Low Is Dead at 58; Headed Apollo Space Project,” New York Times, 18 July 1984. 76. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at White House Ceremony Marking the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing,” 20 July 1984, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/72084d. 77. 130 Cong. Rec. S20,496–97 (daily ed. 23 July 1984) (statement of Senator Moynihan). Epilogue 1. Leonard David, “Mars Rovers Are in Good Shape for Winter,” NBCNews.com, last updated April 25, 2006, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12480225/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/mars-rovers-are-good-shape-winter/#.XLXSuOhKiHt. 2.

George Low, the guiding light behind the Apollo program . . . began his career as a research scientist and progressed to key leadership positions in the manned spaceflight program. . . . He continued his lifelong efforts to build a better tomorrow while serving as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We’re grateful for what George Low has done and the ideas he stood for, and we’ll miss him very much. —President Ronald Reagan, 20 July 1984 The fundamental operating unit in George Low’s NASA experience has always been the team, whether he was a member, contributor, or leader. But without him, those extraordinary teams would have lacked the final sparks of ingenuity, those extra quanta of strength that finally meant success.

Continued contradictory policy and continued suboptimization for each of our special interests can only cause us to fail in all of our objectives.54 While Low was serving as RPI president, the nation also turned to him for important national committee work. During the Jimmy Carter administration, for example, he was called on to review the nation’s general aviation safety procedures. During President-elect Ronald Reagan’s transition period, Low was called on to serve as chairman of the NASA transition team, making broad recommendations for the future president’s space policy. A committed public servant, Low always accepted the call, irrespective of the office holder’s political party affiliation. If he could help—especially in areas that concerned aeronautics, space, or education—Low was all in.


The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, IFF: identification friend or foe, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Poindexter, then the White House national security adviser, told Reagan in a cover note for the briefing, “I would invite your attention particularly to the need to ensure that future cases are referred to the FBI on a timely basis for investigation.” John M. Poindexter, “Memo to the President,” Oct. 1, 1986, contained in Regan files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Libruary. Also see Wise, Spy Who Got Away, 87–93. 5. “USSR” folder, President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Oct. 2, 1986, box 7, Regan files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 6. Andrew Rosenthal, “Soviet Linked with Howard Case Executed for Treason,” Associated Press, Oct. 22, 1986. The Tass announcement did not say when. 7. Libin, “Detained with Evidence,” and a confidential source close to the family.

., Rolph went to see Tolkachev in a wooded park at the Moscow Zoo, located near Tolkachev’s apartment building. Tolkachev often passed the zoo while walking to work. They had planned the meeting months earlier, and Rolph wanted to stick to the schedule, even though superpower hostility seemed to be ratcheting up again. On November 4, Ronald Reagan had been elected fortieth president of the United States. Then, in early December, there had been a scare over a possible Soviet invasion of Poland. In the end, Soviet troops didn’t cross the border, but the Moscow station was braced for heavy KGB surveillance. Rolph was determined to go ahead with the meeting.

Cathy Cox of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base fulfilled requests professionally and promptly. I am grateful for access to the collections of the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.; the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; the U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Program, Annapolis, Maryland; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California; and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, Moscow. Glenn Frankel has been a mentor on writing for years and once again gave me perceptive and valuable comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to Svetlana Savranskaya for comments on a draft and sharing her knowledge about how to pry Cold War secrets out of the world’s archives.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

Populism, he writes, is “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.” That’s a good start. It doesn’t describe someone like Ronald Reagan or Vladimir Putin, both of whom have sometimes been called “populist,” but it does describe the logic of the parties, movements, and candidates from America’s People’s Party of 1892 to Marine Le Pen’s National Front of 2016. I would, however, take Kazin’s characterization one step further and distinguish between leftwing populists like Sanders or Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias and rightwing populists like Trump and the National Front’s Le Pen.

The first are what political scientists call realigning elections. In these, a party or a presidential candidate’s challenge to the prevailing worldview causes an upheaval that reorders the existing coalitions and leads to a new majority party. Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigns in 1932 and, even more so, 1936 did this, and so did Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. Such elections are rare. They are usually precipitated by economic depression or war, and by a succession of political outbursts that challenge, but do not replace, the prevailing worldview. In American politics, these outbursts often take the form of populist candidacies and movements.

The key contention that sustained the neoliberal agenda was that the older New Deal liberalism, by focusing on raising consumer demand and reducing inequality, would stifle growth and reduce Americans’ standard of living. By contrast, the neoliberal and supply-side agenda, while not directly confronting economic inequality, promised to spur economic growth, which would benefit all Americans. As Ronald Reagan, borrowing from John Kennedy, put it in the 1980 campaign, “a rising tide will lift all boats.” Similar kinds of arguments would be made in Europe by the “Third Way” centrists, who were partially inspired by Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But even by the late 1980s, reality on the ground appeared to contradict these claims of widespread prosperity.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Instead, they argued for “limited government,” drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry, particularly in the environmental arena. They said they were driven by principle, but their positions dovetailed seamlessly with their personal financial interests. By Ronald Reagan’s presidency, their views had begun to gain more traction. For the most part, they were still seen as defining the extreme edge of the right wing, but both the Republican Party and much of the country were trending their way. Conventional wisdom often attributed the rightward march to a public backlash against liberal spending programs.

The brothers took an even more audacious step into electoral politics in 1979, when Charles, who preferred to operate behind the scenes, persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. The brothers were by then backing the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. They opposed all limits on campaign donations, so they found a legal way around them. They contrived to make David the vice presidential running mate, and thus according to campaign-finance law he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign rather than being limited by the $1,000 donation cap.

All of which calls into question how in 1990 the Scaife Foundation could justify pressing the Heritage Foundation, of which it was the largest funder, to focus more on conservative social and moral issues and in particular family values. Heritage’s president, Ed Feulner, quickly complied with his donor’s request, hiring William J. Bennett. Soon after, Bennett, an outspoken social conservative who had been the secretary of education under Ronald Reagan and the director of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W. Bush, was appointed Heritage’s new distinguished fellow in cultural policy studies. Lee Edwards, who wrote Heritage’s official history, confirms that the Scaife Foundation “had particularly in mind the disintegration of the family, an issue which became a major Heritage concern.”


pages: 283 words: 77,272

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

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

Needless to say, the empathy Ford expressed for Nixon is rarely invoked as a means of arguing for leniency, let alone immunity, for ordinary Americans. That’s because Ford’s call for “empathy” is merely disguised aristocratic privilege. The Precedent Exploited The precedent established by the Nixon pardon would be exploited little more than a decade later, when another group of high-level offenders—the Iran-Contra criminals of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations—were seeking immunity from prosecution. Sure enough, they got it: White House officials who clearly and knowingly broke the law, and then deliberately lied to Congress about what they had done (also a felony), were systematically protected from any consequences for their crimes.

Some have disputed the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to “war on terror” detainees, on the ground that they are not actually prisoners of war. But even if the Geneva Conventions do not apply, there is no such dispute about the Convention Against Torture, a treaty negotiated and signed by President Ronald Reagan, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. Article 4 of that treaty requires each country to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law,” and Article 5 dictates that “each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction.”

Felt was most famous for having been Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat” source in the Watergate investigation, but Marcus focused on a different part of his life: the 1980 criminal trial in which Felt was convicted of having ordered illegal, warrantless searches of the homes of 1960s radicals and their friends and relatives. Less than twenty-four hours after Felt’s 1980 conviction, he (along with an FBI codefendant) was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. Reagan justified his pardon with these following words, obviously relevant to the contemporary debate about possible prosecution of Bush officials. [The men’s convictions] grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Keynes rejected this idea and argued that governments could intervene effectively in market economies to solve the problem of recession, or what one of his contemporaries called the “gales of creative destruction.”3 Thus, when demand for goods slackened and workers were threatened with unemployment, governments could act to keep the wheels of industry turning. Keynes also endorsed the idea of a welfare state to protect people from the chronic insecurities that characterize the boom-and-bust nature of capitalist development. By the 1980s, neoliberal ideas had regained popularity. Under Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, there was a return to preaching the virtues of free trade, self-interest, and the power of the market to deliver prosperity and justice. Keynes’s ideas were renounced as a recipe for big government and a growing underclass living off state handouts.

Given that the knowledge economy now offered high-skill, high-wage jobs to those willing to invest in their human capital, the role of the state could be limited to improving educational standards, expanding access to higher education, and creating flexible job markets that reward talent, ambition, and enterprise. The False Promise 23 Neoliberal reforms introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s—subsequently pursued by governments of different political persuasion on both sides of the Atlantic—stripped away much of the safety net that offered security to individuals and families through the welfare state that characterized midcentury America and Europe.

In its place, a society would be built where individuals were encouraged to pursue their self-interest and where greed was treated as a virtue in the vain hope that the hidden hand of the market would miraculously benefit all through the trickle down of resources from the winners to the losers. “What I want to see above all,” Ronald Reagan stated, “is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.” But Reagan was adamant that this could only be guaranteed by getting the state off the backs of the people, for “if the reins of government were removed, business would boom, spreading prosperity to all the people.”25 The neoliberal opportunity bargain involved changing the incentive structures for individuals and the business community.


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

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

I love the First Amendment."15 It's interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright was heckled in Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while defending the administration's Iraq policy, she yelled: "We are the greatest country in the world!" Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though Gore's and Albright's words don't quite have the ring of "Deutschland über alles" or "Rule Britannia". In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent intellect for which he was esteemed, tried to show how totalitarian the Soviet Union was by declaring: "I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for 'freedom'."16 In light of the above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask if there's a word in American English for "embarrassment"?

In other words, whatever the diplomats and policymakers at the time thought they were doing, the Cold War skeptics have been vindicated—it was not about containing an evil, expansionist communism after all; it was about American imperialism, with "communist" merely the name given to those who stood in its way. In sum total, all these post-Cold War non-changes engender a scenario out of the 1950s and 1960s. And the 1970s and 1980s. John Foster Dulles lives! Has Ronald Reagan been faking illness as he lurks behind the curtain of Oz? Why has all this continued into the 21st century? American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the summum bonum, that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not allow asbestos, banned pesticides and other products restricted in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil...To the highly-sensitive nostrils of Washington foreign-policy veterans, Yugoslavia smelled a bit too much like one of these governments.

They are believed to have also been behind the attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak while he was visiting Ethiopia.17 In August 1994, three "Afghans" robbed a tourist hotel in Morocco, killing tourists in an effort to destabilize Morocco's vital tourism industry.18 Throughout much of the 1990s, Kashmiris and other nationals trained in Afghanistan have been fighting against India in the mountains of Kashmir, waging "holy war" for secession from New Delhi.19 Since Algeria's cancellation of the 1992 election, Algerian veterans of the Afghanistan conflict have played a key role in the rise of the Armed Islamic Group, responsible for many thousands of gory murders in their crusade for an Islamic state.20 In Bosnia, beginning in 1992, Afghans fought ferociously alongside the predominantly Muslim Bosnian army for two years, attacking Serbian positions to liberate Muslim villages.21 One of those who confessed to the November 1995 bombing in Saudi Arabia, referred to above, said that he had fought with the Bosnian Muslims.22 In a 1999 interview, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi told a London-based Arabic newspaper that his government had crushed an Islamic militant movement of "Afghans". "They returned desperate and destructive," he said, "and adopted killing and explosives as their profession, according to the training they received from the American intelligence."23 And there has been more of the same in other places, from the men Ronald Reagan fancied as "freedom fighters". "This is an insane instance of the chickens coming home to roost," said a US diplomat in Pakistan in 1996. "You can't plug billions of dollars into an anti-Communist jihad, accept participation from all over the world and ignore the consequences. But we did. Our objectives weren't peace and grooviness in Afghanistan.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Although greater competition from manufactured imports and more foreign ownership could … help the Korean economy, Koreans and others saw this … as an abuse of IMF power to force Korea at a time of weakness to accept trade and investment policies it had previously rejected’.28 This was said not by some anti-capitalist anarchist but by Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard economist who was the key economic advisor to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The IMF-World Bank mission creep, combined with the abuse of conditionalities by the Bad Samaritan nations, is particularly unacceptable when the policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions have produced slower growth, more unequal income distribution and greater economic instability in most developing countries, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter.

However, this began to change in the 1980s. The change was most palpable in the US, whose enlightened approach to international trade with economically lesser nations rapidly gave way to a system similar to 19th-century British ‘free trade imperialism’. This new direction was clearly expressed by the then US president Ronald Reagan in 1986, as the Uruguay Round of GATT talks was starting, when he called for ‘new and more liberal agreements with our trading partners – agreement under which they would fully open their markets and treat American products as they treat their own’.10 Such agreement was realized through the Uruguay Round of GATT trade talks, which started in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este in 1986 and was concluded in the Moroccan city of Marrakech in 1994.

In the late 1970s, the bankrupt Swedish shipbuilding industry was rescued through nationalization by the country’s first right-wing government in 44 years, despite the fact that it had come to power with a pledge to reduce the size of the state. In the early 1980s, the troubled US car maker Chrysler was rescued by the Republican administration under Ronald Reagan, which was in the vanguard of neo-liberal market reforms at the time. Faced with the financial crisis in 1982, following its premature and poorly designed financial liberalization, the Chilean government rescued the entire banking sector with public money. This was General Pinochet’s government, which had seized power in a bloody coup in the name of defending the free market and private ownership.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Although greater competition from manufactured imports and more foreign ownership could … help the Korean economy, Koreans and others saw this … as an abuse of IMF power to force Korea at a time of weakness to accept trade and investment policies it had previously rejected’.28 This was said not by some anti-capitalist anarchist but by Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard economist who was the key economic advisor to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The IMF-World Bank mission creep, combined with the abuse of conditionalities by the Bad Samaritan nations, is particularly unacceptable when the policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions have produced slower growth, more unequal income distribution and greater economic instability in most developing countries, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter.

However, this began to change in the 1980s. The change was most palpable in the US, whose enlightened approach to international trade with economically lesser nations rapidly gave way to a system similar to 19th-century British ‘free trade imperialism’. This new direction was clearly expressed by the then US president Ronald Reagan in 1986, as the Uruguay Round of GATT talks was starting, when he called for ‘new and more liberal agreements with our trading partners – agreement under which they would fully open their markets and treat American products as they treat their own’.10 Such agreement was realized through the Uruguay Round of GATT trade talks, which started in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este in 1986 and was concluded in the Moroccan city of Marrakech in 1994.

In the late 1970s, the bankrupt Swedish shipbuilding industry was rescued through nationalization by the country’s first right-wing government in 44 years, despite the fact that it had come to power with a pledge to reduce the size of the state. In the early 1980s, the troubled US car maker Chrysler was rescued by the Republican administration under Ronald Reagan, which was in the vanguard of neo-liberal market reforms at the time. Faced with the financial crisis in 1982, following its premature and poorly designed financial liberalization, the Chilean government rescued the entire banking sector with public money. This was General Pinochet’s government, which had seized power in a bloody coup in the name of defending the free market and private ownership.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

We might view the United States as having undergone six such major shifts: at the time of the Revolution, after the elections of Andrew Jackson and later of Abraham Lincoln, at the end of Reconstruction, during the Great Depression, and after the election of Ronald Reagan. Historians may disagree with us on the details of these changes of story, but since much of history is about such shifts, they are unlikely to argue with us about their existence. Nor are they likely to disagree with us about the most recent such shift, coinciding with the election of Ronald Reagan. At that time the explanation of how the economy worked turned to the conservative image with which we began this book, the “invisible hand.” This shift was, of course, not just an American phenomenon.

Indeed, it is in this last category, stories, where Animal Spirits itself fits in, because the goal of the book is to give its own story about how the economy behaves. Its intent is to tell a more accurate story than the dominant one of the past thirty years or so, ever since the free market revolution that swept the world, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Manmohan Singh, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brian Mulroney, Bertie Ahern, Carlos Salinas de Gotari, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Carlos Menem, and others. These stories, embellished by oft told vignettes of newly successful people, and in their mostly justified enthusiasm for expanded free markets, led to too much economic tolerance.

In England it took the form of Thatcherism. In America it took the form of Reaganism. And from these two Anglo-Saxon countries it has spread. This permissive-parent view of the role of government replaced the Keynesian happy home. Now, three decades after the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we see the troubles it can spawn. No limits were set to the excesses of Wall Street. It got wildly drunk. And now the world must face the consequences. It has been a long time since we discovered how it was possible for a government to offset the rational and irrational shocks that occur to capitalist economies.


pages: 956 words: 267,746

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

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

Although Carter was a devout Christian, a newly created evangelical group, the Moral Majority, was attacking his support for legalized abortion and a constitutional amendment to guarantee equal rights for women. A midsummer opinion poll found that 77 percent of the American people disapproved of President Carter’s performance in the White House—a higher disapproval rate than that of President Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate. The Republican candidate for president, Ronald Reagan, had a sunnier disposition. “I refuse to accept [Carter’s] defeatist and pessimistic view of America,” Reagan said. The country could not afford “four more years of weakness, indecision, mediocrity, and incompetence.” Reagan called for large tax cuts, smaller government, deregulation, increased defense spending to confront the Soviet threat, and a renewed faith in the American dream.

The moral of the story was clear: the United States and its allies needed to increase their military spending. “In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced,” Hackett wrote, “and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defenses to enable it, by a small margin, to survive.” Ronald Reagan later called The Third World War an unusually important book. And it helped to launch a new literary genre, the techno-thriller, in which military heroism was celebrated, the intricate details of weaponry played a central role in the narrative, and Cold War victories were achieved through the proper application of force.

Having gained almost two thirds of the popular vote in 1978, Bill Clinton now faced a tough campaign for reelection, confronting not only the anger and frustration in his own state but also the conservative tide rising across the United States. Frank White, the Republican candidate for governor, was strongly backed by the religious right and many of the industry groups that Clinton had antagonized. The White campaign embraced the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, attacked Clinton for having close ties to Jimmy Carter, ran ads that featured dark-skinned Cubans rioting on the road to Barling, raised questions about all the longhairs from out of state who seemed to be running Arkansas, and criticized the governor’s wife, Hillary Rodham, for being a feminist who refused to take her husband’s name.


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

America has been ensuring Saudi Arabia’s security since World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt met with the Saudi king, Abdul Aziz, Why We Think We Want Energy Independence 51 aboard the USS Quincy. Ever since then, the basic arrangement has stayed in place: The Saudis provide the world with a predictable stream of oil, and the U.S. ensures that the House of Saud will stay in power. Ronald Reagan probably summed it up best in 1981 when he said, “There is no way” that the U.S. would stand by and see Saudi Arabia “taken over by anyone that would shut off that oil.”6 Of course, America’s energy interests—and therefore, its economic interests—in the Persian Gulf go beyond Saudi Arabia. America has significant military investments in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Oman, and it is not going to abandon all of those multi-billion-dollar air bases, army depots, and transportation hubs just because American motorists might, at some point in the future, be burning more ethanol-flavored gasoline.

Now known as Central Command, the task force was given the responsibility of managing all U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf. (Today, in their briefing materials, Central Command officials note that their territory, which covers 27 predominantly Muslim countries that stretch from Sudan in the west to Kazakhstan in the east, contains 65 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.) Ronald Reagan followed Carter’s lead and continued the militarization. In 1981, the Reagan administration pushed through an $8.5-billion weapons deal for Saudi Arabia that included advanced surveillance aircraft as well as aerial tankers, air-to-air missiles, and other gear.15 Like Carter, Reagan made it clear that U.S. policy was to protect the Persian Gulf.

The panels, which cost $28,100 (about $84,000 in 2006 dollars), were used to heat water for the staff mess and other parts of the White House.31 When Carter showed the panels to a group of reporters, he said that in a generation, they would “either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”32 Ronald Reagan beat Carter in the 1980 presidential race. And while Carter obsessed about energy, Reagan largely ignored the industry, figuring that it would manage itself. Reagan also worked to undo some of the regulatory obstacles that had been imposed on the industry by Congress and prior administrations.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

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

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

Because there was considerable initial doubt regarding climate change, and because global living standards would nosedive if society simply banned the combustion of fossil fuels the way it banned ozone-depleting compounds, the public discourse on global warming veered into partisan grandstanding. Just a generation ago, the US Republican Party supported science-based conservation: Ronald Reagan backed the CFC ban, and the elder President George Bush endorsed 1990 legislation to reduce air pollution. By the year of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, Republicans had begun to shun conservation and the scientific method, while in the hyperpartisan politics of the moment, for advocates of every variety, “sound science” came to mean “whatever supports our donors’ agenda.”

In the same fashion, with steadily fewer workers, US factories keep setting production records. Most Americans might guess the peak for United States manufacturing was in the 1950s or 1960s. Not so: the number-one year for US manufacturing output was 2016. Do you think factories were busier back in those hazy Good Ole Days, say, of the Ronald Reagan presidency? Since Reagan, US factory output has risen 83 percent. The single-generation almost-doubling of US manufacturing has been accompanied by a 30 percent decline in factory employment. Factory employment has hardly disappeared, as media culture likes to think: in 2016 there were 12.3 million US factory jobs, more than the number of jobs in food service.

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were great presidents, but both utilized war as an excuse to claim for themselves extraordinary powers that most likely were not necessitated by the national interest, or at minimum, not necessary for the reasons Lincoln and Roosevelt invoked. John Adams, John Tyler, James Polk, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama employed war or the prospect of war as rationalization for subverting law or Congress or both. Leaders of many nations, including of liberal democracies, have cited war or the prospect of war as reasons they should be granted extraordinary authority, or exempted from accountability.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

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

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

First, we looked to see if the groups had any political coherence. From 1948 to 1960, the four groups jumped about, voting for Democrats in some years, Republicans in others. In 1976, the groups all voted at about the national average (see Figure 2.2). Beginning in 1980 with the first election of Ronald Reagan, the counties began to diverge in their political inclinations, and they continued to separate for the next quarter century. This pattern appeared again and again as we evaluated other demographic measures. Education. In 1970, the county groups were well balanced in the proportion of the population that had a college degree.

Within every event were the beginnings of political alignments that would extend for the next forty years. Days after troops subdued the Watts rioters, the New York Times reported that "California candidates of both parties, openly or warily, viewed the Los Angeles riots today as providing a ready-made issue for next year's important campaign for Governor." Ronald Reagan was considered the front-runner and the primary beneficiary of the riots.51 Earlier, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that officials had used to close and fine a Planned Parenthood birth control clinic. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court ruled for the first time that there was a limited constitutional "right to privacy."

By September 1966, the proportion who said that integration was proceeding "too fast" nearly doubled, jumping from 28 percent to 52 percent. Similarly, in 1965 street crime appeared just behind public education on the list of most important issues. Street crime had never before been of much concern. By 1968, 81 percent of Americans agreed that "law and order has broken down in this country."86 Ronald Reagan did not lead white men out of the Democratic Party with his 1980 campaign. Rather, the switch can be traced to 1964, when "men's support for the Democratic Party dropped precipitously from 51 percent to the high 30s throughout the seventies to a low of 28 percent in 1994." The gap in the party preferences of white men and women that became so pronounced in the 1990s and has continued into this century resulted from white men leaving the Democratic Party beginning in the mid-1960s.87 The Decline of Polarization The collapse of social institutions, the dropping levels of trust, and the abandonment of political parties beginning in 1965 all contributed to a decline in partisan political behavior.


pages: 186 words: 57,798

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

In the winter of 1989, when democratic yearnings began to un-seat the Polish Communist Party, when all of Central Europe fell, and finally the Soviet Union was dismantled, the world was shocked and completely taken by surprise by this sudden turn of events. No one was more caught by surprise than the befuddled U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, and his advisers. Had they done it? In time they decided they had—that they had overthrown the Soviet Union by taking a hard line. Of course U.S. governments had been taking a “hard line” ever since the Russian Revolution. Woodrow Wilson had even invaded. But Ronald Reagan, by being a good cold warrior and stepping up the nuclear arms race, had pressured the Soviets right out of existence. To make this claim—and some still make it—is to ignore the Eastern Europeans who dedicated their lives to slowly, nonviolently chipping away at Soviet authority.

Urban also claimed that the soldiers would be rescuing a poor oppressed people who desperately needed their help. This tactic generally works best if a case can be made that the people in need of being rescued are people like us. This was why Abraham Lincoln preferred to speak of “saving the Union” to “freeing the slaves,” why Roosevelt wanted to save freedom rather than save the Jews, and why Ronald Reagan in 1983 did not want to rescue the black Grenadians from an evil coup d'état but instead claimed he was rescuing a handful of American medical students. White Christians generally want to rescue white Christians, which was at the heart of Urban II's message. Of course not all of these elements are always lies, though they were in this case.

The selected design, by Maya Ying Lin, was simply a wall of polished stone with the names of the more than 58,000 people who were killed in that war. The simple realities of presenting all those names in the order they were killed stated the painful reality that this is what war is, the large-scale killing of individuals. But by the time the veterans' group had the design ready, Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan didn't like the “Vietnam syndrome” and he didn't like the monument design. Critics, including some veterans, complained that it was “flagless.” Secretary of the Interior James Watt refused to issue a building permit until a traditional romantic statue of three servicemen was allowed to be erected next to it.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

This kind of—let’s face it, male—individualism was hardly as virtuous as it was cracked up to be. It has fed into the extreme rhetoric and actions of everyone from robber barons of yore to Reagan Republicans. “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience,” Ronald Reagan said, as he used his metaphorical buzz saw to take apart welfare, coming up with a whole language to demean those who were dependent on state monies, including “welfare queens.” In 1971, Reagan, then the governor of California, called such social aid “a cancer eating at our vitals.” The real-life welfare queen was “a woman in Chicago,” as Reagan put it, who had actually committed public-assistance crimes.

As scholar James Read writes in his essay “The Limits of Self-Reliance”: instead, Emerson “admired the self-reliance of individual fugitive slaves . . .” most of all and was most focused on a kind of mental independence of, in Emerson’s words, liberating “imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man.” As Read writes, “Emerson’s philosophy of Self-Reliance provided less clear guidance for fighting slavery.” In the last decade, the critic Kathryn Schulz also decried Thoreau as a kind of pinched proto–Ronald Reagan, an ungenerous soul who was “fanatical about individualism . . . convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them.” Critics have also found him guilty of promulgating the corporate individualism that mirrored the political culture of the 1980s. It was fun to find the critic Leo Marx writing scathingly of Emerson in the New York Review of Books over forty years ago that his “tone anticipates that adopted by Reaganites in castigating lazy ‘welfare mothers.’”

The Saturday Review in 1946 compared soldiers coming home from World War II to Alger’s characters, even when they benefited from one of the great social supports, the G.I. Bill: in “Horatio Alger fashion, so to speak, the veteran will be able to pull himself up by his educational bootstraps.” Two decades or so later, Ronald Reagan intersected with the Horatio Alger story in more ways than one, winning the 1969 Horatio Alger Award when he was governor of California, his personal rags-to-riches story part of what was said to make him Alger-ian: “Reagan’s father was an alcoholic who lost his job on Christmas Eve, at the onset of the Great Depression, and struggled thereafter to support his family . . .”


pages: 369 words: 105,819

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

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

Presidents seem to be especially likely to rank high in extroverted narcissism. In fact, psychologist Ronald J. Deluga, of Bryant College, used biographical information to calculate a Narcissistic Personality Inventory score (a tool for measuring extroverted narcissism) for every commander in chief, from George Washington through Ronald Reagan. He found that high-ego presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ranked higher than more soft-spoken leaders like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, but almost all presidents scored high enough to be considered “narcissists.” A more recent study led by psychologists Ashley L. Watts and Scott O. Lilienfeld of Emory University yielded similar results, but also revealed something that helps explain Nixon’s dual nature: as the presidents’ narcissism scores increased, so did their likelihood of facing impeachment proceedings, “abusing positions of power, tolerating unethical behavior in subordinates, stealing, bending or breaking rules, cheating on taxes, and having extramarital affairs.”

Admittedly, it’s possible, as Guy Winch points out in his February 2, 2016, Psychology Today article, “Study: Half of All Presidents Suffered from Mental Illness.” According to Winch, many of our previous presidents may have suffered from mental health issues, including depression (Abraham Lincoln), bipolar disorder (Lyndon Johnson), alcoholism (Ulysses S. Grant), Alzheimer’s disease (Ronald Reagan), and transient bouts of extreme present hedonism (John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton). We have also survived a president who blatantly lied to cover his criminal tracks before he was caught in those lies (Richard Nixon). In the past, Americans have pulled together and worked to overcome our differences.

Thus, in my opinion, it has been appropriate and, in fact, prudent for clinicians to speak out regarding their concerns of possible neurological deterioration, but the public discussion has been so muddied that serious and legitimate concerns voiced have had no practical impact. Although the presidency of Donald Trump is still young and, in the view of many, including me, quite problematic, with very high and dangerous risks present, in essence we have probably already “dodged a bullet” at least once. During the first 1984 debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, Reagan obviously experienced a moment of disorganization. A brief lapse can happen to anyone under stress and need not be assumed to indicate the presence of pathology (e.g., Rick Perry’s forgetting “the third department” he wished to disband during the 2012 primary debate).


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

From the beginning of his career, Elliott worked to apply North American libertarian methods to British politics. Shortly after graduating from university, he paid his first visit to Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative Washington DC “taxpayer advocacy group” set up by Grover Norquist in the 1980s at the behest of president Ronald Reagan. Its corporate funders have included the Koch brothers’ various foundations. Elliott brought Norquist’s model to Britain.9 In 2004, aged just 25, he co-founded the TaxPayers’ Alliance to campaign in favour of tax cuts and privatisation. The TPA called for the television licence fee – which pays for the BBC – to be abolished and the National Health Service to be replaced by private provision.

The campaign was organized “at the American end” by former Leave.EU Strategist Gerry Gunster, Farage said.107 Supporters included one-time Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Mississippi governor Phil Bryant. World4Brexit’s chairwoman, Californian Peggy Grande, appeared in the British Press, quoting her former boss Ronald Reagan. Offices were listed in Washington DC and London. Where the money was coming from was a mystery. Under US legislation, World4Brexit’s funders were mostly anonymous. Its literature said: “We have donors from all across the United States and across the globe” and pledged to “follow the letter of the law in the eyes of the IRS”.

Guided by Fink’s insights, a tiny group of American plutocrats invested billions in think tanks, universities and election campaigns over the last four decades. Before this methodical and precisely targeted spending spree, libertarians had been largely thought of as cranks.8 Afterwards, the limited space within which policies are created and publicly discussed was filled with proposals that they wanted. The deregulation of Ronald Reagan and George H. and George W. Bush often came straight from blueprints drawn up by libertarian institutes. Donald Trump campaigned to “drain the swamp”; in office he rolled back roughly 85 environmental rules and regulations in his first two years.9 The US pulled out of the Paris climate accord and loosened domestic laws on toxic air pollution.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

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

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

And it remains the defining truth many twenty-first-century Americans imagine somehow vanished when the Cold War ended. Both the US and Russia retain superpower nuclear arsenals. Thus, however evil, however demonic, however dangerous, however deserving to be strangled Russia is, the US must struggle to find some way to live with it—or face dying together. In Ronald Reagan’s oft-quoted one-liner: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought.”60 Today, China has also developed a nuclear arsenal so robust that it creates a twenty-first-century version of MAD with the United States. The US recognizes this reality in its deployments of ballistic missile defenses, which exclude Russia and China from the threat matrix they are required to meet (since under current conditions, it is not feasible to mount a credible defense against them).61 Thus in a second case, as Churchill noted about the Soviet Union, a “sublime irony” has made “safety the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”62 Clue 8: Hot war between nuclear superpowers is thus no longer a justifiable option.

The constraints imposed by MAD on the contest between the Soviet Union and the United States are relevant for American strategists thinking about China today. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the rise of the Soviet Union to superpower status created what came to be recognized as a “bipolar world.” Both nations believed that their survival required that they bury or convert the other. But if President Ronald Reagan was right, this had to be achieved without war. The central implication for US strategy toward China from the US-Soviet competition is therefore as uncomfortable to accept as it is impossible to deny: once two states have invulnerable nuclear arsenals, hot war is no longer a justifiable option.

Their focus was America’s Soviet adversary, and their purpose, to widen the emerging Sino-Soviet split in the Communist bloc. And it worked. But as he approached the end of his life and reflected on the course of events, Nixon confided to his friend and former speechwriter William Safire, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”1 What a monster it may become. In the three and a half decades since Ronald Reagan became president, by the best measurement of economic performance, China has soared from 10 percent the size of the US to 60 percent in 2007, 100 percent in 2014, and 115 percent today. If the current trend continues, China’s economy will be a full 50 percent larger than that of the US by 2023.


pages: 525 words: 138,747

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks

friendly fire, military-industrial complex, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Tipper Gore

You know, when the producers of this video asked me to discuss my opinions on the George Bush administration, I was struck by the very cynical thought, ‘What is the fucking point? People still love Ronald Reagan.’ After eight years of lies and hypocrisy, people love this guy. Leads me to a very disturbing question: how far up your ass does this guy’s dick have to be before you realize he’s fuckin’ ya? Ha, people are just, ‘I like Ronald Reagan. He looks good on TV, he made the country stronger, patriotism’s at an all-time high. Hold on a minute, something’s slappin’ my ass. Hey, he’s fuckin’ us!’ What’s the point of George Bush?

You’re staring at me like, ‘Bill, they’re just musicians, and they’re, you know, and they’re just doing their thing, and’ NO! They are DEMONS SET LOOSE ON THE EARTH TO LOWER THE STANDARDS FOR THE PERFECT AND HOLY CHILDREN OF GOD! Which is what we are. Make no mistake about it. What’s happened to us? After eight years of Ronald Reagan and Yuppies we live on like the third mall from the sun now, you know? Come on, man. Is it fuckin’ me? Debbie Gibson7had the number one album in this country, y’all. Now, if this doesn’t make your blood fucking curdle . . . I mean, who buys that shit, you know? Is there that much babysitting money being passed around right now?

A vote for Clinton is a vote for higher taxes, Bill.’ See, I have news for ya, folks: there’s other reasons not to vote for George Bush than taxes, OK? I don’t know what’s happened to us as a world – maybe twelve years of Republicanism has made us think this way. But the reason I didn’t vote for George Bush is because George Bush, along with Ronald Reagan, presided over an administration whose policies towards South America included genocide.47 (laughs) So, yeah, you see . . . the reason I didn’t vote for him is cos he’s a mass murderer. Yeah. I, yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll . . . I’ll pay that extra nickel on, you know, a litre of petrol just knowing little brown kids aren’t being clubbed to death like baby seals in Honduras so Pepsi can put a plant down there.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

The Reagan administration refused to admit that the industry was insolvent, refused to give the FSLIC any additional money to close failed S&Ls, and ordered Pratt not to use the FSLIC’s statutory right to borrow even the paltry sum of $750 million from the treasury. Pratt’s orders were to cover up the S&L crisis. The cover-up was particularly critical to the administration in 1981. Ronald Reagan’s campaign promises were to cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget. Those three promises, of course, were inconsistent, as his budget director, David Stockman, would later admit.2 The administration knew that if the public realized that the budget deficit was really $150 billion larger than reported, the resulting outcry could have prevented passage of the large tax cuts that the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (generally called the 1981 Tax Act) provided for.

Why did he remain loyal to them even after it became clear that doing so would have disastrous consequences for his constituents, the nation, and his party? Why did he, after striving for decades to become Speaker, continue to support the control frauds, even though doing so cost him his life’s ambition and his reputation? How did three control frauds and a real estate developer, each of whom voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, get Wright, a populist Democrat, to champion wealthy GOP frauds despite the warnings of fellow Democrats? Wright’s actions on behalf of the control frauds had enormous direct consequences: they were decisive in forcing him to resign in disgrace from the House, and because they delayed the closure of dozens of (mostly Texas) control frauds, they led to billions of dollars in additional costs to the taxpayers.

Syndicated columnist. ANDREWS, MIKE (D-TX). Congressman allied with Jim Wright. ANGOTTI, OTTAVIO. Senior officer at Consolidated Savings Bank. ANNUNZIO, FRANK (D-IL). Member of the House Banking Committee. ATCHISON, JACK. AY audit partner for Lincoln Savings. BAKER, JAMES. Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan. BANK BOARD. Federal regulator of Savings and Loans. BARABOLAK, ALEX. Lead FHLB-Chicago examiner of ACC. BARCLAY, GEORGE. CEO of FHLB-Dallas. BARNARD, DRUIE DOUGLAS, JR. (D-GA). Member of the House Banking Committee. BARRY, JOHN. Author of a book about Jim Wright. BARTH, JIM. Bank Board chief economist.


pages: 455 words: 131,569

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

During World War II, the Army bought more than fifteen thousand of these balsa-and-plywood target drones from Denny’s Radioplane Company, a fact Denny touted to an actor friend whose Army Air Forces job was to publicize Hollywood’s contributions to the war effort. When future U.S. president Captain Ronald Reagan sent Private David Connor to the Radioplane Company to photograph its drone assembly line for the Army’s Yank magazine, Connor discovered a girl so fetching he returned later to take more photos of her. Eventually he showed the photos to movie studio contacts, and after the war Norma Jean Dougherty left Radioplane for a legendary Hollywood career as Marilyn Monroe.

Linden, widely regarded as the kinder and gentler of the two, was his older brother’s partner but had also served a term on the Denver city council in the early 1970s, attended Harvard Business School, and held top jobs at Gates Learjet Corporation and Beech Aircraft Corporation, where in 1982 he became president and chief executive officer. Along the way, Linden became an expert in, and ardent advocate of, using advanced composite materials such as carbon epoxy—a new technology in those days—to build aircraft. Politically, the Blue brothers were dedicated to helping President Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, which in the early 1980s appeared increasingly likely to get hot. The Soviet Union and its chief allies in Latin America, Castro and the Sandinistas, had been growing bellicose in recent years, a factor that in 1980 helped Republican Reagan make Democrat Jimmy Carter a one-term president.

The Mastiff could stay airborne at most four hours, and at relatively low altitude, but Lehman decided the marines could use such a capability, and the drone and its control van were small enough for ground troops to transport. The Navy secretary was even more excited by the possibility of developing a mini-drone like the Mastiff to spot targets for four World War II battleships he had persuaded President Ronald Reagan and Congress to bring out of mothballs. Each of the four dreadnoughts bristled with nine sixteen-inch guns that could fire man-size shells the weight of an economy car twenty-three miles. But because the munitions came to earth at over-the-horizon distances, the ship’s gunners usually had no way to see where their shells were landing, unless a manned aircraft were sent to observe the target, which was both inefficient and dangerous.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

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

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

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was preparing that early winter of 1985 for a summit meeting and state dinner with President Ronald Reagan. “For some reason,” as Harrington recalled it, “the king wanted Salem” in Washington. Salem flew off immediately. This was hardly an unusual diversion. As Salem’s friend Mohamed Ashmawi, a wealthy Saudi oil executive, put it: “He used to go and visit the king wherever he is.”12 Secrecy and complexity governed the relationship between King Fahd and Ronald Reagan. That winter of 1985, apart from Great Britain, there was perhaps no government with which the Reagan administration shared more sensitive secrets than it did with Saudi Arabia.

Up the White House driveway they strolled on the chilly night of February 11—Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees manager; Vice President George Bush; Linda Gray, star of Dallas, the television series about oil barons; Oscar Wyatt, the genuine Texas oil baron; the actress Sigourney Weaver; and Donald and Ivana Trump. “It’s exciting. It’s Americana. It’s Ronald Reagan,” joked Saturday Night Live comedian Joe Piscopo, who was also on the state dinner’s guest list. “The king of Saudi Arabia came here to see how a real king lives, I suppose.”14 Saudi royals do not travel on official business with their wives, so the king escorted Abdulaziz, his eleven-year-old son by Princess Jawhara Al-Ibrahim.

(Like Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, Salem “had no idea where Nicaragua was,” said a European friend who worked with him on arms deals in other parts of the world.) An attorney who represented the Bin Laden family in a Texas civil lawsuit some years later recalled possessing a photo of Salem standing with Ronald Reagan, but that evidence file had been destroyed during a routine archive cleaning, and the photographs taken by White House staff during the Fahd summit show no trace of Salem. He was the eldest of fifty-four children, the leader of the sprawling Bin Laden family, the chairman of several multinational corporations, and a genuine friend to King Fahd, but Salem was also decidedly the king’s subordinate; he might just as well have been called to Washington to organize a night on the town as to participate in clandestine statecraft.16 There was one portfolio of secrets binding King Fahd and President Reagan that winter that unquestionably involved Salem Bin Laden, however.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

If you were alert back then, this refresher may be unnecessary, even laughable. If you were not alert then, this may just be laughable. But it also may help to clarify references in the book about things of that moment. In 1985: The United States population is 240 million. The Cold War is still on, though Mikhail Gorbachev has just become the Soviet leader. Ronald Reagan is president. Other major political figures include Walter “Fritz” Mondale, Democratic presidential nominee the year before; Geraldine Ferraro, his vice-presidential running mate; and presidential hopefuls/Senators Gary Hart and John Glenn (the latter a former astronaut). Ed Koch is mayor of New York City.

Indeed, the President continues to make debatable assertions of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did. In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public. (my italics) This report is not so much a news story as a story about the news, and our recent history suggests that it is not about Ronald Reagan’s charm. It is about how news is defined, and I believe the story would be quite astonishing to both civil libertarians and tyrants of an earlier time. Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” For all of his pessimism about the possibilities of restoring an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century level of public discourse, Lippmann assumed, as did Thomas Jefferson before him, that with a well-trained press functioning as a lie-detector, the public’s interest in a President’s mangling of the truth would be piqued, in both senses of that word.

It is well understood at the National Council that the danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion. 9. Reach Out and Elect Someone In The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor’s fine novel about lusty party politics in Boston, Mayor Frank Skeffington tries to instruct his young nephew in the realities of political machinery. Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. “Politics,” he said, “is just like show business.”1 Although sports has now become a major branch of show business, it still contains elements that make Skeffington’s vision of politics somewhat more encouraging than Reagan’s. In any sport the standard of excellence is well known to both the players and spectators, and an athlete’s reputation rises and falls by his or her proximity to that standard.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

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

Available: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/was-reagan-influenced-by-reading-tom-clancys-red-storm-rising.html 14. President Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, 23 Mar. 1983. 15. Valerie Edwards, ‘How Ronald Reagan based his foreign policy on Tom Clancy books: President told Margaret Thatcher to read Red Storm Rising thriller to understand Russia’, Daily Mail 30 Dec. 2015, online. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3378683/Ronald-Reagan-advised-Margaret-Thatcher-read-Tom-Clancy-s-thriller-Cold-War-strategy.html 16. Tom Clancy, The Sum of all Fears (New York: Putnam, 1991) 17.

Uppsala: Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, December 2005. Eckhardt, William. ‘Civilian Deaths in Wartime’. Bulletin of Peace Proposals 20.1 (1989): 89–98. Edwards, Valerie. ‘How Ronald Reagan based his foreign policy on Tom Clancy books: President told Margaret Thatcher to read Red Storm Rising thriller to understand Russia’. Daily Mail 30 Dec. 2015. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3378683/Ronald-Reagan-advised-Margaret-Thatcher-read-Tom-Clancy-s-thriller-Cold-War-strategy.html. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Eds. Eric Dunning et al.

No state that devoted ‘so much of its energies to physically and psychologically controlling millions of its own subjects’, Amalrik argued, could survive indefinitely. Eventually the ‘Soviet Union will have to pay up in full for the territorial annexations of Stalin and for the isolation in which the neo-Stalinists have placed the country.’36 More significantly Ronald Reagan had asserted strongly at the start of his presidency that in the ideological competition with the United States, the Soviet Union was bound to lose. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones… the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.37 Yet the weight of the Sovietology community, in both academia and government, was much more cautious, convinced that the system was remarkably resilient and also capable of adjusting.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

The study of media coverage of conflicts in the Third World mentioned earlier follows a similar pattern, which is quite consistent, though the public regards the media as too conformist.28 The media cheerfully publish condemnations of their “breathtaking lack of balance or even the appearance of fair-mindedness” and “the ills and dangers of today’s wayward press.”29 But only when, as in this case, the critic is condemning the “media elite” for being “in thrall to liberal views of politics and human nature” and for the “evident difficulty most liberals have in using the word dictatorship to describe even the most flagrant dictatorships of the left”; surely one would never find Fidel Castro described as a dictator in the mainstream press, always so soft on Communism and given to self-flagellation.30 Such diatribes are not expected to meet even minimal standards of evidence; this one contains exactly one reference to what conceivably might be a fact, a vague allusion to alleged juggling of statistics by the New York Times “to obscure the decline of interest rates during Ronald Reagan’s first term,” as though the matter had not been fully reported. Charges of this nature are often not unwelcome, first, because response is simple or superfluous; and second, because debate over this issue helps entrench the belief that the media are either independent and objective, with high standards of professional integrity and openness to all reasonable views, or, alternatively, that they are biased towards stylishly leftish flouting of authority.

In earlier years, the United States was defending itself from other evil forces: the Huns, the British, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Canadian Papists, and the “merciless Indian savages” of the Declaration of Independence. But since the Bolshevik revolution, and particularly in the era of bipolar world power that emerged from the ashes of World War II, a more credible enemy has been the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” that seeks to subvert our noble endeavors, in John F. Kennedy’s phrase: Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire.” In the early Cold War years, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze planned to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government,” as Acheson put it with reference to NSC 68. They presented “a frightening portrayal of the Communist threat, in order to overcome public, business, and congressional desires for peace, low taxes, and ‘sound’ fiscal policies” and to mobilize popular support for the full-scale rearmament that they felt was necessary “to overcome Communist ideology and Western economic vulnerability,” William Borden observes in a study of postwar planning.

This is a primary function it has continued to serve as illustrated, for example, by its criminal acts to undermine the rising “crisis of democracy” in the 1960s and the surveillance and disruption of popular opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America twenty years later.15 The effectiveness of the state-corporate propaganda system is illustrated by the fate of May Day, a workers’ holiday throughout the world that originated in response to the judicial murder of several anarchists after the Haymarket affair of May 1886, in a campaign of international solidarity with U.S. workers struggling for an eighthour day. In the United States, all has been forgotten. May Day has become “Law Day,” a jingoist celebration of our “200-year-old partnership between law and liberty” as Ronald Reagan declared while designating May 1 as Law Day 1984, adding that without law there can be only “chaos and disorder.” The day before, he had announced that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice that later condemned the U.S. government for its “unlawful use of force” and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua.


pages: 538 words: 164,533

1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, feminist movement, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, land reform, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

The nephew introduces the uncle to marijuana, which the uncle queerly refers to as “a stick of tea.” But after he smoked it he said, “It expanded my consciousness. No kidding! Now I know what Richie means. I listened to music and heard it as never before.” Ronald Reagan defined a hippie as someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” The lack of intellectual depth in Ronald Reagan’s analysis surprised no one, but most of these analyses had little more to them. Society had not progressed beyond the 1950s, when the entire so-called beat generation, a phrase invented by novelist Jack Kerouac, was reduced on television to a character named Maynard G.

“When I look at this thing, I think, My God, I hope we’ll never have to use it,” said Los Angeles deputy police chief Daryl Gates, “but then I realize how valuable it would have been in Watts, where we had nothing to protect us from sniper fire when we tried to rescue our wounded officers.” Such talk had become good politics since California governor Pat Brown had been defeated the year before by Ronald Reagan, largely because of the Watts riots. The problem was that the vehicles cost $35,000 each. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office had a more cost-effective idea—a surplus army M-8 armored car for only $2,500. In Detroit, where forty-three people died in race riots in 1967, the police already had five armored vehicles but were stockpiling tear gas and gas masks and were requesting antisniper rifles, carbines, shotguns, and 150,000 rounds of ammunition.

Michigan governor George Romney had become the object of too many jokes when he reversed his support for the Vietnam War, claiming he had been “brainwashed.” The dry-witted Democratic Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy commented, “I would have thought a light rinse would have done it.” California governor Ronald Reagan hoped he could step into the vacuum created by Romney. But he had been an elected official for less than a year. Besides, Reagan was considered too reactionary and would likely be completely routed, as would Romney. The Republican Party knew about routs. It was a sensitive topic. In the last election their candidate, Barry Goldwater, running against Johnson, had sustained the worst defeat in American history.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the White House and executive branch—which employs 4 million people, including 1.3 million people in the armed services—will run. The job has been construed as deputy president, or chief operating officer, or even prime minister. Larger-than-life chiefs have included Richard Nixon’s H. R. Haldeman and Alexander Haig; Gerald Ford’s Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney; Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan; Ronald Reagan’s James Baker; George H. W. Bush’s return of James Baker; Bill Clinton’s Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles, and John Podesta; George W. Bush’s Andrew Card; and Barack Obama’s Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley. Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.

And Steve Bannon, reporting directly to Trump, remained the undisputed voice of Trumpism in the White House. There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name—the unimportant one—and various others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s own undisputed independence. Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job. * * * The transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate, to whisperer for a disaffected demographic, to risible nominee, to rent-in-the-fabric-of-time president-elect, did not inspire in him any larger sense of sober reflection.

His partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional committee investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy campaign manager on the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer. * * * In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money.


Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, East Village, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

It’s a tough book because it’s in English, but there are many thrilling pictures of Tubman and her rescued slaves running through the awful Maryland on their way to Canada. And I am so angry at slavery, at this horrible thing, as angry as the people around me are at the blacks, so angry, in fact, that we’ve heard the new president, Ronald Reagan, is really going to give them one “across the neck.” Lying on my army cot, Emmanuelle in the back of my mind, Harriet Tubman out front, I conjure an imaginary friend, a black boy or a girl just fled from Maryland. I am still ecumenical on the subject of gender, so s/he is lying next to me, his/her arms around me, my arms around him/her, and I just say over and over something I picked up on the street, “It’s all going to be okay, Sally, I promise.”

Five years earlier I had written the novel Lenin and His Magical Goose for my grandmother Galya, who is now six years away from a horrible death back in Leningrad. But now I know to avoid anything even remotely Russian. My Flyboy is as Atlantan as apple pie. And his Iarda, while vaguely Israeli sounding (a reference to the Yordan, the River Jordan?), is also a hot, principled taxpayer who can blow a Lopez or a Rodriguez out of the sky as surely as Ronald Reagan will soon joke, “We begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes.” Bombing Grandma Galya back in Leningrad, he means, and the rest of us Russian liars. I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary.

Allow abortion because what if someone like Jerry Himmelstein is born in such cases it is wise to say the two parents agoofed. And what if a natural disaster like Eedo Kaplan [an Israeli boy who harasses the two Russian girls in school] is born? Think about it. Here are things you should not crossbreed … A long list that includes “Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Ferraro” and ends, sadly, with “Gary Gnu and any Female Gnu” and then the same words with which my father would end all of his Planet of the Yids tales: “To be continued.” Once it is finished I read it over and over again. I cannot sleep. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Whereas in days gone by hard times had been synonymous with famine and early graves, in the United States of the 1930s many went without gasoline rather than bread, and a drop in traffic accidents actually pushed the mortality rate down.37 There was enough ambiguity in the patchy crime data from the era38 for a right-wing romantic like Ronald Reagan to be able to get away with looking back and claiming ‘we had possibly the lowest crime rate in our history at a time when poverty was most widespread’.39 And as the likes of Steinbeck's Joads were making their terrified trek from the Dustbowl to the West, there were those who said that they could not truly be poor because they were driving in trucks.

The heritability of joblessness, then, is hard to dispute. Unlike many of the maladies we have uncovered, there will be no need to persuade the political Right that this problem exists. Indeed, if anything the tendency is to exaggerate it – to suggest that the poor live in a parallel culture with different norms, something that Ronald Reagan implied when he summoned up the bogeywoman of the ‘Welfare Queen’ during his unsuccessful tilt for the White House in 1976.74 And in the UK of today, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has spoken of whole communities in which nobody in three generations has worked. These are overblown and misleading claims.75 They also wrongly imply that there are places so permanently downtrodden and marginalised that hard times can come and go without making much difference.

Instead, Margaret Thatcher swept into Downing Street in the British election of that year, before Foot himself went on to lead the Labour party into oblivion at the ballot boxes in 1983 – the moment that finally buried a post-war settlement founded on that ideal of compassion in the hour of need. Between these two British elections, a third had taken place across the Atlantic and brought Ronald Reagan to power. The drift of the next 30 years is familiar. Of course, there are important and distinct qualifications to be made about particular policies on either side of the ocean, but there is a good deal of truth in the common caricature of the post-1980s age as an era of deregulation, deunionisation and the squeezing, freezing and dismantling of various post-war social protections.3 The programme of the New Right was controversial at every pass; but it won sufficient victories and became sufficiently associated with the perception of prosperity for it to survive, in modified form, after the partisan pendulum finally swung away from its instigators.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

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

It helped us immeasurably in planning for and managing, in conjunction with my French and American counterparts, the volatile and complex situation facing us in Berlin from the summer of 1989 onwards. The Allied missions were enduringly brilliant in their ability to provide information that underpinned many crucial decisions made during the Cold War.” CHAPTER TWELVE Death of a Soldier Amid the overtures of high-level negotiations between the reelected President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev by the early spring of 1985, there were accurate indications of a thaw in US-Soviet relations that could be perceived within the Allied military in Europe and in Washington, Paris, and London. For the first time since the Soviets’ 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the United States Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) received permission to attend the annual Soviet Army-Navy Day reception in Potsdam in force rather than with the usual token representation.

Many Allied tour members had faced similar dilemmas over the years, and as previously commented, they had to weigh up if the target was worth the risk. Nicholson was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 30, posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit. In an unprecedented move, President Ronald Reagan signed the papers to promote him posthumously to the rank of honorary lieutenant colonel. Three years later, amid the thawing of relations between the superpowers as Gorbachev met with Reagan at summits in Geneva and Reykjavik, an official apology for his death was finally issued by Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov.

For their part, the ambitious young East Germans had no idea that Springsteen had recently turned down a $12 million offer from American car manufacturer Chrysler, who wanted to use “Born in the U.S.A.” in an advertising campaign but—the inappropriateness of the song lyrics aside—the rock star had firm ideas about his personal branding. The same had happened when President Ronald Reagan’s campaign team had wished to have the song play at his reelection rallies across the country. Jon Landau was quick to spot the problem. “I was sitting in the lobby of the Grand Hotel the day before the concert,” he recalled, “when I was approached by a member of the FDJ who thanked Bruce and myself for doing this concert on behalf of the anti–Nicaraguan war organizations.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

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

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

It was not, however, until the election of Margaret Thatcher as the UK’s prime minister in 1979 and, a year later, Ronald Reagan’s election as president of the US that things really began to change: no amount of novel economic ideas would be likely to get off the ground without some form of democratic endorsement. Thatcher and Reagan were not just enthusiastic supporters of monetarism. They also, it turned out, shared a deep antipathy towards government. As Reagan put it – in a more memorable way than Hayek ever managed – ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.’5 Even then, the early years were touch and go: in 1981, Ronald Reagan sacked around 13,000 American air traffic controllers who went on strike in violation of the terms of their contracts, while even in her second term in office Margaret Thatcher was engaged in a ferocious battle with Britain’s coal miners.

In this case, behaviours should somehow be judged relative to moral norms established by America’s Founding Fathers and subsequently delivered to the world through the benevolent exercise of American ‘soft power’. Yet the US itself has never offered a vision of moral stability. Notably, it has been unable to show any consistent approach in its foreign policies, especially in the Middle East. In 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, later to become George W. Bush’s hawkish secretary of defense, was sent by Ronald Reagan to ‘initiate a dialogue and establish a personal rapport’ with Saddam Hussein. The aim was to reassure Saddam that Washington ‘would regard any major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West’.1 As this conversation came only a handful of years after the US had been selling its nuclear technologies to pre-revolutionary Iran and shortly before it broke its own embargo on selling arms to post-revolutionary Iran, it is no wonder that many in the Middle East struggled to form a positive – let alone consistent – view of US involvement in the region.

A good example is the 1983 US-led invasion of Grenada which, at the time, led to huge condemnation from the General Assembly of the United Nations. On being asked about the 108 to 9 vote deploring the invasion – intriguingly, a much greater level of opposition than had been offered in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – Ronald Reagan pithily observed that ‘it didn’t upset my breakfast at all’.4 Then there are the asymmetric extradition arrangements between the US and much of Europe. Even if, say, a UK citizen has broken no UK or European law, he or she can still be extradited to the US to face US justice which, as a UK citizen, might sound completely unjust.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Nuances may have been lost in the translation, but this embrace of capitalist values by a hardened veteran of the Communist struggle definitively put the big battalions behind the materialist side of the moral argument and appeared to draw down the curtain on the socialist backlash. It is no coincidence that Deng’s conversion broadly coincided with the ascendancy of the Chicago school of economics and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who oversaw the conclusion of the Cold War. Reagan lauded ‘the magic of the market’. Like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, he ushered in an era of liberalisation and neo-conservatism, policies favoured by economists at the University of Chicago. Other intellectual champions of this ethos included Ayn Rand, mentor of the subsequent chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.

There is, in fact, something curiously Manichean about the way the capitalist political economy works, as the chapters that follow will show. Things that are in themselves a benefit to society – banking, debt, speculation, animal spirits – become damaging when taken to excess. And excess seems to be a recurring feature of economic cycles and of capitalism itself. After the long period of market fundamentalism introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and after the worst recession since the 1930s, people are understandably resentful of huge boardroom pay awards, fat bank bonuses and rising inequality. How far society’s waning tolerance of these excesses will lead to a much more heavily regulated, lower growth form of capitalism turns heavily on these difficult issues about the moral character of money.

And when it becomes disproportionately large in relation to the economy, it needs to be cut down to size. CHAPTER FIVE SOPHISTERS, ECONOMISTS AND CALCULATORS A striking feature of the Anglo-American approach to capitalism in the two and a half decades before the great financial crisis was a belief in what Ronald Reagan called ‘the magic of the marketplace’. This, the US President declared in a radio address in 1984, would create opportunities for growth and progress, free from the deadweight of government interference. His faith in the unfettered market’s ability to deliver the economic and social goods was underpinned by the best efforts of economists at the University of Chicago.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

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

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

Pay,” New York Times, June 29, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/an-unstoppable-climb-in-ceo-pay.htmlpagewanted=all. 12. Diane Stafford, “High CEO Pay Doesn’t Mean High Performance, Report Says,” Kansas City Star, Aug. 28, 2013, http://www.kansascity.com/2013/08/28/4440246/high-ceo-pay-doesnt-mean-high.html. 13. Brian Montopoli, “Ronald Reagan Myth Doesn’t Square with Reality,” CBSNews, Feb. 4, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ronald-reagan-myth-doesnt-square-with-reality/. 14. Peter Beinart, “The Republicans’ Reagan Amnesia,” The Daily Beast, Feb. 1, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/02/01/the-republicans-reagan-amnesia.html. 15. Richard W. Fisher, “Ending ‘Too Big to Fail.” 16.

Almost overnight, our postwar prosperity vanished. Incomes stagnated. Joblessness was epidemic. The confidence we’d enjoyed in American economic dominance had been replaced by the insecurity and unfamiliarity of a more global economy. But our wavering sentiment reflected another, deeper change. In the 1980s, conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan had embarked on a series of bold new economic and social policies. Where governments since Roosevelt’s New Deal had played a heavy role in the economy, we now shifted to a free-market, or “laissez-faire,” policy that granted the maximum degree of economic freedom for businesses and individuals alike.

That was clearly the case in the ballooning world of consumer credit, where credit’s guiding logic of immediate rewards and deferred costs became the consumer’s logic as well. But the deeper effects of this “financialization” of the economy were felt elsewhere. For instance, as governments began borrowing more heavily—it was Ronald Reagan, that free-market conservative, who discovered it was easier to finance a budget than balance one—policymakers grew increasingly beholden to the desires and agendas of the debt markets. When President Clinton tried to fulfill a campaign promise for more infrastructure and schools, bond traders, anxious about more government spending causing inflation,5 bid up long-term interest rates, which threatened the housing market and, by extension, Clinton’s chances for a second term.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

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

Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org info@haymarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-60846-442-5 Trade distribution: In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Cover design by Josh On. Cover photo of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan on the Pacific Ocean. Photo by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available. Contents Preface to the 2015 Edition vii Preface to the First Edition xiii Introduction 1 1. Thought Control: The Case of the Middle East 25 2.

NBC, for example, was bitterly condemned for running an interview with the man accused of planning the Achille Lauro hijacking, thus serving the interests of terrorists by allowing them free expression without rebuttal, a shameful departure from the uniformity demanded in a properly functioning free society. Should the media permit Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, and other voices of the emperor and his court to speak without rebuttal, advocating “low-intensity warfare” and “retaliation” or “preemption”? Are they thereby permitting terrorist commanders free expression, thus serving as agents of wholesale terrorism?

“Operation Peace for Galilee—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon—was originally undertaken” to protect the civilian population from Palestinian gunners, Friedman reports in one of the numerous human interest stories on the travail of the suffering Israelis. Political figures regularly expound the same doctrine. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that “the increased Syrian military presence and the use of Lebanon by the Palestine Liberation Organization for incursions against Israel precipitated the Israeli invasion [of 1982],” and Ronald Reagan, in a yet another display of moral cowardice, asks us to “remember that when [the invasion] all started, Israel, because of the violations of its own northern border by the Palestinians, the P.L.O., had gone all the way to Beirut,” where it was “10,000 Palestinians [!] who had been bringing ruin down on Beirut,” not the bombers whom he was supporting.45 These and innumerable other accounts, many with vivid descriptions of the torment of the people of the Galilee subjected to random Katyusha bombardment, help create the approved picture of Soviet-armed Palestinian fanatics, a central component of the Russian-based international terror network, who compel Israel to invade and strike Palestinian refugee camps and other targets, as any state would do, to defend its people from merciless terrorist attack.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

They have no ideological alternatives, even as the Democratic Party openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to espouse: nonprofit health care; an end to our permanent war economy; high-quality, affordable public education; a return of civil liberties; jobs and welfare for the working class. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the corporate state has put the liberal class on a death march. Liberals did not protest the stripping away of the country’s manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs. Liberals did not decry speculators, who in the seventeenth century would have been hanged, as they hijacked the economy.

Malpede asked.The Vietnam War finally ended, but the Peace Movement persisted in large numbers through the dirty wars in South America and the growing antinuclear movement. Yet, it became more and more difficult to produce socially conscious, poetic theater. The old dogma of the 1950s reasserted itself: art and politics don’t mix. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he immediately ordered that NEA grants to small - read leftist - theaters be abolished. Reaganism eroded the public perception that a great democracy deserves great art. “Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theater began to institutionalize and to censor itself,” Malpede went on.The growing network of regional theaters became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theaters began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic.

The disappearance of the communist movement weakened American liberalism. Because its adherents were now on the left of the political spectrum, instead of at the center, they had less room within which to maneuver.48 In the wake of the witch hunts, networks such as CBS forced employees to sign loyalty oaths. Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, cooperated in hounding out artists deemed disloyal. Those who refused to cooperate with the witch hunts or who openly defied HUAC instantly became nonpersons. One such resister was Paul Robeson, who went before the committee in June 1956. A celebrated singer and actor, Robeson, who was a communist sympathizer and vocal supporter of civil rights, was banned from commercial radio and television.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

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

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

As recently as the late 1970s these theories were viewed as the crackpot musings of reactionaries. A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in the New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.” But since the election of Ronald Reagan, these libertarian principles have won the Washington, DC, battle of ideas. Since then, notions that the state should regulate the free market have been out of favor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may be that the Great Recession of 2008 led many to realize that this philosophy is a dead end for both culture and politics, but we seem to be lacking the political and cultural will to direct society onto a new path.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. 3. Even though it was Ronald Reagan who created the break with historical antitrust policy, the blame cannot be placed on Republican administrations alone. As Barry Lynn points out, Bill Clinton’s “attitudes towards monopolization were even more favorable than those of Reagan or George H. W. Bush.” And even though Clinton and Gore ran in the 1992 presidential campaign as opponents of media monopolization, Lynn says, “their decision to allow the consolidation of U.S. media companies that had begun under Reagan to continue… cut the number of big firms from more than fifty to six.”

He is like a character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. 2. Upon their father’s death, Charles and David started to organize their own political movement. In an indication of how far to the right they were, Charles persuaded David to accept the Libertarian Party’s nomination for vice president so they could run to the right of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980. Before the existence of Citizens United—the organization that won the 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate contributions to political action committees—David funneled $2 million into the campaign to finance his own candidacy. The campaign was a total flameout, attracting only 1 percent of the vote.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

When there began to be more of these than flights in the opposite direction, Washington was obliged to reconsider its policy. It appears that there are as well good and bad terrorists. When the Israelis bombed PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985, Ronald Reagan expressed his approval. The president asserted that nations have the right to retaliate against terrorist attacks "as long as you pick out the people responsible".5 But if Cuba had dropped bombs on any of the headquarters of the anti-Castro exiles in Miami or New Jersey, Ronald Reagan would likely have gone to war, though for 25 years the Castro government had been on the receiving end of an extraordinary series of terrorist attacks carried out in Cuba, in the United States, and in other countries by the exiles and their CIA mentors.

Greece 1964-1974: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution,"said the President of the United States Bolivia 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d'etat Guatemala 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized "final solution" Costa Rica 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally, part II Iraq 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work Australia 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust Angola 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game Zaire 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven Jamaica 1976-1980: Kissinger's ultimatum Seychelles 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance Grenada 1979-1984: Lying—one of the few growth industries in Washington Morocco 1983: A video nasty Suriname 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman Libya 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match Nicaragua 1978-1990: Destabilization in slow motion Panama 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching Communists what democracy is all about Iraq 1990-1991: Desert holocaust Afghanistan 1979-1992: America's Jihad El Salvador 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style Haiti 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?

Edgar Hoover "helped spread the view among the police ranks that any kind of mass protest is due to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often Communists, 'who misdirect otherwise contented people'."19 The last is the key phrase, one which encapsulates the conspiracy mentality of those in power—the idea that no people, except those living under the enemy, could be so miserable and discontent as to need recourse to revolution or even mass protest; that it is only the agitation of the outsider which misdirects them along this path. Accordingly, if Ronald Reagan were to concede that the masses of El Salvador have every good reason to rise up against their god-awful existence, it would bring into question his accusation, and the rationale for US intervention, that it is principally (only?) the Soviet Union and its Cuban and Nicaraguan allies who instigate the Salvadoreans: that seemingly magical power of communists everywhere who, with a twist of their red wrist, can transform peaceful, happy people into furious guerrillas.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

And as for defense, the budget bias significantly distracts attention from the campaign gumming up and agglutinating our military with unisex rites and social experiments, sharia sensitivity-training, and globalistic goo while letting our nuclear capabilities and civil defenses atrophy. Nonetheless, the Left still feels haunted and harried both by the vestigial survival of Wealth & Poverty and by the gilded memory of Ronald Reagan, who made me his most quoted living author. Jonathan Chait, an editor and columnist at the New Republic—a social register of the upper-class Left—delighted me a couple years ago by writing a book called The Big Con about the vast influence of supply-side economics, its “imbecility” as a “scam” and a “hoax,” its “lunacy” and its utter lack of socially acceptable academic proponents.

Of course,” he notes, rather impatiently, “there are still exceptions,” but “their small number [as if exceptional riches could ever be commonplace] only proves the rule” of economic sclerosis.6 This mode of thinking also sometimes afflicts conservatives when they have been sufficiently trained in the social sciences. In the late 1970s, Martin Anderson, an economist who wrote speeches for both President Nixon and Ronald Reagan, began his book Welfare by declaring, “The ‘war on poverty’ that began in 1964 has been won.”7 He quoted the conclusion of Alice Rivlin, head of the Congressional Budget Office, that the combination of expanded welfare payments and in-kind benefits had effectively lifted all but a very small proportion (6.4 percent) of Americans above the poverty line.

Books and articles poured forth, declaring that the present welfare system, for all its manifest faults, was, as it were, “our welfare system, right or wrong,” an almost geological feature, one expert described it, with rocks and rills and purpled hills like America itself. “A wonderfully complex array of programs, payment levels, and eligibility rules,” wrote Martin Anderson, Ronald Reagan’s counselor, “a complex welfare system dealing with the very complex problem of the poor in America.”2 Anderson thought benefit levels could even be raised if work and child-support requirements were stiffly enforced. Richard Nathan, Nelson Rockefeller’s former adviser on the subject and long a high level Republican at HEW (now the HHS) and the White House, agreed: no large changes were needed, just marginal reforms.


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

Thus the first months of the new Bush administration further demonstrated the power of what I have called the American nationalist thesis, and have analyzed in the second chapter of this book: a widely shared and almost religious belief in the values of the "American Creed;" in America's role as the supreme exemplar of democratic civilization in the world; America's right and ability to spread its values to the rest of the world; and above all, of faith in democracy. George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, won a second term in part because he and his advisers were able to express and exploit national myths, which are believed in by the great majority of Americans. In doing so the Bush administration not only gained votes itself, but also disabled the Democratic Party, forcing it in several areas of debate to become a paler shadow of the Republicans.

In the two years after 9/11, however, they were largely swept away by a tide of mythbased nationalism against which it was very difficult to argue. The period during which the memories of Vietnam were suspended was not very long—but it was long enough to get America into Iraq.51 The figure of Ronald Reagan is critical to an understanding of how America dealt with the legacy of Vietnam and the consequences for America today and in future.52 On one hand, Reagan's external policy demonstrated that he and most of 57 AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG his administration were determined not to get involved in any major conflict, and realized full well how bitterly unpopular a serious war would be with a majority of Americans.

It was also argued that the democratization of Afghanistan and Iraq would initiate the democratization of the entire Middle East, beginning with Iran. And, of course, the emphasis on democratization among powerful sections of the modern American Right does not date from 2002. The most important historical moment in this regard was Ronald Reagan's adoption of the language of democratic revolution and human rights as a key part of his struggle against the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union, involving a deliberate and open repudiation of the "Realist" considerations which had supposedly governed the policies of the previous Republican administrations of Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower.


pages: 609 words: 159,043

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

“NASA STS-61A Space Shuttle Post Flight Crew Mission Presentation.” YouTube video, 24:32. Posted by Matthew Travis, 14 July 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1deq3vtDZgM. “National Security Decision Directive Number 164, National Security Launch Strategy February 25, 1985.” National Security Decision Directives of President Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/reference/Scanned%20NSDDS/NSDD164.pdf. Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) Facility. Historic American Engineering Record no. AL-129-B. Washington DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/al/al1100/al1193/data/al1193data.pdf.

“He [Onizuka] was more comfortable in things like press conferences and giving speeches to forty thousand and stuff like that. My background had never put me in that position.” As the STS-51C launch date drew closer, the public debate over the secrecy of the upcoming space shuttle mission grew in volume. In the age of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, speculation ran wild in the nation’s press about the space shuttle eventually taking weapons systems into orbit. One political cartoon depicted an orbiter piloted by Darth Vader carrying the president as a passenger. On the side of the ship were the words “Reagan Space Militarization Program.”

With eight years tenure at Los Angeles, getting reassigned to detachment 2 in Houston allowed Watterson to avoid being sidelined by Secretary Orr’s recent directive. On 15 February 1985 the crews for two upcoming classified missions were named. Karol (Bo) Bobko’s crew would eventually become STS-51J, and Bob Crippen’s would undertake the inaugural Vandenberg flight. Just ten days later President Ronald Reagan signed the National Security Launch Strategy, directing the air force to purchase ten expendable launch vehicles and “launch them at a rate of approximately two per year during the period 1988–92.” As had become the norm, no MSE payload specialists were publicly named with the NASA crew announcements.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

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

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

The mid-1960s was not only the last time the public sector was on a par with the private sector; it was the last time that people in many countries trusted their government. Leviathan overreached, promising more than it could deliver; the 1970s brought stagflation, an oil crisis, and Watergate. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher launched a counter-revolution that spread around the world, even reaching socialist bastions like Sweden. But they were much more successful in changing the rhetoric than the reality, so the state has continued to grow; only now it is a much more loathed monster. Then along came the populists.

So when we date the decline of the Western state to the 1960s, this comes with the fervent hope that it can still rebound. We have the technology, the power, and the competitive threat to prompt a new beginning. But it won’t be easy. Since the 1960s, government in the West has tried a variety of cures—from a genuine attempt at revolution under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the quack cures of the modern populists. It has had moments of Trajan-like triumph—especially the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even when it was lecturing the rest of the world about the inevitability of globalization in the 1990s, the Western state never regained the confidence at home it had in the 1960s.

“I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom.” Running against Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, Goldwater won just six states. But as the Great Society collapsed, Friedman found two better champions. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher swept into Downing Street, with Hayek in her handbag, and a year later Ronald Reagan won the White House. Then the pair began, in Thatcher’s words, “a world-wide revolt against big government, excessive taxation and bureaucracy.”6 Reagan relished a battle with Leviathan, whether it came in the shape of the Soviet Union or the air traffic controllers union. But Thatcher was bolder in reforming government, partly because Britain was in so much worse shape than America and partly because she didn’t have Reagan’s luxury of running eye-watering deficits.7 It required nerves of iron to keep pushing ahead in the early 1980s even as her reforms devastated parts of the British economy—and, electorally, she was probably only saved by the 1982 Falklands war.


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

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

Photograph by Neil Leifer More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. During the presidential campaign of 1980, my mission on this cross-country flight with Ronald Reagan was to brief him on a long list of domestic issues. Adviser Martin Anderson, in the foreground, put me up to it. "He'll listen to you," he said. But I couldn't get Reagan to stop telling Stories. Michael Evans photograph, courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation At the Republican convention that July, Henry Kissinger and I tried to persuade former president Ford to become Reagan's running mate. Polls showed that Reagan and Ford would be a "dream ticket," but after a suspenseful twenty-four hours, the negotiations fell apart and the vice presidential nomination went to George H.W.

That evening is memorable to me for two reasons: First, Nixon preempted Bonanza, America's favorite TV western and a show I loved to watch, to *The discomfort index was later renamed t h e misery index and w e n t on to figure in at least two presidential campaigns. Jimmy Carter used it to criticize President Ford in 1976, and Ronald Reagan used it to criticize President Carter in 1980. 61 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. T H E AGE OF T U R B U L E N C E announce his policy; and second, I reached for something on the floor and threw my back out.

Barbara's social network extended to Hollywood, of course. Business would take me to Los Angeles five or six times a year, where I'd play golf at the Hillcrest Country Club—the place where Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Henny Youngman, and other comedians used to have a roundtable every day at lunch. (Ronald Reagan was also a Hillcrest member.) I learned a bit about the media industry doing work for the William Morris Agency, which was a Townsend-Greenspan client, and from spending time with the legendary producer Lew Wasserman. And I'd tag along with Barbara to parties in Beverly Hills, where I felt totally out of place.


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

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

Only a few years before the Soviet collapse, the streets of New York and other major American cities were rocked by demonstrations staged by proponents of nuclear disarmament that divided fathers and sons, pitting the young political activist Ron Reagan against his father, President Ronald Reagan. Americans and their Western allies fought numerous battles at home and abroad in a war that seemed to have no end. Now an adversary armed to the teeth, never having lost a single battle, lowered its flag and disintegrated into a dozen smaller states without so much as a shot being fired. There was good reason to celebrate, but there was also something confusing, if not disturbing, about the president’s readiness to claim victory in the Cold War on the day when Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s principal ally in ending that war, submitted his resignation.

Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 1–226. 4. Scott Shane, “Cold War’s Riskiest Moment,” Baltimore Sun, August 31, 2003. 5. “Atomic War Film Spurs Nationwide Discussion,” New York Times, November 22, 1983; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York, 1990), 585–586; Beth A. Fisher, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO, 2000); Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States–Soviet Relations, January 16, 1984,” http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.html. 6. Barbara Bush, A Memoir (New York, 1994); George Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York, 2000); Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: An Unauthorized Biography (Joshua Tree, CA, 2004). 7.

Nixon flew to Moscow in May 1972 to sign SALT I—the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—with Brezhnev, and President Jimmy Carter flew to Vienna in 1979 to sign SALT II with the same leader. Both treaties placed caps on the production of nuclear weapons. But SALT II was quickly followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the American boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games a year later. The next American president, Ronald Reagan, wanted to restore the spirits and international standing of the United States after the Vietnam debacle. In the Soviet Union, the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 unleashed a succession crisis in the Kremlin. International tensions rose, threatening for the first time since the early 1960s to turn the Cold War into a hot one.3 On September 1, 1983, near Sakhalin Island, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, including a sitting member of the US Congress.


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

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

A brochure prepared for the Fort Lee auction described the segments of Wall as the perfect way to "decorate the entrance hall of your corporate headquarters, museum, or estate." 4 Some pieces were re-erected as works of artor were they just souvenirs? Others stood as victory monuments or Cold War booty, such as the piece ("hated symbol of, yes, an evil empire") proudly unveiled by former president Ronald Reagan at the dedication of his presidential library.5 It was difficult enough to define the meaning of Wall fragments removed to sites where they stood alone. The idea of leaving pieces on their original site made no sense at all to most Berliners. Proposals to preserve parts of the Wall, and to create a Wall memorial in Berlin, faced organized and unorganized opposition.

Before long, however, West Germany and its allies began to exploit the propaganda value of the Wall as a symbol of Communism's failure. 11 By the time of Kennedy's triumphal visit in June of 1963, a pilgrimage to the safely fortified forward post had become a favorite photo opportunity. Every state visitor in Bonn was if possible brought to Berlin to view the infamous Wall. President Ronald Reagan's visit in 1987, for example, sounded the metaphor of mobility and connectedness. He stood before the walled-off Brandenburg Gate and demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The East could respond in kind: it declared the statements of Western politicians at the Wall to be a provocation showing the necessity and the efficacy of the border fortifications, which they, too, proudly displayed to guestsat least to carefully selected ones.

Nevertheless, tourist buses regularly came by, and state visitors were brought there too. In 1963, when John F. Kennedy came to see it, he found that the East had hung red banners between the columns to block any view beyond the gatea Cold War gesture with more figurative meaning than the East had intended. In 1987, the gate served as the backdrop for Ronald Reagan's speech, with bulletproof glass erected behind the rostrum. (Bill Clinton, in 1994, was the first U. S. President privileged to speak on Pariser Platz, under the heads of the quadriga's horses instead of their posteriors.) Both East and West Berliners claimed the gate as the symbol of their city and of their version of German unity.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

It is hard to argue with advice that feels about as controversial as a fortune-cookie platitude. But tip-of-your-nose illusions are often so convincing that we bypass the advice and go with our gut. Consider a forecast made by Peggy Noonan—the Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan—the day before the presidential election of 2012. It will be a Romney victory, Noonan wrote. Her conclusion was based on the big numbers turning out to Romney rallies. The candidate “looks happy and grateful,” Noonan observed. And someone who attended a campaign stop had told Noonan about “the intensity and joy of the crowd.”

The long-serving Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had died in 1982 and been replaced by a frail old man who soon died and was replaced by another, Konstantin Chernenko, who was also expected to die soon. There was both agreement and disagreement about what would come next. Liberals and conservatives alike largely expected the next Soviet leader to be another stern Communist Party man. But they disagreed on why things would work out that way. Liberal experts were sure that President Ronald Reagan’s hard line was strengthening Kremlin hard-liners, which would bring a neo-Stalinist retrenchment and worsening relations between the superpowers. Experts of a conservative bent thought that the Soviet system had pretty much perfected the art of totalitarian self-reproduction, hence the new boss would be the same as the old boss and the Soviet Union would continue to threaten world peace by supporting insurgencies and invading its neighbors.

Within hours of Chernenko’s death, the Politburo anointed Mikhail Gorbachev, an energetic and charismatic fifty-four-year-old, the next general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev changed direction swiftly and sharply. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) liberalized the Soviet Union. Gorbachev also sought to normalize relations with the United States and reverse the arms race. Ronald Reagan responded cautiously, then enthusiastically, and in just a few years the world went from the prospect of nuclear war to a new era in which many people—including the Soviet and American leaders—saw a glimmering chance of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. Few experts saw this coming. And yet it wasn’t long before most of those who didn’t see it coming grew convinced they knew exactly why it had happened, and what was coming next.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

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

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

Yet in the modern world we’re not condemned to stand around like peasants at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, wondering how the Great Ones are getting along inside the marquee. We’re not swineherds nervously contemplating the quarrels of the gods on Mount Olympus. We make our own history. Whatever the truth about the “friendship” between, say, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, or Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, I know that, for me, Pierre in Paris, Helena in Warsaw, John in Washington, and Michael in Bonn were, and remain, friends. These friendships were born in the particular circumstances of a time and place. What friendship is not? We stood for the same things and against the same things: not all the same things, all the time, but quite enough to make common cause.

A former American ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn, says he finds businesspeople to be America’s best friends in France.100 That is even more true in Germany, although in both countries you must distinguish between cosmopolitan big business and smaller, more defensive companies. Even the more outward-looking French and German business leaders don’t necessarily favor the American business model and the kind of deregulation pioneered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Some do; others think their own varieties of capitalism can compete well. What all European business leaders see, however, is the huge and growing interdependence between the American and European economies, and the damage that can be done to their businesses by political disputes.

To this I now turn. CHAPTER THREE America, the Powerful INSIDE THE GIANT Sometimes one remark says it all. President George W. Bush is talking to a small group of visitors in the drawing room on the first floor of the White House. From its windows, they have a fine view of planes taking off from Ronald Reagan National Airport. This is one of the last months of the innocent time when planes in the skies over Washington are just that—planes—and not potential weapons of mass destruction. The meeting is to prepare the president, still new in office, for his first official trip to Europe, but just now he’s recalling, in his clipped, tautly smiling way, a Summit of the Americas the previous month.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

“Everybody felt worse compared to the role models, those at the top.” By the late ’90s, polls showed that Americans believed they needed $75,000 (for a family of four) to lead a “minimum” middle-class life. I’VE GOT MINE, JACK In the years just after World War II the super-rich sought to conceal their profligacy, but after Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural ball many began to flaunt it again. As economist Robert Frank points out, there’s been a rush on $15,000 purses, $10,000 watches, even $65 million private jets. Twenty million Americans now own big-screen TVs costing at least $2,000 each. Some buy their children $5,000 life-size reproductions of Darth Vader and $18,000 replicas of Range Rovers, $25,000 birthday parties, and million-dollar bar mitzvahs.14 Yachts the size of mansions burst their berths in many a marina.

Its operations are housed in palatial hillside headquarters that might embarrass the Parthenon. Inside, the feel is expensive and dynamic. Tour groups learn about Dobson’s vision for FOF, while the photographs lining the walls establish his connection to past and present Republican stalwarts, including Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Dozens of neatly dressed men and women respond to hundreds of phone callers every day, counseling them and sending out audiotapes, videotapes, and publications geared to teens, single parents, and other readers. “We get thousands of letters every week,” said Stanton when we first met him at FOF.

It can, for example (especially with the help of regimes that allow workers little freedom to organize), produce children’s toys so cheaply that they can be shipped halfway around the world and still be given away with two-dollar meals at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King. The deregulation of the American economy, which began in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, coupled with a precipitous decline in the influence of organized labor, has increased domestic productivity. It delivers the goods, but in a manner far less equitable than before. In contrast to other societies, Americans have long considered theirs a “classless” one, with few citizens who are either very rich or very poor.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

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

Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 305. 141 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 587. 142 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva, 288; Regan, For the Record, 307. 143 U.S. government film seen at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 144 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 588. 145 Grachev quotes Yakovlev, in Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble, 64. 146 Ibid. 147 Reagan Library, Matlock MSS (Box 92137), obtained from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. 148 Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev, 162. 149 Regan, For the Record, 310–11. 150 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 14. 151 Gorbachev, Zhizn’, 2:21. 152 Chernyaev’s diary, November 24, 1985, entry, in Sovmestnyi iskhod, 657. 153 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 620. 154 Grachev, Gibel’ Sovetskogo “titanika,” 255. 155 Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 600–601. 156 On Gorbachev’s hours, see Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva, 288. 157 Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev, 156. 158 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 591. 159 Regan, For the Record, 312–13. 160 Author’s interview with Gorbachev, May 2, 2007, Moscow. 161 Reagan, American Life, 12–15. 162 Regan, For the Record, 315. 163 Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, “Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois, on May 9, 1982,” Public Papers of President Ronald W.

MASLYUKOV, YURI Deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, 1985–1988; first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and chairman of State Planning Commission, 1988–1991; member of Presidential Council, 1990–1991; Politburo member, 1989–1990. MATLOCK, JACK F., JR. U.S. ambassador to Soviet Union, 1987–1991; special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for national security affairs, 1983–1986. MATLOCK, REBECCA Wife of U.S. Ambassador Matlock. MAZOWIECKI, TADEUSZ Polish prime minister, August 1989–December 1990. MEDUNOV, SERGEI Krasnodar region party first secretary, 1973–1982. MEDVEDEV, ROY Soviet dissident historian; USSR people’s deputy.

PUTIN, VLADIMIR Russian president, 2000–2008, 2012–; prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, 1999–2000, and President Dmitry Medvedev, 2008–2012. RAKHMANIN, OLEG First deputy head of Central Committee department on relations with Communist and workers’ parties of socialist countries, 1968–1987. RAKOWSKI, MIECZYSLAW Polish prime minister, 1988–1990. REAGAN, NANCY First lady, 1981–1989, wife of Ronald Reagan. REAGAN, RONALD U.S. president, 1981–1989. REGAN, DONALD White House chief of staff under President Reagan, 1985–1987. REMNICK, DAVID Washington Post Moscow correspondent, 1988–1991. REVENKO, GRIGORY Chief of staff of the Gorbachev presidential administration, end of 1991. RICE, CONDOLEEZZA Director of Soviet and East European affairs, U.S.


pages: 165 words: 47,405

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

It’s a picture of the angel of death standing over the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980.1 Romero was assassinated only a few days after he had written a letter to President Jimmy Carter pleading with him not to send aid to the military junta in El Salvador, which would be used to crush people struggling for their elementary human rights.2 The aid was sent, and Romero was assassinated. Then Ronald Reagan took over. The kindest thing you can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what the policies of his administration were, but I’ll pretend he did. The Reagan years were a period of devastation and disaster in El Salvador. Maybe seventy thousand people were slaughtered.3 The decade began with the assassination of the archbishop.

Thomas McCann, the public relations officer of the United Fruit Company, actually wrote an interesting book about this, An American Company, in which he describes the propaganda efforts, led by Edward Bernays, to persuade the public and the press to support the coup. And then he says, “It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience.”26 The cover of the Pakistani writer and activist Eqbal Ahmad’s book Terrorism: Theirs and Ours has a photograph of Ronald Reagan sitting in the White House with a group of mujahideen from Afghanistan. This is not a photograph that is being widely circulated in any of the major media. The Reagan administration was instrumental in supporting the mujahideen, elements of which later morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.27 They went beyond supporting them.

The line of the soldiers who carried out atrocities in Iraq is that the Iraqis did it to us, so we’re going to do it to them. What did the Iraqis do to us? 9/11. Of course, the Iraqis had nothing to do with it, but the feeling still is that we’re the ones under attack; they’re the ones who are attacking us. And that inversion goes on all the time. Take Ronald Reagan and his rhetoric about “welfare queens.” We poor people, like Reagan, are being oppressed by these rich black women who drive up in Cadillacs to get their welfare checks. We’re being oppressed. And in fact that’s a strain that goes right through U.S. history. There’s a book by Bruce Franklin, a literary theorist, that traces this strain through American popular literature, going back to the colonists.


pages: 148 words: 45,249

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

Among those who called for urgent, immediate, and far-reaching climate policy: Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford, and David Durenberger; Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H. W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of Ronald Reagan’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for the military and freedom of speech. Except the atmosphere had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

Pomerance knew he wasn’t that person; he was an organizer, a strategist, a fixer—which was to say that he was an optimist, a romantic even. His job was to build a movement. And every movement, even one backed by widespread consensus, needed a hero. He just had to find one. 7. A Deluge Most Unnatural November 1980–September 1981 The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And Rafe Pomerance found himself wondering whether what had seemed to be a beginning had actually been the end. In the following months, Reagan floated plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land, and deregulate surface coal mining. He appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department.

Nelson, Roger Dower, Nicky Sundt, Karl Braithwaite, David Rind, Richard Morgenstern, Anthony Del Genio, Lonnie Thompson, Allan Ashworth, Keith Mountain, Jon Riedel, Henry Brecher, David Elliott, Lisa East, Martin Hoerling, Robert Krimmel, Michael McPhaden, Tad Pfeffer, Daniel Fagre, Shad O’Neel, Richard Meserve, Eugene Skolnikoff, Lawrence Linden, Alan Miller, Benjamin Cooley, William Sprigg, Sylvia Laurmann, and Kathy Schwendenman; Ann Finkbeiner, author of The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite; James Rodger Fleming, author of Historical Perspectives on Climate Change; Janice Goldblum at the National Academy of Sciences; Justin Mankin, professor of geography at Dartmouth College; Julia Olson of Our Children’s Trust; Laura Kissel at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center; Kevin Krajick at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; and Amanda Kistler at the Center for International Environmental Law. Additional support was provided by the staffs of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, the Geisel Library Special Collections at UC San Diego, UCLA Library Special Collections, the W. R. Poage Legislative Library at Baylor University, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Media Communication Division. I drew from the anthropologist Myanna Lahsen’s outstanding research on the history of climate denialism, as well as her use of the term Mirror Worlds to describe general circulation models (following Paul N.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

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

* * * — This systemic change could not have occurred without changes in laws and regulations that encouraged it. Some appeared small at the time, which is often the case with systemic change: It’s not the size or visibility of specific legal or regulatory changes that count but their consequences for how the system functions. Ronald Reagan’s administration looked favorably on the corporate raiders. Although the raiders’ tactics might easily have been seen to violate the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 because of their reliance on risky loans, Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission made no attempt to stop them. In fact, the Reagan administration’s laissez-faire approach to antitrust allowed the raiders to mount acquisitions that the government would have challenged before.

* * * — Power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. By the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.4 percent of them are. Starting in the 1980s, and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought unions. Surely Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire the nation’s air-traffic controllers, who went on an illegal strike, signaled to private-sector employers that fighting unions was legitimate. But it was really the wave of hostile takeovers, the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, that pushed employers to crush unions.

After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign on behalf of “the silent majority” was an appeal to racism. So was Ronald Reagan’s condemnation of “welfare queens,” and George H. W. Bush’s use of Willie Horton—a black convicted felon who while on a weekend furlough committed assault and rape—to whip up white fears that Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, where Horton had been incarcerated, would release other black convicts.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

National Security Strategy” (The White House, May 20, 1982). A declassified copy is available at (www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-032.htm). 7. See Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 30-1; also see my review, “Ronald Reagan on Reaganism,” Orbis (Summer 2001): 475–84. 8. National Intelligence Council, Domestic Stress on the Soviet System, declassified National Intelligence Estimate (Washington, November 18, 1985). 9. Directorate of Intelligence, CIA, “Rising Political Instability under Gorbachev: Understanding the Problem and Prospects for Resolution” (April 1989), memorandum available in Benjamin B.

According to National Security Decision Directive 32, U.S. goals were to “foster, if possible in concert with our allies, restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken the 2990-7 ch04 berkowitz 7/23/07 12:09 PM Page 33 u.s. intelligence estimates of soviet collapse 33 Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.”6 In the late 1970s, though, before he became president, not even Ronald Reagan was willing to propose that the Soviet Union was on a course to collapse. In his speeches and essays during this period, Reagan was fully prepared to argue that the Soviet Union was evil and that its economy was inefficient and unable to sustain itself indefinitely. But he was not ready to say that it was on a course to collapse or that U.S. policy could accelerate this collapse.

This discovery was an important signal that the Soviet Union was already beginning to collapse under the weight of its own economic contradictions. The only question was what the postcollapse environment would look like. When Peter presented these findings to Shell’s board of directors in 1984, the idea that the Soviet Union would soon collapse seemed thoroughly implausible. Although President Ronald Reagan talked incessantly about America’s long-term battle with the Evil Empire, people within Shell (and within the U.S. government) had trouble believing collapse was possible. Even if it was, they did not know what they could do about it. Fortunately, the Shell scenario team had also identified the key indicators that would signal which scenario was unfolding, and over the next eighteen months, all the “collapse” indicators flashed.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

African American poverty decreased dramatically during the 1960s and the African American share of AFDC caseloads declined. But the percentage of African Americans represented in news magazine stories about poverty jumped from 27 to 72 percent between 1964 and 1967. Hysteria about welfare costs, fraud, and inefficiency increased as the 1973 recession took hold. Driven by Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians, a taxpayer revolt against AFDC challenged the notion that the poor should have the full complement of rights promised by the Constitution. But the welfare rights movement’s successes were enshrined into law, so exclusion from public assistance could no longer be accomplished through discriminatory eligibility rules.

* * * Sophie’s family was not alone. In 2006, Republican governor Mitch Daniels instituted a welfare reform program that relied on multinational corporations to streamline benefits applications, privatize casework, and identify fraud. Daniels had long been a foe of public assistance. In 1987, while serving as President Ronald Reagan’s assistant for Political and Intergovernmental Affairs, he had been a high-profile supporter of a failed attempt to eliminate AFDC. Nearly 20 years later, he tried to eliminate TANF in Indiana. But this time he did it through high-tech tools, not policy-making. Governor Daniels famously applied a Yellow Pages test to government services.

“Suitable home” and “employable mother” rules were selectively interpreted to block African American women from claiming their benefits until the rise of the welfare rights movement in the 1970s. “Man in house” and “substitute father” rules legitimized intrusion into their privacy, judgment of their sexuality, and invasions of their homes. Ronald Reagan’s 1976 stump speech about the lavish lifestyle of “welfare queen” Linda Taylor was intended to make the face of welfare both Black and female. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” he said during the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary contest. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

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

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

He was more than just brilliant, he was a vigorous advocate of a strong defense, and passionate about the importance of nuclear weapons to that defense. By the time I was working as a movie producer, Teller was in his seventies, but he had found a fresh role advocating for and helping to design President Ronald Reagan’s controversial Star Wars missile defense shield, formally called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller was a cantankerous, difficult personality—he was widely rumored to be the inspiration for the title character “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie. I wanted to meet him simply because I wanted to understand the personality of someone who could be passionate about inventing the most destructive weapon in the history of humanity.

Mullany: former special agent for the FBI, pioneered FBI’s offender profiling Kary Mullis: biochemist, Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work with DNA Takashi Murakami: artist, painter, sculptor Blake Mycoskie: entrepreneur, philanthropist, founder and chief shoe giver of TOMS shoes Nathan Myhrvold: former chief technology officer at Microsoft Ed Needham: former managing editor of Rolling Stone and editor in chief of Maxim Sara Nelson: cofounder of the public interest law firm Christic Institute Benjamin Netanyahu: prime minister of Israel Jack Newfield: journalist, author, former columnist for the Village Voice Nobuyuki “Nobu” Matsuhisa: chef and restaurateur Peggy Noonan: speechwriter and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, author, columnist for the Wall Street Journal Anthony Norvell: expert on metaphysics, author Barack Obama: president of the United States, former U.S. senator from Illinois ODB: musician, music producer, founding member of Wu-Tang Clan Richard Oldenburg: former director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen: actresses, fashion designers Olu Dara & Jim Dickinson: musicians, record producers Estevan Oriol: photographer whose work often depicts Los Angeles urban and gang culture Lawrence Osborne: journalist, author of American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome Manny Pacquiao: professional boxer, first eight-division world champion David Pagel: art critic, author, curator, professor of art history at Claremont College specializing in contemporary art Anthony Pellicano: high-profile private investigator in Los Angeles Robert Pelton: conflict-zone journalist, author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places books Andy Pemberton: former editor in chief of Blender magazine David Petraeus: director of the CIA, 2011–2012, retired four-star U.S.

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


pages: 255 words: 75,172

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

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

This freeze would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, bringing this kind of spending—domestic discretionary spending—to its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president. Let me repeat that. Because of our budget, this share of spending will be at its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower was president. That level of spending is lower than it was under the last three administrations, and it will be lower than it was under Ronald Reagan. It’s unfair to blame Obama alone for the failure of much-needed labor law reform for a working class on its knees, or for appeasing corporate America with a shrunken budget. The political calculus and ideology displayed by the administration reflected decades of shifting allegiances and power in the country, including the formerly proud “party of labor.”

At the national level, our political debate became increasingly racialized, particularly around the issue of affirmative action. Conservatives successfully recast affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” and when they secured electoral advantage, they were able to transform this rhetoric into action. Upon winning the presidency, Ronald Reagan quickly knocked the teeth out of federal enforcement, slashing the budget of the EEOC and the office responsible for federal contracting.17 He appointed Clarence Thomas (now a Supreme Court justice) to head the EEOC and ordered a near stoppage to enforcement of the law. Class-action lawsuits by the EEOC, the easiest way to secure remedies for discrimination, dropped from 1,106 in 1975 to just 51 in 1989.18 Today progress has stalled on all fronts.

As companies shipped entire industries overseas and the central cities lost white middle-class residents to the job-exploding suburbs, urban black people found little support or sympathy from our political elites. Laissez-faire, trickle-down economics was gaining prominence and power just as globalization tore through American manufacturing. After the widespread shedding of factories in the urban core, Ronald Reagan made it to the White House, in no small part thanks to his astute use of racial anxiety to win over white working-class voters. Help most assuredly would not be on the way. Patrisse Cullors, one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, directly experienced the simultaneous havoc created by closing factories and the “war on drugs.”


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

CEOs and journalists should note the bibUcal correlation of pride and imminent falls. The Gildered Age Speaking of scripture, you can actually push the birth of the most recent New Era back a little farther than ShiUer did. Baffler editor Tom Frank (personal communication) says that the earUest claim he could find for the existence of a "new economy" was a 1988 speech by Ronald Reagan at Moscow State University. In it, Reagan said: In the new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We're breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny. Even as we explore the most advanced reaches of science, we're returning to the age-old wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the book of Genesis in the Bible: In Novelty the beginning was the spirit, and it was from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth.

In the 1980s, real incomes at the middle and lower levels were heading down; in the late 1990s, they were heading up—not as rapidly as those in the upper brackets, but probably enough to soothe. A more cynical interpretation of the disappearance of inequaUty as a poHtical issue is that Hberal pundits became a lot less interested in the problem when there was a Democrat in the White House; it was a lot easier to blame Ronald Reagan than it would be to blame the structural workings of American capitalism. With a RepubUcan back in power, we're hearing a bit more about polarization, but only wimps obsess about inequaUty when there's a fifty-year war against terror to fight. Why should anyone care about income inequahty? Certainly the irrepressible Sylvia Nasar (1999) of the New York Times —a rare journalist with formal economics training—has no problem with it.

Stocks had their worst decade since the 1930s, and bonds performed miserably, failing even to keep up with inflation. As we saw earHer in the chapter, to the ruHng classes, things were wildly out of whack, with American workers acting insolent and the Third World in rebeUion. Subduing the Third World was left to Ronald Reagan and the contras, but Wall Street declared war on the workers' insolence—and in this case, corporate managers were a special kind of worker that also needed to be subdued. To accompHsh that subduing, WaU Street has tried several strategies over the last two decades. First was the wave of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts that dominated the financial landscape of the 1980s.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

Realism, adds Morgenthau, “appeals to historical precedent rather than to abstract principles [of justice] and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good.” No group of people internalized such tragic realizations better than Republican presidents during the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush all practiced amorality, realism, restraint, and humility in foreign affairs (if not all the time). It is their sensibility that should guide us now. Eisenhower represented a pragmatic compromise within the Republican Party between isolationists and rabid anticommunists. All of these men supported repressive, undemocratic regimes in the third world in support of a favorable balance of power against the Soviet Union.

But unlike his fellow Republicans of the Cold War era—dull and practical men of business, blissfully unaware of what the prestigious intellectual journals of opinion had to say about them—Kissinger has always been painfully conscious of the degree to which he is loathed. He made life-and-death decisions that affected millions, entailing many messy moral compromises. Had it not been for the tough decisions Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger made, the United States might not have withstood the damage caused by Carter’s bouts of moralistic ineptitude; nor would Ronald Reagan have had the luxury of his successfully executed Wilsonianism. Henry Kissinger’s classical realism—as expressed in both his books and his statecraft—is emotionally unsatisfying but analytically timeless. The degree to which Republicans can recover his sensibility in foreign policy will help determine their own prospects for regaining power.

He and his team concluded that the Soviet advantage was temporary, and that the West would eventually move out ahead. They strongly recommended that the United States commence a military buildup and create a Persian Gulf rapid-reaction force. The last two years of Carter’s presidency and the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency would see those recommendations become reality. Only in 1981 did Huntington get around to publishing a book about the 1960s, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Most generations in history have been organizational ones, preferring to motor along in their daily grooves, directed by others.


pages: 293 words: 74,709

Bomb Scare by Joseph Cirincione

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The secret smuggling operations he started to acquire machinery for this effort later formed the basis of his global nuclear black market that provided equipment to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other nations beginning in the 1980s. (More information on AQ Khan can be found in Chapter 4.) THE TWO RONALD REAGANS After almost two decades of arms limitation agreements and an overall increase in global nuclear arsenals the pendulum swung back with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president in 1981. Treaties were out, and talk of preparing to fight and win a global thermonuclear war was in. Richard Perle, then assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, told Newsweek in 1983, “Democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger, and every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish the sense of apprehension.”40 President Reagan began programs to increase U.S. nuclear and conventional military power, including production of the MX missile (a new ten-warhead intercontinental ballistics missile), the B-1 intercontinental strategic bomber, additional Trident ballistic missile submarines, and, most famously, the elaborate anti-missile program knows as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.”

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) cut both U.S. and Soviet-deployed strategic nuclear forces down to an agreed limit of 6,000 warheads each. Today, defenders of both Reagan’s first- and second-term policies insist the buildup was necessary to encourage Soviet reform and to reach real arms reduction agreements. “It was Ronald Reagan, by his arms buildup and his inability to contemplate anything but an American victory,” says Irving Kristol, “that persuaded the Soviet leaders they were fighting a losing war. And so they folded their tents and stole away.”44 Not so, says Anatoly Dobrynin, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States.

Their primary goal, according to Reiss, was not actually to develop their own weapons, which would have led to a cutoff of the nuclear technology trade necessary for its burgeoning civilian nuclear power program, but “to use the threat of an ROK nuclear arsenal in order to persuade Washington to maintain it conventional and nuclear forces in the South.”26 When President Ronald Reagan won election in 1980, he assured the South Korean president that the United States would not withdraw any forces. Whether the U.S. assurances helped stop the South Korean program or the South Korean program helped keep the U.S. assurances is a bit unclear, but the outcome satisfied both nations.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

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

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

It wasn’t so much that this version of capitalism won the argument as that it won by sheer force: countries which had adopted it were growing their economies faster than those that weren’t. You can’t accurately measure subjective changes in the texture of people’s experiences, but you can measure growth in GDP, and the evidence from GDP was irrefutable. With Ronald Reagan in power in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in power in the United Kingdom, a Hong Kongite version of free-market capitalism took over the world. I couldn’t go home again, but in some important respects it made no difference, because home was coming to me. The version of capitalism which spread so thoroughly around the world had its ideological underpinnings from Adam Smith, via Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, and tended to act as if there were a fundamental connection between capitalism and democracy.

The collectivist tradition in Iceland is so strong that it is more like a fact of national character than like an ideology—and this doesn’t seem inappropriate in a country very aware of its isolation, its history as a Viking settlement, and the always-apparent inhospitability of the geography and climate. In the 1980s, however, the Independence Party, which had been more or less permanently in power since Iceland became independent from Denmark, began to adopt a more ideological turn. Its younger and more energetic politicians looked admiringly at the free-market policies being adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and began to wonder what Iceland might be capable of if it were freed from the current model of nationalization and regulation. A long march toward the free market began, and in 2001 the banks were privatized, a policy which was a triumphant success—until it turned into a total disaster.

Congress’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on October 23, 2008, and spoke about “a once-in-a-century credit tsunami” based on a “whole intellectual edifice” which had now collapsed. That’s an amazing admission for Greenspan to have made, given that he more than anyone else was in charge of the monetary policies behind both the long boom and the abrupt bust. He had charge of the Federal Reserve under four presidents, from Ronald Reagan, who appointed him in 1987, to the second President Bush, whom he served until his retirement in 2006, and during that time he oversaw the response to several crises, from the crash of October 1987 (during which share prices fell 20 percent in a single day) through the recession of 1991, the implosion of LTCM in 1998, and the dot-com bust of 2001.


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99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

The Age of Market Capitalism That radical change was not long in coming. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister of the UK and in 1981 Ronald Reagan became President of the USA. These two leaders were influential in ushering in a new form of capitalism – market capitalism. Central to market capitalism is the concept that markets know best. According to market capitalism, government intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, consumes resources which would be better used in the private sector and therefore inevitably makes matters worse economically. Ronald Reagan summarized this view succinctly: ‘Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem.’3 Free markets, according to this doctrine, while they may occasionally experience painful periods of creative destruction, are the only way to guarantee the best use of resources, the highest levels of economic growth and the fairest distribution of the wealth that they create.

It’s a persuasive story: clear, simple and underpinned by a compelling work ethic. For many years I believed it myself. Institutionally, the biggest change from the Golden Age of Capitalism to the Age of Market Capitalism was that government intervention was no longer perceived as a vital way of alleviating economic woes. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both rose to power in the 1970s and both lent their names to their own varieties of market capitalism: ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganomics’. Nigel Lawson, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, defined Thatcherism as: ‘Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values” (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism.’4 Meanwhile, Republican member of the House of Representatives, Jeff Duncan, summarized Reaganomics like this: ‘Limit government, lower taxes, reduce government spending.

It should also be constantly reduced. How should we tackle unemployment? Reduce interference with businesses, either in the form of regulation or from institutions such as trade unions. Two highly influential politicians who adopted this philosophy were Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. An obvious theoretical weakness of this model is that its prescriptions are the same in all circumstances. Regardless of the economic problem, the answer is to limit government, lower taxes and reduce government spending. Taken to its extreme, this would result in an end state with zero taxes and zero government spending, and therefore zero government and zero law enforcement – in a word, anarchy.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

This possibility of theory influencing the world, as well as the world influencing the theory, has not been accommodated by the specific kind of economic approach that has been widespread in public policy since the late 1970s. The emphasis has been on markets as the organising principle for the economy and in particular ‘free markets’. The role of the state in this view, embedded by the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, should be confined to specific ‘market failures’ or the provision of certain ‘public goods’; textbooks give standard examples such as pollution, congestion, or the state provision of basic education. It is important to appreciate that the ideology of a minimal state and expanded ‘free markets’ only gained such enormous political traction because of the experience by the 1970s of profound ‘government failure’ (Coyle 2020b).

Politicians reflect their voters’ preference for having your cake and eating it. Politicians therefore might not like economists—but they need them. Another fundamental idea is cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In the UK there is an elaborate set of rules for doing this, set out in a how-to manual known as the Green Book.11 In the United States, Ronald Reagan introduced a requirement for a cost-benefit analysis for many new regulations—although President Trump was less keen on using such evidence (Shapiro 2020). CBA consists of trying to list and measure where possible all the likely results of a policy. Those that can be measured are converted into monetary terms, and the costs and benefits netted off against each other.

Despite their failure to account for the social aspects of the economy, the welfare theorems have made the idea of competitive markets a powerful benchmark. It was cemented into place in policy choices by the co-evolution of events, political developments and economic ideas in the 1970s and ’80s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan embedded in their philosophies of government a free market version of economics. The macroeconomic failures of the 1970s and the collapse of the centrally planned economies in 1989 seemed to validate this shift in public policy. Academic economics in turn took it further, embracing rational expectations, public choice, and real business cycle theory, as described earlier.


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Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

U.S. student debt growth rates have declined, and they have not declined because there are fewer younger people who could go to university, or because U.S. universities are charging less for their courses. Between 1969 and 1979, the number of degrees awarded by U.S. universities rose from 1.27 million a year to 1.73 million, or by 43 percent.2 During the next ten years to 1989, which was mostly the era of President Ronald Reagan, this number rose to 1.94 million, or by just 12 percent. In the 1990s the annual total of degrees being awarded rose to 2.38 million annually, and so by 23 percent in the decade to 1999. In the twenty-first century, the number accelerated to 3.35 million, or a rise of 41 percent, from 2000 to 2009, and to 3.55 million by 2010 and 3.74 million by 2011, but then the growth halted.

By 1976 the U.S. national debt stood at $600 billion, and the rate of acceleration slowed a little, but the $700 billion milestone was passed in 1977, $800 billion was reached in 1979 and then, during 1980, national debt acceleration was growing again and $30 billion extra was being borrowed every quarter. At that rate it should be no surprise that the total national debt passed $900 billion in 1980 and $1 trillion in 1981. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, the greatest-ever acceleration in the nation’s debt was well under way. Reagan did not like taxation, but he liked spending money, especially on the military. The only way to square that circle was to increase the size of the debt—which, coincidentally, also served to enrich the affluent who had money to lend to the government.

However, these later years were also the years in which there were quarters when the total national debt fell. As pointed out above, when smoothed over a year, the relative rises in the 1980s were, in fact, even greater than the relative rises in 2008 or 2015. We are no longer seeing U.S. national debt rise as it rose under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s or during George W. Bush’s presidency from 2001 to 2009. Republican presidents appeared to have been committed to getting their country into greater and greater debt. The great rise in debt was partly what fueled the great acceleration. From the beginning of the British, French, and Dutch East India Companies, over four hundred years ago, through to the global spread of American banks today, debt has been used to expand trade, power, and privilege.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

For example, narratives from the second half of the twentieth century describe free markets as “efficient” and therefore impervious to improvement by government action. These narratives in turn led to a public reaction against regulation. There are of course legitimate criticisms of regulation as practiced then, but those criticisms were usually not powerfully viral. Viral narratives need some personality and story. One such narrative involved movie star Ronald Reagan, who became a household name as the witty and charming narrator of the highly popular US television show General Electric Theater from 1953 to 1962. After 1962, he entered politics in support of free markets. Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980. In the 1984 reelection, he won every state except his opponent’s home state.

But, somehow, the Laffer curve went viral (Figure 5.1). The Laffer curve described in the narratives that are tallied in the figure owes much of its contagion to the fact that it was used to justify major tax cuts for people with higher incomes. The Laffer curve’s contagion related to fundamental political changes associated with Ronald Reagan, who was elected US president in 1980, and with Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister in the United Kingdom a year earlier, in 1979. Both were conservatives whose campaigns promised to cut taxes. However, the Laffer curve narrative may not have played a role in France’s election of a socialist president, François Mitterrand, around the same time.

A bit earlier, the phrase stimulate the economy had emerged in the late 1950s, and its use grew rapidly from 1978 to 1980, suggesting that tax cuts for higher-income people might serve as an energizer, freeing the supposedly superior people to contribute to society. Celebrities, Quips, and Politics Though the Laffer curve epidemic may have played a role in the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, other narratives were surely influential, such as this quip by Reagan: Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.23 Reagan used these words in a 1986 speech.


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

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

Since one popular interpretation of these shifts in policy and of the consequent shifts in income and wealth distribution fingers the Reagan Revolution after 1981 as the chief culprit, it is significant that in virtually every case the key turning points occurred a decade or more before the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In short, the presidential election of 1980 and the subsequent unfolding of Reaganism was a lagging indicator of this sea change in the American political economy. The reversal of the social and policy innovations from the first decades of the twentieth century was probably the proximate cause of the Great Divergence in the twenty-first century, just as their original invention had been the proximate cause of the Great Convergence.67 Let us briefly review the evidence.

Johnson and Nixon (ironically, each a moderate within his own party) were the twin progenitors of that turn toward polarization, Johnson by signing the Civil Rights bills in 1964-65 that (as he himself reportedly had foretold45) cost the Democrats their conservative, Southern wing, and Nixon by following an essentially racist “Southern strategy” in 1968 to bring those same conservative Southerners into the Republican fold.46 In the aftermath of Watergate, Vietnam, and the myriad other conflicts of the late 1960s and early 1970s (to be discussed in Chapter 8), Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter temporarily tacked back toward the middle, trying to press the pause button on growing polarization. By 1975, however, Ronald Reagan was raising an impassioned banner of “no pale pastels, but bold colors,” and after 1980 the Reagan Revolution pulled the Republican Party further and further to the right, a movement that would last well into the twenty-first century.47 The polarization that had begun with civil rights spread quickly across many other issues, as the parties took opposing stances on issues that had not previously been partisan, thus extending and reinforcing the basic polarization.

But with the advent of the New Conservatism in the 1960s under the aegis of Barry Goldwater and the economist Milton Friedman, Republicans moved sharply to the right.48 “Big government” and “tax and spend” liberal policies, they now argued, caused deficits, inflation, and unemployment, while government regulation interfered with the efficiency of the free market.49 “Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan argued in his 1981 inaugural address; “government is the problem.”50 By the 1990s Democrats under Bill Clinton began to follow the Republicans to the right on issues like welfare, crime, and deregulation, but never fast enough to keep pace with the Republicans; and this widening ideological gap soon became the dominant dimension of polarization.


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Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

One of the lessons learned from his own training, according to Walker, "was that those guys actually can be trained in just a few months' time ... and become a good, acceptable working complement to a crew." The need to define appropriate flight training for civilians was driven home on 27 August 1984, just three days before Walker's first trip into space, when President Ronald Reagan announced, "I am directing NASA to begin a search in all of our elementary and secondary schools and to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program one of America's finest: a teacher." NASA'S motivation to send civilians to space came as an outgrowth of an explosion of public interest in the space program, thanks to the shuttle.

Ladwig, who was sworn to secrecy, phoned the magazine and informed them as carefully as he could that it might not be a movie star flying on the shuttle but a more ordinary citizen, maybe even a teacher. The message got through, and the photograph of a teacher appeared with the article. President Ronald Reagan made the announcement on 27 August 1984 that a teacher would travel on the shuttle. Within days of Reagan's announcement, teachers began writing to inquire and volunteer. "Look no further; I'm the one," was the most frequent statement in the letters. Astronaut David Leestma would later describe 1985 as the "hoo-ha, `Let's go fly' year," as if the groundwork had been laid and NASA could now pull out all the stops.

Now that NASAS first citizen in space was a reality, full attention could shift to the second. With four months of required training, and a planned September launch, the pace was about to pick up. Discussion had no sooner resumed in the meeting then a second interruption brought the terrible news that the Challenger and its crew were lost in an explosion. That night, President Ronald Reagan had planned to laud the Teacher in Space program during his State of the Union address, saying, "Tonight while I am speaking to you, a young secondary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, is taking us all on the ultimate field trip, as she orbits the earth as the first citizen passenger on the Space Shuttle."


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In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, break the buck, business cycle, central bank independence, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, debt deflation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, price stability, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, too big to fail

As frightening as some of those seemed at the time, the Fed managed them with the standard central banker tools — moving interest rates up and down, lending to healthy banks that needed quick cash, cajoling the chief executives of big banks to do what was needed to prevent crises that threatened the financial system. Jimmy Carter had recruited Paul Volcker to restore global confidence in the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar and to end an inflationary spiral that, at the time, seemed unstoppable. In Ronald Reagan’s years, Volcker helped big American banks cope with massive losses on loans they had made to Latin American governments. His successor, Alan Greenspan, steered the economy through the storms of the 1987 market crash and then helped clean up the mess left by savings and loan associations that were pulled under by a combination of shortsighted regulation and lousy real estate loans.

Greenspan responded with a smile, and then said, “I went to school with Henry V. And the last time I spoke to him he gave me a good notion of strategy.” Everyone laughed. In the 1980s, Greenspan had turned his interest in and facility for understanding the inner workings of the American economy into a successful consulting business when Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary, James Baker, and chief of staff, Howard Baker, recruited him to succeed Paul Volcker. Volcker had put the U.S. economy through a wrenching recession and accomplished what most people — economists and ordinary folk — thought impossible: bring inflation from the double digits to below 5 percent.

Greenspan, in contrast, was both reliably conservative — an acolyte of philosopher Ayn Rand — and politically agile. He had come to Washington in the last dark days of the Nixon White House. (His confirmation hearing to be chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers came the same day Nixon went on national TV to resign.) He stayed on to advise Ford and later candidate Ronald Reagan. He was comfortable with politicians and, having dated TV news stars Barbara Walters and Andrea Mitchell, with the press. He was skillful at courting and manipulating both sets of people to protect the Fed’s credibility and independence and to burnish his own reputation. Volcker was physically intimidating at six feet seven inches and famously opaque in his utterances.


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A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Many traditional industrial centres (such as Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield) and mining areas (North England and Wales) were devastated, as depicted in movies such as Brassed Off (about coal miners in Grimley, a thinly disguised version of Yorkshire coal town Grimethorpe). The actor: Ronald Reagan and the re-making of the US economy Ronald Reagan, the former actor and a former governor of California, became the US president in 1981 and outdid Margaret Thatcher. The Reagan government aggressively cut the higher income tax rates, explaining that these cuts would give the rich greater incentives to invest and create wealth, as they could keep more of the fruits of their investments.

STANDING The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). J. TREVITHICK Involuntary Unemployment: Macroeconomics from a Keynesian Point of View (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). ‘Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.’ RONALD REAGAN ‘The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.’ ARISTOTLE The State and Economics Political economy: a more ‘honest’ name? In the old days, no country had a Ministry of Defence.

However, the philosopher Robert Nozick, the economist James Buchanan, the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics, and other modern advocates of contractarianism have developed Hobbes’s ideas in a different direction and advanced a political philosophy to justify the minimal state. In this pro-free-market version of contractarianism, more commonly known as libertarianism in the US, Leviathan came to depict the state as a potential monster that needs to be restrained (which is not what Hobbes intended). This view is best summed up in Ronald Reagan’s comment that ‘Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.’ According to the libertarians, any state intervention without the unanimous consent of all individuals in society is illegitimate. Therefore, the only justified actions of the government are things like provision of law and order (especially the protection of property rights), national defence and supply of infrastructure.


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Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

The 1978 document helped establish a key plank of American space policy: the right of self-defense in space. And it helped the U.S. military view space as an arena in which wars could be fought, not just a place to put hardware that could coordinate and enhance actions on the ground. Ronald Reagan (1981–89) President Ronald Reagan offered strong support for NASA’s space shuttle program. After the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, he delivered a moving speech to the nation, insisting that the tragedy wouldn’t halt America’s drive to explore space (excerpt on the next page). “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave,” he said.

Looking beyond the moon to the asteroids and Mars (Illustration Credit 8.3) APPENDIX CHANGING VISIONS FOR SPACE EXPLORATION Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953–1961) John F. Kennedy (1961–63) Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69) Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974) Gerald Ford (1974–77) Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) Ronald Reagan (1981–89) George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) Bill Clinton (1993–2001) George W. Bush (2001–2009) Barack Obama (2009–) A TIME LINE OF PRESIDENTIAL POLICIES and actions with highlights from key speeches on space exploration from the middle of the 20th century on. Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953–1961) President Dwight D.


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The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

Albert Einstein, feminist movement, Isaac Newton, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

In just three months, an entire air base—Isely Field—was fully operational on Saipan. Then, on the island of Tinian, the largest airport in the world, North Field—8,500-foot runways, four of them. And following that, on Guam, what is now Andersen Air Force Base, the US Air Force’s gateway to the Far East. Then came the planes. Ronald Reagan narrated war films at the time, and one of those was devoted to the earliest missions of the B-29, known as the Superfortress. Reagan described the plane as one of the wonders of the world, a massive airship: With 2,200 horsepower in each of four engines. With a fuel capacity equal to that of a railroad tank car.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1944, Hansell launched attack after attack. Hundreds of B-29s skimmed over the Pacific waters, dropped their payloads on Japan, then turned back for the Marianas. As Hansell’s airmen prepared to launch themselves at Tokyo, reporters and camera crews flew in from the mainland, recording the excitement for the folks back home. Ronald Reagan again: B-29s on Saipan were like artillery pointed at the heart of Japan…The Japs might just as well have tried to stop Niagara Falls. The Twenty-First Bomber Command was ready to hit its first target. But then, on January 6, 1945, Hansell’s commanding officer, General Lauris Norstad, arrived in the Marianas.

The B-29s took off from the Marianas, skimming over the ocean at several thousand feet. As they approached Japan, they climbed high in the air, out of harm’s way. They turned at Mount Fuji, then came in from the west over Tokyo. Here, over aerial shots of the city, in the Army Air Forces’s war film, Ronald Reagan describes what happened: Six hours later, through the clouds, they saw it—Fujiyama [Mount Fuji], ancient symbol of Japan. Here come some modern symbols. Phosphorus bombs and flak. And fighters…Within a radius of fifteen miles of the Imperial Palace live seven million Japanese, a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms.


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The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

In the 1950s and 1960s, the West experienced high overall prosperity, and individual nations developed mixed economies that suited their own national cultures and contexts. Things began to shift in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Western economies stalled and neoliberal ideas attracted world leaders searching for answers to their countries’ declining economic performance, such as Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. M a r k e t F a i l u r e 43 Friedman became an advisor to President Reagan; in 1991, von Hayek received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush.8 An ironic aspect of this element of our story is that Friedrich von Hayek had great respect and admiration for the scientific enterprise, seeing it as the historical companion to enterprise capitalism.

Rather, government intervention was required: to raise the market price of harmful products, to prohibit those products, or to finance the development of their replacements. the toxic effects of DDt, acid But because neoliberals were rain, the depletion of the ozone so hostile to centralized gov- layer, and climate change were ernment, they had, as Amer- serious problems for which icans used to say, “painted markets did not provide a themselves into a corner.” The spontaneous remedy. American people had been persuaded, in the words of U.S. President Ronald Reagan (r. 1980–1988), that government was “the problem, not the solution.” Citizens slid into passive denial, accepting the contrarian arguments that the science was unsettled. Lack-ing widespread support, government leaders were unable to shift the world economy to a net carbon-neutral energy base.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

While his brutal monetary policy did tame inflation (pushing it down from 13.5 per cent in 1981 to 3.2 per cent two years later), its harmful effects on employment and capital accumulation were profound, both domestically and internationally. Nevertheless, the two prerequisites had been met even before Ronald Reagan settled in properly at the White House. A new phase thus began. The United States could now run an increasing trade deficit with impunity, while the new Reagan administration could also finance its hugely expanded defence budget and its gigantic tax cuts for the richest Americans. The 1980s ideology of supply-side economics, the fabled trickle-down effect, the reckless tax cuts, the dominance of greed as a form of virtue, etc. – all these were just manifestations of America’s new ‘exorbitant privilege’: the opportunity to expand its twin deficits almost without limit, courtesy of the capital inflows from the rest of the world.

The loss of the private money brought the Global Minotaur to its knees. With it came crashing down the only mechanism the world economy had for recycling its surpluses. The upshot is a Crisis from which no liquidity-pumping by the Fed and the other central banks can help us escape. Toxic theory, Part A: trickle-down politics, supply-side economics When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the fledgling Global Minotaur was already in residence, if not in complete control. Within the United States, its handmaidens5 were cradling it, preparing it for the bigger and better things to come. With the twin US deficits gradually expanding, the beast’s imprint on American society and its influence on the world economy were growing by the day.

As the US budget deficit exploded, it accelerated the tsunami of foreign capital that rushed into New York. Eager to buy safe American debt at a time of general uncertainty, the world’s surplus was pouring into the US, allowing Wall Street to create even more private money to fuel even greater consumer spending. The year before Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory, Margaret Thatcher had won office in the UK on a similar political manifesto. The difference was that her government inherited an economy that had been on the decline for almost a century. Moreover, it was a social economy in which the working class had managed, especially after the Second World War, to secure considerable power over economic affairs (both through the establishment of a large welfare state and through the nationalization of large industrial sectors, e.g. coal and steel).


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Until recently American politics remained mired in the cultural controversies passed down from the late sixties, with right-wing populists forever reminding “normal Americans” of the hideous world that the “establishment” had built, a place where blasphemous intellectuals violated the principles of Americanism at every opportunity, a place of crime in the streets, of unimaginable cultural depravity, of epidemic disrespect for the men in uniform, of secular humanists scheming to undermine family values and give away the Panama Canal, of judges gone soft on crime and politicians gone soft on communism. The thirty-year backlash brought us Ronald Reagan’s rollback of government power as well as Newt Gingrich’s outright shutdown of 1995. But for all its accomplishments, it never constituted a thorough endorsement of the free market or of laissez-faire politics. Barbara Ehrenreich, one of its most astute chroniclers, points out that the backlash always hinged on a particular appeal to working-class voters, some of whom were roped into the Republican coalition with talk of patriotism, culture war and family values.

Most of these writers properly feel that the crash was caused by a combination of all or most of these influences: deregulation to the point of anarchy; a towering secrecy that conceals the financial world from ordinary investors; greed that distorts capitalism and the character of those who administer it; a justice system that Wall Street malefactors know they need not fear; and, to personalize the problem, we are offered Alan Greenspan and his fellow conspirators, chief of whom were Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who was a top exec at Goldman Sachs before joining Clinton’s Cabinet and a top exec at Citigroup after leaving it. In Lowenstein’s opinion, Clinton was, except for Ronald Reagan, “the most market-oriented president since the Roaring Twenties.” If the crash proved anything, it was that crime pays. Sufficient tax credits were claimed to offset the measly $1.4 billion fine that J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and four others agreed to fork over for misdeeds that, as Stiglitz says, “put most acts of political crookedness to shame. ...

Paulson asks for trust. But has he earned it? Remember, he started out in office gutting the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; he tried to cripple the SEC and recently relied on Morgan Stanley—not a disinterested party—for advice on the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Therefore “trust but verify,” as Ronald Reagan would (and did) say. Congress must impose conditions to protect the public, the national interest and, not least, the interests of the next administration. Herewith a short list: 1. Disclosure clause. Treasury should have immediate and complete access to information about portfolios, counterpar-ties, the internal valuation methods used by financial firms, their proprietary models and the history of adjustments made to those models to recognize or conceal losses as the crisis unfolded. 2.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

It affects 47 million people worldwide and more than 800,000 in the UK alone.1 As the world’s population ages, Alzheimer’s is expected to affect 135 million people by 2050, overtaking cancer to become the second leading cause of death after heart disease.2 We’ve now reached a point at which almost everyone knows someone–whether a family member or a friend–who has been affected. In recent years, cases from the echelons of high society have reached our ears as well. Rita Hayworth, Peter Falk, Charlton Heston, Rosa Parks, Margaret Thatcher–all eventually developed Alzheimer’s. When President Ronald Reagan was diagnosed, in November 1995, he published a handwritten letter to the American public: ‘At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done… Unfortunately, as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden.

With the world’s population steadily ageing, Alzheimer’s could now be seen for what it truly is: a global and inescapable epidemic. 3 A Medicine for Memory All life is chemistry. J. B. van Helmont, Ortas Medicinae, 1648 ON 5 NOVEMBER 1986, in a proclamation to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s, President Ronald Reagan addressed the crowd: ‘No cure or treatments yet exist… but through research we hope to overcome what we now know is a disease…’1 For the scientists who had worked for so long to prove that Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of ageing, this public recognition of the Alzheimer’s epidemic was a landmark moment.

Some of the best organisations for families, carers and patients: Age UK Tel: 0800 678 1174 Email: contact@ageuk.org.uk Website: www.ageuk.org.uk Alzheimer’s Association Tel: +1 800 272 3900 Email: info@alz.org Website: www.alz.org Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center Tel: +1 800 438 4380 Email: adear@nia.nih.gov Website: www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers Alzheimer’s Disease International Tel: +44 20 7981 0880 Email: info@alz.co.uk Website: www.alz.co.uk Alzheimer’s Europe Tel: +352 29 79 70 Email: info@alzheimer-europe.org Website: www.alzheimer-europe.org Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Tel: +1 866 232 8484 Email: info@alzfdn.org Website: www.alzfdn.org Alzheimer’s Research Forum Email: contact@alzforum.org Website: www.alzforum.org Alzheimer’s Research UK Tel: 0300 111 5555 Email: enquiries@alzheimersresearchuk.org Website: www.alzheimersresearchuk.org Alzheimer’s Society Tel: 0300 222 1122 Email: enquiries@alzheimers.org.uk Website: www.alzheimers.org.uk Caregiver Action Network Tel: +1 202 454 3970 Email: info@caregiveraction.org Website: www.caregiveraction.org Caregiver.com Tel: +1 800 829 2734 Email: info@caregiver.com Website: www.caregiver.com Carers UK Tel: 020 7378 4999 Email: info@carersuk.org Website: www.carersuk.org Dementia UK Tel: 0800 888 6678 Email: info@dementiauk.org Website: www.dementiauk.org Family Caregiver Alliance Tel: +1 415 434 3388 Email: info@caregiver.org Website: www.caregiver.org National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC) Tel: 020 7697 1520 Website: www.ncpc.org.uk NHS Choices Website: www.nhs.uk Office of the Public Guardian Tel: 0870 739 5780 Email: customerservices@publicguardian.gsi.gov.uk Website: www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-public-guardian Society for Neuroscience Tel: +1 202 962 4000 Website: www.sfn.org Notes Preface: ‘A Peculiar Disease’ 1. Prince, Comas-Herrera, et al., ‘World Alzheimer’s Report 2016’. 2. At the time of writing, Alzheimer’s overtook heart disease in England and Wales; it is now the leading cause of death. Office for National Statistics, Statistical Bulletin. 3. Reagan, Handwritten letter courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. 4. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, p.39. 5. Lambert, Ibrahim-Verbaas, et al., ‘Meta-analysis of 74,046 individuals identifies 11 new susceptibility loci for Alzheimer’s disease’. 6. Fraser, Consulting report, July 2015. Chapter 1: The Psychiatrist with a Microscope 1.


pages: 269 words: 83,959

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

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

“We were all subjected to a very rigorous ordeal because of politics in Washington,” he tells me. “We had a liberal Congress, and they were adamant that there would be repercussions for the president. The special prosecutor offered me a deal: if I would accuse the president of lying, he would drop all charges against me. That’s how blatant it was. It was an effort to get Ronald Reagan and it didn’t work.” “I’ve heard from a number of sources that this scandal had an extremely adverse effect on the government’s ability to negotiate [with the terrorists], because it was under so much scrutiny after the affair broke,” I say. Then I ask him, “Do you in any way feel like your actions or the actions of those senior to you contributed to the length of my father’s captivity?”

“Congress has lots of different ways of investigating things, but . . . they decided to bring it out in the open . . . thousands of classified documents, many of which I wrote or crossed my desk, were all declassified, and the result was that Americans were put at risk. Some, like your dad, were held longer; others, such as Terry Waite, who had tried simply to be an intermediary, were captured and taken. Others were killed. And that will happen every time classified information of that nature is declassified. I didn’t make that call. Ronald Reagan didn’t make that call. Congress did.” Ultimately, our conversation is frustrating. I am angry afterward, but not surprised; North just repeated to me the same things he’s been saying all along. But bringing up Terry Waite seems pretty ballsy, considering North has been accused of indirectly causing his kidnapping.

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


pages: 309 words: 81,243

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

Obama had barely gotten his head above water in the approval ratings by the time of the election, the economy had stagnated (in the two quarters just prior to the election, the gross domestic product had grown just 1.3 percent and 2.0 percent)1, and Obama had performed in mediocre fashion in the presidential debates. Nonetheless, he became the first president since Ronald Reagan to win two elections with a majority of the popular vote. So, what did Obama do to work this magic? He put together a different sort of coalition. Obama won because he held together a heavily minority-based, low-income coalition: 93 percent of black voters, 71 percent of Hispanic voters, 73 percent of Asian voters, 55 percent of female voters, 76 percent of LGBT voters, 63 percent of those making below $30,000 per year, and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000 per year.2 Obama became the first president since FDR in 1944 to drop electoral and popular vote support and win reelection anyway.

Obama won because he held together a heavily minority-based, low-income coalition: 93 percent of black voters, 71 percent of Hispanic voters, 73 percent of Asian voters, 55 percent of female voters, 76 percent of LGBT voters, 63 percent of those making below $30,000 per year, and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000 per year.2 Obama became the first president since FDR in 1944 to drop electoral and popular vote support and win reelection anyway. The story of Obama’s 2012 victory is the story of the transformation of American politics. In 2008, Obama had been a different sort of candidate running a quite familiar campaign: a campaign of unification. Ronald Reagan had run on “morning in America”; Bill Clinton had run on a “third way” eschewing partisanship; George W. Bush had run on “compassionate conservatism”; Obama ran on the terms “hope” and “change,” pledging to move beyond America as a collection of “red states and blue states” and instead to unite Americans more broadly.

Government promised educational opportunity; it offered instead forced busing and lowered public schooling standards.14 This was a bipartisan affair—former conservative Richard Nixon, as president, re-enshrined LBJ’s economic programs, including unmooring the American dollar from the value of gold and setting prices, wages, salaries, and rents.15 And once again, as with FDR’s response to the Great Depression, economic stagnation set in, with the percentage of people living in poverty stopping its decrease in 1970 and the stock market topping out in January 1966 around 8,000 . . . and dropping steadily until July 1982 in inflation-adjusted terms.16 By the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, America had fallen out of love with the utopian government schemes. The Utopian Impulse had waned. “Fixing the world” through government measures had been reduced to gas lines, inflation, unemployment, and a president bemoaning an American malaise, admitting that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”17 Ronald Reagan took up that baton, declaiming in his First Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”18 In reality, Reagan didn’t reduce the size and scope of government—government continued to grow.


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Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

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

Jr 367 CSCE see Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe CSCE Council of Ministers 490, 493, 495 CSCE Paris summit (1990) 255–73, 312, 314–18, 357, 358–9, 380, 405, 411, 431, 436, 485, 489 Cuba 20, 64, 195, 196, 302, 331, 543 Czech Republic 456 Czechoslovak Politburo 123 Czechoslovakia 502; 1968 invasion of 211; as associate member of EC 509; Bush’s visit to 312–14; divides into two separate states 456, 486; and flight of East Germans 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 142, 149, 248; free elections in 308; hardliners in 84; and meeting in Paris 256; and membership of EC 263, 322; and membership of NATO 311–12; and opening of border with FRG 142, 149; as part of a ‘Common European Home’ 228; represented at fortieth anniversary of PRC 123; represented at NACC meeting 449; Soviet control over 69; Thatcher’s comment on German-Czech border 177; upheavals in 166, 486; Velvet Revolution in 187–90, 192–3, 456; and Western aid 310, 385, 481; withdrawal of Soviet troops from 214, 424 Davos World Economic Forum 213, 279 Dayton Peace Accords (1995) 589 ‘Declaration on New Relations’ (1992) 464 Delors Committee 265 Delors, Jacques 238, 587; at Houston G7 summit (1990) 306; comments on European political union and GDR 271–2; and consequences of German unification 272; discussions with Mitterrand and Bush on NATO 288–91; and Europe of concentric circles 260; and the EC 95–7; makes a deal with Kohl 247; and EMU 265; proposes extraordinary EC summit 272–4; and Yugoslav conflict 492 Delors Plan 172 Delors Report (1989) 177, 266–7 Dem Rossiya (’Democratic Russia’) movement-cum-party 396 Democratic Alliance (Poland) 103 Demokratie Jetzt 135 Demokratischer Aufbruch 135, 150 Deng Xiaoping: contrast with Gorbachev 583; economic reforms 29–32; and exit from the Cold War 3–4; ideological tensions with Li Peng 571; perceived as enemy of freedom 58; politico-economic reform 558, 574; relationship with: America 25, 26, 28–31, 33, 35, 37–9, 60–3, 586, GDR 122–3, Gorbachev 33–5, 37–9, 546, Jiang Zemin 571-4; and student unrest 55, 57; successors to 558–9, 566, 595; and Tiananmen Square 441, 558 Denmark 497, 500 Der Spiegel 156, 285 Deutsche Volksunion (DVU) 506 Die Republikaner party 158 Die Welt 158 Donetsk 437, 444 Dowd, Maureen 347 Dresden 119, 121, 135, 143, 155, 180, 181–4, 216 Dubček, Alexander 188 Dublin EC Councils I and II (1990) 274–9, 282, 284, 290, 305 Dukakis, Michael 24, 430 Dumas, Roland 209, 246, 493, 500 DVU see Deutsche Volksunion Eagleburger, Lawrence 214, 328, 429–30, 436, 494, 518, 521, 560, 561 EAI see Enterprise for the Americas Initiative East Asia 20, 542, 544 East Berlin 77–8, 109, 112, 114, 124, 133, 135–6, 142, 149, 160, 178, 180, 190, 212, 213; see also Berlin East Germany see German Democratic Republic (GDR) East-West relationship 19, 42, 47, 95, 99, 174, 178, 179, 191–2, 198, 202, 210, 271, 287, 324, 349, 449, 455, 458, 482–3, 502, 590 Eastern Europe 16, 28, 32, 40, 45, 75, 82, 85, 92, 94, 95, 99, 155, 172–3, 177, 178, 214, 216, 245, 251, 259, 263, 295, 311, 405, 406, 424, 433, 438, 439, 446, 448, 457, 466, 481, 533, 566, 569, 588 EBRD see European Bank for Reconstruction and Development EC 12 260, 264, 274, 306, 515 EC 92 97, 544 EC see European Community EC Brussels summit (1991) 509 EC Council of Ministers 274, 276, 277, 497 EC Strasbourg summit (1989) 176–8, 179 ECB see European Central Bank Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the EU 96, 175, 260, 265–72, 281–2 EFTA see European Free Trade Area Egypt 333, 334, 337, 338, 364, 446 El Salvador 195, 543 EMU see Economic and Monetary Union Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) 543 EPU see European Political Union Estonia 7, 75, 106, 107, 391, 395, 404, 412, 417, 420, 437, 449 EU see European Union Europe 584-5: and aid for Russia 302–7, 469; and Balkan conflict 491–505; and building a Community 272–3; Bush’s attitude towards 285–8, 533; conventional armed forces in 314–18; disunity in 511–12; Dublin summits 274–9, 282, 284; and East-West relationship 307–14; and Germany-in-NATO issue 295–8, 299; and Maastricht Treaty 498; and EMU 265–72, 281–2 nationalist movements in 507; Paris CSCE summit (1990) 255–73; and political union 271–2; security issues 218, 221–4, 226–38, 241–4, 288–93, 298–302, 424, 485–6, 512–16, 588; Thatcher’s view of 279–87; visions for new order in 256–65 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 305, 311, 429, 466 European Central Bank (ECB) 266 European Commission 96, 266, 282, 305, 311 European Community (EC) 6, 26, 81, 83, 95–7, 153–5, 157, 174, 176–8, 207, 235, 251, 256, 259, 260, 305, 406, 410, 419, 424, 436, 466, 491–505, 527, 548, 582 European Confederation idea 256, 258–65, 311 European Council 509 European Free Trade Area (EFTA) 311 European Monetary System (EMS) 96 European Parliament 155, 272, 274, 419, 507 European Political Union (EPU) 266 European Security Council 228 European Union (EU) 7, 8, 97, 204, 207–8, 277, 459, 461, 493, 498, 582, 589, 593 Fahd, King 328, 329–30, 338 Falin, Valentin 230, 245 Fang Lizhi 32, 560, 561 FDP see Free Democrats party Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) 3, 7, 46, 65, 78, 97, 98, 100 and note, 111, 420, 582; and adequate burden-sharing 466; and aid to Russia 481; and aid to the Soviet Union 406–7; and Balkan conflict 493, 494, 495–6, 495–8, 499–501, 502–5, 503–4; Balkan policy 509–10; Bush’s Four Principles on reunification 202–3; and cost and challenges of unification 480, 584; different foreign approaches to 213–24, 226–38; economy of 337; election fears 506–7; and European security issues 513; inter-German unity treaty and formal unification 246, 250–1, 587; international position 509; and Kuwait crisis 374; Kohl-Gorbachev deal on unification 307; Kohl’s blueprint for reunification 151–66; as major donor of aid 212; managing unification of 6, 8, 400; as member of EU 584; nationalist and political movements in 506–7; and NATO membership after unification 218, 221–4, 226–38, 241–4, 264, 295–8, 299, 459, 584; and problem of asylum seekers, migration from the East and unification 506–8; provides aid to Soviet Union 406–7, 433; international reactions to Kohl’s Ten Point Plan for 166–78; as regional superpower in Europe 593; see also German Democratic Republic Federation of Young Democrats 75 financial crash (2008) 8 Finland 444 Fischer, Oskar 78, 114 follow-on to Lance (FOTL) 290–1 Ford, Gerald 25, 25–6, 26, 477 Ford Motor Company 552 Foreign Affairs 593 FOTL see follow-on to Lance Four Powers (US, USSR, France, UK) 161, 169, 179, 209, 210, 228, 246, 249, 293 Fourth of May Movement (China) 32 France 7, 97, 98, 320, 364, 420, 433, 459, 485, 493, 496, 497, 498, 500, 503, 507, 584 Franco-German army corps 511–12 Free Democrats party (FDP) 43, 107, 112, 213, 265 FREEDOM Support Act 471–3, 476–9 FRG see Federal Republic of Germany Fukuyama, Francis 582 G7+1 547, 592 G7 87, 242, 329, 406, 427, 447, 564, 585 G7 Houston summit (1990) 303–7, 561–2 G7 London summit (1991) 429, 431, 432–5, 547 G7 Munich summit (1992) 480–1, 482, 548 G7 Paris summit (1989) 91–9, 192 G8 481, 595 G24 95, 99, 311 Gaidar, Yegor 369, 463, 469, 479 Gallucci, Robert L. 521 Gandhi, Rajiv 63–4 Garton Ash, Timothy 67–8, 72, 150, 188 Gates, Robert 92, 214, 379 GATT see General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper 67, 104 Gdańsk 70–1, 87, 95 GDR see German Democratic Republic GDR Council of Ministers 213 Gelb, Leslie H. 540 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 5, 27, 97, 194, 305–6, 481, 482, 552, 566, 582 Geneva 306, 576 Geneva summit (1985) 16 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich 3, 128, 130–1, 159, 168, 180, 185, 207, 213, 228, 268; and abolition of SNFs 43; ‘all-European’ exit strategy from the Cold war 215–18; attitude towards NATO and the EC 258; and Balkan conflict 495–8, 499–500, 503–4; belief in German re-unification 118–19; birth of 112; comments on French machinations and European security issues 513; Europa-Plan 161, 164; and flight of East Germans 112, 113, 117, 118–19, 120; and food aid to USSR 406; and FOTL 290; and Kuwait crisis 374, 378; meeting: at Camp David 224, 226–8, with Baker 217–18, with Gorbachev 241–4; and NACC 448; and national self-determination 589; NATO and European security issues 231–2; pleased at outcome of Washington aid conference (1992) 466; speeches: in Berlin (1989) 131, in Tutzing (1990) 215–18, in Luxembourg (1990) 227; and Soviet-German treaty 249; and stabilising of post-Wall Europe 6; success and resignation of 508–9; supports Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 169–71, 172–5; vision for all-European security architecture 215-18, 227-8, 256; welcomes EMU idea 265 Georgia 59, 211, 390, 392–3, 404, 408, 444 Gerasimov, Gennady 115, 126 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 20, 64, 394; Baker’s Potsdam visit (1989) 208–9; and the breaching of the Wall 128–35, 145–6, 148; challenges of unification 584; comparison with Hungary and Poland 148–50; flight of East Germans to Hungary and the West 77, 78, 108–22, 213, 582; inter-German unity treaty and formal unification 246, 250–1, 587; Kohl-Gorbachev deal on unification 307; Kohl’s blueprint for reunification 151–66; and membership of EC 271; and membership of NATO after unification 218, 221–4, 226–38, 241–4, 264, 295–8, 299, 459; mounting protests and tensions in 135–44, 150, 212–13; post-unification see Federal Republic of Germany; relationship with PRC 122–3; transition from communism 148–51; see also Federal Republic of Germany German-Polish border treaty (1990) 250, 509 German-Soviet Treaty on Good-Neighbourliness, Partnership and Cooperation (1990) 247, 249, 251, 252 Germany see Federal Republic of Germany; German Democratic Republic Gigot, Paul A. 351 Gilbert, Martin 353 Gingrich, Newt 478 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 507 Glaspie, April 323 Gorbachev Foundation 458 Gorbachev, Mikhail 3–4, 172; and the 500 Day plan 400–4; accused of ‘subversion of socialism’ by PRC 558; agrees with Kohl seizing ‘the great opportunities that had opened up’ 581; agrees to Bush’s nuclear disarmament initiative 536–7; aligns himself with international law and order 525; appears to have run out of steam 412–15; arms reduction talks with Reagan 585; asks for loans from Beijing 569; at Helsinki superpower summit (1990) 341–8; at London G7 summit (1991) 432–5; at Paris CSCE summit (1990) 255, 256, 316–17; attitude towards Japan 546–7; awarded Nobel Peace Prize 245–6; battle of letters with Kohl 179–81; challenges of change 106; comment on breakup of Yugoslavia 489; contrast with Deng Xiaoping 583; and crisis in the Baltic States 410–11, 414–15, 417–21; criticised on his foreign policy 211–12; crumbling of support for 402–3; and deal on German unification 307; dinner with Yeltsin and Nazarbayev (1991) 439–40; domestic problems 251–2, 317–18, 400–5, 412–13, 421–7; encourages ‘socialist renewal’ and reform 29, 71, 84, 106, 149, 586; events leading up to aborted coup 385–97; family background 13–14; and flight of East Germans to Hungary and the West 121; and full German membership of NATO 228–38, 241–4; and German unification 213–14; and German-Soviet Treaty 247, 251; and Gulf war 320, 332, 339–41, 354, 357, 359, 363, 364, 375, 414; as honorary member of G7 585; importance in diffusing Cold War tensions 584–5; and INF Treaty 314; kept informed of Bush-Yeltsin meeting 432; letter on multilateral East-West cooperation 99–100; and Lithuania 369–70; and Malta summit 191–200, 559; meetings with Kohl 78–82, 238–44; meets Thatcher 43–4; Mitterrand’s concerns over 212; NATO and European security issues 232–8; and new Union Treaty 408–9, 440; non-interventionist position 84, 90, 149, 190, 197; and the Paris Charter 315–16; policy towards GDR 116; political reorganisation 403–5, 407–9; and post-Cold War international relations 4–5, 19–20; presents eye-catching disarmament package 83; prevents Baker-Yeltsin meeting 428; proposes complete reorganisation of the government 404–5; prospects for 427–8, 458; protests against 418; reaction to: breaching of the Wall 131–2, 133–4, fence-cutting between Austria and Hungary 77, Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 168–71, 197, NATO London Declaration (1990) 301, Shevardnadze’s resignation (1991)409, Tiananmen Square 59, 63–4; refuses to dismantle Berlin Wall 127; relationship with: Bush 20–3, 39–40, 65, 82–3, 85, 102–3, 133, 190, 293–7, 325, 375, 380, 381, 383–4, 410–12, 420–1, 428–9, 431, 434–40, 443, 450–2, 457, 461, 592, Deng Xiaoping 33–5, 37–9, 47–55, Honecker 124–7, Reagan 16–17, 20, 21, 28, 101, 193, 196, with Seoul 535, Yeltsin 341, 383, 397–9, 400, 402, 425–7, 428–9, 440–52, 457–8; requests Western aid 247, 248–9, 302–5, 409–10, 419–20, 429, 430, 431, 433; rise to power 14–15; shocked at news from Warsaw 68; and Soviet interests in Asia 546; speeches: at the United Nations (1988) 12–13, 16–20, 21, 25, 27–8, 42, 582; in Strasbourg (1989) 83–4; and splintering of Yugoslavia 5–6; and stabilising of post-Wall Europe 6; talks with: Bush at Moscow summit (1991) 435–8, Gandhi (1989) 63–4, Mitterrand (1989) 82–3; and trade agreement with US 293–7; unsuccessful coup against (1991) 381–3; vision of ‘Common European Home’ 82, 83–4, 157, 228, 256–8, 590; visit to UN and Governors Island 11–13, 16–23; visited by Baker and Genscher (Feb. 1990) 219–21 Gorbachev, Raisa Maximovna Titarenko 14–15, 383 Grachev, Andrei 68, 414, 418 Grass, Günter 156 Greece 274, 497 Greens 213, 253 Grenada 355, 543 Gromov, Boris 407–8, 427 Grósz, Károly 73–4, 107 Guangzhou 571 Gulf War (1990-91) 415, 421, 436, 439, 446, 459, 460, 461, 465, 524, 526–7, 538, 588, 593; gathering of forces 334–40, 352–3; Japan’s refusal to send troops to 545; and long-term US commitment to the area 362–3; military campaign into Iraq and Kuwait 371–80; obtaining consensus for 319–21, 323–34; persuading allies of need for action 352–62; Soviet attitude towards 320, 332, 339–42, 362–3, 409, 414; US preparations for 364–7, 369–71; see also Kuwait Haass, Richard 322, 364, 371, 374 Habsburg, Otto von 110 The Hague peace conference (1992) 494 Haiching Zhao 571 Hainan 574 Hamilton, Lee 244 Hamtramck 40–1, 291, 465 Han Xu 35 Hanover EC Council (June 1988) 265 Haughey, Charles 274, 275 Havel, Václav 188, 190, 255, 308, 310, 312–14, 385, 486 Hawaii 532 Helsinki Conference (1975) 6, 83–4, 119, 154, 164, 170, 177, 178, 179, 180, 198–9, 201, 203, 215, 217, 218, 231–2, 234, 235, 241, 256, 259, 297, 316, 420, 501 Helsinki superpower summit (1990) 341–51 Helsinki II CSCE summit (1992) 485–6, 511, 516 Hempstone, Smith Jr 518 Hendrickson, David 460 Herrhausen, Alfred 156, 166 Herzog, Roman 7 Highway of Death (Kuwait City-Basra) 376 Hirohito, Emperor 35, 545 Hitler, Adolf 129, 130, 171, 490 Honda 552 Honecker, Erich; as diehard socialist 80, 108, 112, 149; envisions ‘Chinese solution’ to protests 135, 136–7, 138, 149; fall of 140, 190; and flight of East Germans to Hungary and the West 115, 116, 117–18, 120; health of 139; reaction to Austria-Hungary border opening 77–8; relationship with Gorbachev 124–7; supports PRCs reaction to Tiananmen Square 122 Hong Kong 94, 541, 563, 564 Horn, Gyula 76, 110, 112, 113, 114 Horváth, István 110 Houston 303–7, 561–2 HSWP see Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Hu Jintao 595 Hu Yaobang 32 Huber, Hermann 119 human rights; American stance on 60, 62, 193, 195, 294, 431, 476, 490, 515, 527; championed by Pope John Paul II 70; in communist states 431; and Eastern Europe 312; enshrined in Helsinki Final Act 119; in Japan 564; and new world order 524; in PRC 32, 38, 58, 59, 361–2, 557, 558, 561, 563, 564, 565–6, 570, 573; in Romania 186; Russian Federation attitude towards 576; Soviet attitude towards 463, 476; UN Declaration 13; in Western Europe 279, 315; Yugoslavia as supporter of 489 Hungarian Democratic Forum 110 Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) 89–90, 107 Hungary 449, 500, 502; as associate member of EC 509; Bush’s visit to 84, 89–91, 101, 192, 533; change and transformation in 27–8, 47, 64, 72–6, 80, 100, 106–7, 108, 148–50, 186, 187, 188, 189, 385; comparison with GDR 148–50, 189; and fence-cutting ceremony with Austria 4, 47, 65, 76–8; financial debt and aid 73, 95–6, 97–9, 284, 309–10, 385, 481; and flight of East Germans to 108–22, 248; free parliamentary elections in 308; Gorbachev and Kohl’s support for 78, 80, 82; Kohl’s visit to 181; and lobby for Warsaw Pact military intervention in 84; as member of EC 263; and mutual cooperation agreement with Poland and Czechoslovakia 424; opposition round table (ORT) 74; as part of Central European security zone 228; PRC’s attitude towards 64; presses for Soviet troop withdrawal 214; Red Army in 312, 423–4; and relationship with EC 263, 264, 311; Revolution in 60, 415; Hurd, Douglas 173, 246, 358, 493 Hurricane Andrew 519 Husák, Gustáv 188 Hussein, King of Jordan 328, 330, 334 Hussein, Saddam 6, 318, 320, 322, 323–4, 329–30, 334–5, 340, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353, 354, 362, 364, 365, 367, 369, 372, 373, 375, 376, 377, 410, 412, 414, 461, 524, 538, 562, 588, 593 Hutchings, Robert 306, 445, 491 Iacocca, Lee 552 IAEA see International Atomic Energy Agency ICBMs see intercontinental ballistic missiles Iceland 415, 418–19, 500, 502 IGC see Intergovernmental Conference IMF see International Monetary Fund Independent newspaper 300, 336 Independent Trade Unions (Hungary) 107 India 495, 522, 559, 562 Indonesia 541, 562 INFs see intermediate(-range) nuclear forces Inner Mongolia 569 Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 560 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) 266, 267, 269, 273, 274, 275–6 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987) 16, 257, 314 Intermediate(-range) nuclear forces (INFs) 43 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 537, 538, 540 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 86, 141, 305, 309, 409–10, 429, 434, 435, 465, 467, 469, 471, 478, 479, 548 International Red Cross 563 Iran 6, 567 Iraq 318, 322, 323, 325, 334, 340, 345, 354, 355, 361, 362, 369, 371, 375, 410, 457, 524, 525, 527, 538, 562, 593, 595, 596 Iron Curtain 12, 41, 65, 73, 77, 78, 91, 107, 110, 127, 216, 259, 261 Islamic Conference 517 Israel 345, 362–3, 372, 446 Italy 433, 497, 502, 507 Ivashko, Vladimir A. 405 Izvestia 245, 404 Jackson-Vanik amendment 194, 294, 297, 431, 675 Jäger, Harald 145 Jakeš, Miloš 84, 142, 188 Jakobson, Max 405 Japan 5, 20, 26, 35, 54, 94, 97, 305, 329, 331, 337, 459, 466, 469, 480, 531, 533, 538–9, 559, 562, 574, 593 Japanese Liberal Party 545 Japanese-American relationship 541–50, 551–6 Japanese-Chinese relationship 548–9, 564 Japanese-Soviet relationship 545–8 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 129: at Paris G7 summit (1989) 93–4; becomes president of Poland 103; concedes demands for elections 66; and economic, social and political reforms 40, 71, 72, 385; move towards democracy 104; and Solidarity 67, 104; supported by Kohl and Gorbachev 80, 104; talks with Bush 85–6 JCS see Joint Chief of Staff Jiang Zemin 122, 436, 549, 559, 566, 571–2, 573, 574–5, 595 JNA see Yugoslav National Army John Paul II, Pope 70, 85 Johnson, Lyndon B. 350, 367 Johnston, Robert B. 523 Joint Chief of Staff (JCS) 367, 518, 521 Jones, David 367 Jordan 338 Kádár, János 72, 73–4 Kaifu, Toshiki 329, 331, 337–8, 545, 546, 547, 549, 561–2, 564 Kárpáti, Ferenc 77 Kazakhstan 383, 438, 445, 447, 448, 463, 473 Keating, Paul 551 Kennan, George 492 Kennedy, John F. 86, 131, 320 Kennedy, Paul 542 Kennedy School, Harvard 429, 430 Kessler, Heinz 77 Key Largo 289 KGB 14, 121, 183, 245, 363, 382, 402, 404, 407, 408, 428, 440 Khmer Rouge 563 Khrushchev, Nikita 14, 54, 415, 436 Kiev 5, 441 Kim Il-sung 6, 123, 534–5, 537–8, 540, 565 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 460 Kissinger, Henry 26, 61, 367, 471, 542, 557, 586 Kiszczak, Czesław 103 Kohl, Hannelore 161, 224 Kohl, Helmut 3-4: and arms control 45; at dinner with EC heads of government in Paris (1989) 153–5; at Houston G7 summit (1990) 304, 305; at London G7 summit (1991) 432–3; at Paris CSCE summit (1990) 255, 315; and Balkan conflict 493–4, 497–8, 499, 503, 504; and Baltic States crisis 420; battle of letters with Gorbachev 179–81; believes that one must ‘grab the mantle of history’ 581; and bill for unification 480; conveys impression of Gorbachev to Bush 100–1; cordial meeting with Thatcher 284–5; and deal on German unification 307; domestic problems 506–8; and flight of East Germans 112, 113; formal unification and treaty organised 246–51, 587; immediate reaction to breaching of the Wall 130–5; and Kuwait crisis 338, 374, 379; and loans to PRC 562; and Maastricht Treaty 498; maintains consistent perspective on Europe 278–9; meeting at: with Bush at Camp David (1990) 224, 226–8, with Modrow in Dresden (1989) 178–9, 181–4; and EMU 97, 265–71; and EPU 274–6; and national self-determination 589; NATO and European security issues 231–8; offers food aid to USSR 406–7; pleased at Helsinki superpower summit (1990) outcome 348; political problems 508; proposes Eastern European aid package 95–6, 97–8, 151–2; reaction to London Declaration 301–2; international reactions to his Ten Point Plan 166–78; relationship with: Bush 585, Genscher 43, 44, 112, 168–9, 227, with Gorbachev 5, 78–82, 100, 315, 581, Mitterrand 153–5, 212, 260–5, 315, Németh 115, Thatcher 43, 44, 154, 176–7; scepticism concerning Yeltsin 481; signs German-Soviet Treaty 251–2; success in federal elections (1990) 252–4; supports CFE troop-reduction plan 215; Ten Point Plan for unity 106, 151–66, 179–81, 203, 209, 216, 220, 260, 267, 268–9, 311; and US troops in Germany 295–6; visits to: Moscow 238–44, Poland 129–30, 134–5, 151–3, Russia post-collapse of USSR 485 Köhler, Hörst 480 Kondrashev, Stanislav 404 Korean Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, Exchange and Cooperation (1991) 535–6 Korean Joint Declaration for a Non-Nuclear Korean Peninsula (1991) 536 Korean Peninsula 530–1, 534–41, 551, 567, 574 Korean War (1953) 535, 536 Kosovo 487–8, 596 Kozyrev, Andrei 482, 483, 576, 578 Krauthammer, Charles 593 Krenz, Egon: accession to power 139–40, 149; and economic problems of GDR 141–2; flatly rejects reunification 133, 142; Kohl’s scepticism concerning 132; reaction to state election results 108; unsuccessful meeting with Gorbachev 141; visit to PRC 122–3; warns Bush of ‘nationalism’ 167 Kryuchkov, Vladimir 245, 363, 383, 393, 402–3, 426, 440, 441, 546 Kuril Islands (Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashir, Etorofu) 480, 545–6, 547 Kuwait 6, 250, 318, 319–21, 323–34, 335, 341, 345, 347, 352–67, 369–80, 409, 414, 421, 446, 457, 460, 461, 524, 525, 526–7, 538, 562, 588, 593 Kuwait, Emir of 338–9 Kuzmin, Fyodor 415 Kvitsinky, Ambassador 248 Kyrgyzstan 448 Lafontaine, Oskar 156–7, 229, 252 Lake Balaton 108, 109, 111 Lamapton, David 568 Latché 212, 262, 263, 270 Latin America 539, 542–3, 543, 544 Latvia 106, 107, 391, 395, 408, 412, 415, 420, 449 Lauristin, Marju 404 Lautenberg, Frank R. 337 Lazar, Prince of Serbia 488 Le Monde 269 Le Pen, Marine 507 Lebanon 345 Legras, Guy 306 Leipzig 135, 136, 143 Leipzig Monday demonstrations 150, 158–9 Lenin, V.I. 15 Li Jong-ok 123 Li Peng 32, 51, 55, 63, 559, 562, 564, 566, 569–70, 571, 573, 587 Li Ruihuan 123 Libya 334, 560 Ligachev, Yegor 396 Lithuania 106, 107, 213, 229, 293–5, 297, 320, 369–70, 391, 395, 409, 412, 415, 417, 420, 427, 437, 449 Liu Binyan 32 London 20, 155, 429 London Declaration (1990) 237, 300, 301, 311 London NATO summit (1990) 299–302, 448 London G7 summit (1991) 429, 431, 432–5, 547 Los Angeles World Affairs Council 355 Lubbers, Ruud 176 Luhansk 444 Lukin, Vladimir 64 Lukyanov, Anatoly 425 Lunn, Simon 507 Luxembourg 227, 258, 492, 493, 497 Maastricht Treaty (1992) 8, 459, 480, 498–9, 501, 509, 587 McCain, John 335–6 McCurry, Mike 556 Macedonia 509 McGovern, George 366 McNamara, Robert 366 Madrid 445 Madrid EC Council (1989) 96, 97, 266 Madsen, Richard 557 Magdeburg 184 Maizière, Lothar de 298 Major, John 385, 431, 433, 434, 459, 510, 564, 569, 570 Makashov, Albert 396 Malaysia 541 Mallaby, Sir Christopher 281 Malta Summit (1989) 133, 153, 166, 167, 168, 191–200, 211, 254, 256, 260, 320, 436, 461, 485, 559 Mao Zedong 28, 31, 436 Marković, Ante 490 Marshall Plan (1948) 478, 508 Mashakov, Albert 236 Masur, Kurt 136 Matlock, Jack 393, 398, 423, 426 Maull, Hanns 594 Maxim Gorky (passenger liner) 194 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 104–5, 128, 129, 190, 214, 247, 250, 400 Medellin 542 Medvedev, Vadim 391 Melerowicz, Dieter 407 Mercedes 552 Merkel, Angela 146, 253–4, 502 Meskhetian Turks 395 Mexico 543, 544 MFN see most favoured nation (trade status) MGU see Moscow State University Middle East 324, 333, 336, 343, 345, 348, 356, 367, 415, 436, 453, 490, 524, 539, 560–1, 565, 597, 598 Mielke, Erich 135, 138 Mikroelektronik Erfurt 125 Milošević, Slobodan 487–9, 491, 492–3, 496, 497, 502, 503–4, 509, 589 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) 567 Mitchell, George 321 Mitterrand, François 3, 4, 6, 96, 133, 172, 480, 587; at Houston G7 summit (1990) 304, 305; at Paris CSCE summit (1990) 256; at Strasbourg EC Council meeting (1989) 176–8; at London G7 summit (1991) 434; at Paris G7 summit as host (1989) 92–3; attitude towards unified Germany 273; background 174; and Balkan conflict 493, 494, 500, 510; belief in Franco-German cooperation 276–7; bid for French-led European activism 511–12; comment on Germany 503; debates with Kohl 260–5; discussions with Delors and Bush on NATO 288–91; and EMU 266; encourages Bush to meet Gorbachev 101; and EPU 274–6; and France’s status 83; and Kuwait crisis 328–9, 353–4, 358, 374, 376; and letter from Gorbachev on multilateral East-West cooperation 99–100; and loans to PRC 562; and Maastricht Treaty 498; meetings with: Baker and Scowcroft 209–11, Bush 35, 209–1; and NATO 45, 299, 511–13; reaction to Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 174–5; and referendum on Maastricht Treaty 480; relationship with Kohl 153–4, 212; relationship with Thatcher 280–1; talks with Gorbachev 82–3; vision for ‘European Confederation’ 256, 258–65, 311; visit to GDR 178–9, 185; warns Bush of Russian feelings of betrayal 481 Miyazawa, Kiichi 480, 552, 554, 556, 570 Miyazawa Plan (1988) 543 Mladenov, Petar 187 Mladina 502 Mock, Alois 76, 110 Modrow, Hans 143, 150, 158, 178, 181–2, 183, 184, 208, 209, 213 Mogadishu 516, 517, 518, 523, 529 Moldavia (SSR) 390, 437 Moldova 444 Moltke, Helmuth Graf von 129 Momper, Walter 130 Mongolian People’s Republic 20 Montenegro 511 Morin, Richard 366 Morocco 320, 328, 333, 334 Mosbacher, Robert 554 Moscow State University (MGU) 14–15 Moscow summit (Gorbachev-Reagan, 1988) 16 Moscow summit (Gorbachev-Kohl, 1990) 238–44 Moscow summit (Gorbachev-Bush, 1991) 421, 429, 431, 435–8, 461 Moskovskie Novosti 418 most favoured nation (MFN) trade status 30, 293, 295, 296–7, 360, 437, 568, 574, 585 MTCR see Missile Technology Control Regime Mubarak, Hosni 328, 330 Mulroney, Brian 223, 330 Multilateral Investment Fund 543 Munich G7 summit (1992) 480–2, 548 NACC see North Atlantic Cooperation Council NAFTA see North American Free Trade Area Nagorno-Karabakh 392 Nagy, Imre 73, 75, 107 Namibia 227, 436, 457 National Security Council (NSC) 26, 28, 306, 322, 328, 329, 363, 366, 420, 445, 491, 510, 521, 523, 536 National Security Review (NSR) 28 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO London Declaration (1990) see London Declaration NATO-Russia Council 595 Nazarbayev, Nursultan 439–40 Nelan, Bruce W. 350 Németh, Miklós 74, 75, 76–7, 89–90, 111, 113–14, 115, 385 Netherlands 497 Neues Deutschland 143 Neues Forum 135, 140, 143, 150, 212 New Transatlantic Agenda (1995) 544 New York 458–9, 569 New York Times 19, 44, 45, 67, 115, 166, 208, 283, 300, 303, 333, 347, 350, 367, 517, 534, 540 Newsweek 351, 541 NHK TV 553 Nicaragua 41, 195, 457, 543 Nixon, Richard 25, 366, 471, 477, 557, 586 Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) 537, 538, 539, 540, 567 Noriega, Manuel 351, 543 North Africa 597, 598 North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) 544 North Atlantic Assembly 507 North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) 448, 449, 461, 511, 513, 582, 588, 590, 595 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 85, 174, 198, 199, 256, 582; Baker’s and Zoellick’s thoughts on 204, 207–8; and Balkan conflict 498, 527; and the Baltic States 444; Bush’s discussions with Mitterrand and Delors 288–91; Bush’s speech at NATO HQ (Dec. 1989) 201–3; changes to 308; and CIS 448; conservation of after ending of Cold War 6; cooperation with Warsaw Pact 258, 448; defence issues 39, 486; Euro-Atlantic tensions over aid 466–7; future identity 527; Genscher’s views on 216–17, 513; and Gorbachev’s disarmament package 83; and intervention in Yugoslavia conflict 491; London NATO summit (1990) 299–302, 311–12; membership of 311–12, 424, 449, 513; no mention in Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 165; as only serious security institution 590; out of area peacekeeping activity 511, 589; reinvention of 7; rift with WEU 494; Shevardnadze’s visit to 185; strength of 41–2, 69, 513; NATO Brussels summit (1989) 39–40, 42–6; and unified German membership 218, 221–4, 226–38, 264, 285–6; urged to take action in Vilnius 415; US-Soviet-German talks on 219–21; ‘Wintex’ war game 1–2 North Korea 6, 64, 80, 123, 531, 534–41, 551, 565, 577, 595, 597 Northern Territories 545–6, 547, 548 Novo-Ogarevo process 425, 438, 441, 547; see 9+1 process NPT see Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty NSC see National Security Council NSC Deputies Committee 521 NSR see National Security Review nuclear war games 1–2 nuclear weapons 6, 16, 83, 446, 537, 538, 539, 540, 560–1, 562, 565, 567, 595–6 Nunn, Sam 366 Nyers, Rezső 107 Obama, Barack 597, 598 Oder-Neisse border 152, 154, 161–2, 214, 285, 307 OECD see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Office of US Disaster Assistance 517 Oman 334 Operation Desert Shield (Kuwait, 1990–1) 331, 336–41, 353, 363, 364–5, 366, 371, 525 Operation Desert Storm (Kuwait/Iraq, 1991) 371–9, 460, 491, 525, 594 Operation Provide Hope (Russia, 1992) 466 Operation Restore Hope (Somalia, 1992) 456, 522, 523 Orbán, Viktor 75 Order of Malta 111 Organisation of African Unity 517 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 429 Ostpolitik 100 and note, 119, 130, 131, 157, 158, 161, 169, 171, 215, 228, 294, 509 Ottawa ‘Open Skies’ conference (Feb. 1990) 222–3, 264, 287 Ottoman Empire 487, 488 Özal, Turgut 329, 330, 334 Ozawa, Ichiro 545 Pacific Century 5 Pakistan 364, 567 Palestine 345 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 334 ‘Pan-European Picnic’ (1989) 110 Panama 195, 196, 352, 355, 543 Paris 82, 91, 93, 100, 102, 108, 153, 155, 173, 174, 179, 218, 243, 246, 290, 354, 584 Paris Charter see Charter of Paris Paris Club 87, 309 and note Paris CSCE summit (1990) 255–73, 312, 314–18, 357, 358–9, 380, 405, 411, 431, 436, 485, 489 Paris Peace Agreement (1991) 563 Partnership for Peace (NATO) 595 Pavlov, Valentin 413, 421, 422, 426, 429, 430, 431, 440, 441 PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Socialismus) 150, 184, 253 Peasant Party (Poland) 103 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 3–4, 27, 28, 349, 495, 531; and America 28–31, 47–55, 379, 557–74; and arms sales 560–1; asked for loans from Gorbachev 569; battle for democracy in 55, 57–8, 583; Bush-Gorbachev talks on 436; Bush’s visits (1982, 1985, 1989) to 28, 30-31, 36-9, 533; celebrates fortieth birthday (1989) 122–4; charm offensive with neighbours 562; comparison with Soviet Russia 574–5, 583; consolidation and prosperity 5; economic reform 29–31, 470, 586–7; and Paris G7 summit (1989) 94–5; as global superpower 594; human rights issue 32, 38, 58, 59, 361–2, 557, 558, 561, 563, 564, 565–6, 567, 570, 573; and Kuwait crisis 331–2, 340–1, 344–5, 356–7, 359–62; joint declaration on Sino-Russian relations 577–8; joins the World Bank 30; mass-killing of protesters in Tiananmen Square 3, 4, 5, 50, 55, 57, 59–60, 62, 63–4, 67, 100, 101, 122, 149, 340, 357, 360, 362, 393; MFN status 568, 574; as nuclear power 538; One Belt, One Road policy 594; political reform in 32; rapprochement with Japan 538–9; relationships with: GDR 122–3, Japan 548–9, 556, Russia 574–9, Soviet Union 33–5, 546, 568–9; revisionist road 595; and Somalia 522; special brand of socialism in 572–3; status in unipolar world 8; student unrest in 31–2, 55, 57–8; territorial claims 574; and UN Serbian sanctions 511; wedded to communism and one-party state 533; and world-power status 595 perestroika 14, 18, 29, 34, 38, 51, 68, 82, 83, 99, 106, 194, 195, 230, 385, 388, 401, 410, 420, 438, 558 Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier 499, 517 Perot, Ross 520 Peters, Joe 12 Petrakov, Nikolai 400, 401, 412, 418 Philippines 446, 533 Pickering, Tom 167, 339 Playboy 599 PLO see Palestine Liberation Organisation Pöhl, Otto 265, 266 Poland 438, 449, 502; and 2+4 framework 222; as associate member of EC 509; Bush’s visit (1989) to 84, 85–7, 89, 90–1, 101, 192, 533; change and transformation in 27–8, 40, 64, 78, 86, 103–6, 107, 108, 112, 122, 148–50, 187, 188; comparison with: GDR 148–50, Hungary 90; exit from communist dictatorship 66–8, 75, 385; fearful of resurgent, unified Germany 214; financial debt and Western aid 86–7, 93–4, 95–6, 97–9, 308–9, 385, 469, 481; Gorbachev and Kohl’s support for 80, 82; Kohl’s visit (1989) to 128, 129–30, 134–5, 151–3, 181; as part of a Central European security zone (Bahr’s idea) 228; post-war borders 152, 154, 161–2, 176, 214, 220, 244, 246, 250–1, 285, 307; PRC’s attitude towards 64; Red Army in 312, 424; refugees from 507; and relationship with EC 263, 311; rise of Solidarity in 64, 74; Round Table talks 40, 71–2, 103–5, 150; signs mutual cooperation agreement with Hungary and Czechoslovakia 424; unrest and strikes in 70–2, 186, 188 Polish Communist Party 66, 106 Polish National Alliance 465 Polozkov, Ivan 403, 467 Poos, Jacques 492 Popov, Gavril 426 Portugal 54, 274 Portugalov, Nikolai 159 Potsdam 208–9, 584 Powell, Charles 280 Powell, Colin 5, 331, 335, 355, 367, 372, 377, 505, 521, 527 Powell Doctrine 375 Pozsgay, Imre 90, 107, 110 Prague 116–17, 119, 131, 161, 188, 189, 216, 310 Prague Spring (1968) 17, 58, 69, 70, 71, 188 Pravda 40–1 PRC see People’s Republic of China Primakov, Yevgeny 340, 346, 354, 375, 410 Privolnoye 13, 14 Pugo, Boris 363, 407, 417, 422, 441 Putin, Vladimir 7, 121, 183, 594, 595, 598 Qian Qichen 356–7, 359, 360, 361–2, 560, 562, 565, 567 Qiao Shi 122 Quadripartite Agreement (1971) 179 Rakowski, Mieczysław 86, 103 Reagan, Ronald 13, 25, 26, 283, 364, 477; arms reduction talks with Gorbachev 585; character and description 16, 102; intervention in Grenada (1983) 355, 543; offers financial aid to Poland 87; and peacekeeping in Lebanon (1983) 518; relationships with: Deng Xiaoping 30–1, Gorbachev 16–17, 28, 101, 193, 196, Thatcher 44, 210–11; supplies Saddam with weapons 335; visit to Japan (1983) 545 Red Army 17, 45, 58, 68, 70, 106, 138, 146, 222, 239, 242, 243, 248, 311, 393, 406, 423–4, 433, 477, 481, 515, 575 Red Cross 111 Republikaner 134 Reykjavik 16, 196, 536 Rice, Condoleezza 363, 420, 591 Riga 415, 420 Robotron Dresden 125 Rocard, Michel 281 Roh Tae-woo 535, 537, 538, 540, 546, 564, 567 Romania 64, 186–7, 389, 437, 449, 481, 507 Romanian Communist Party 187 Rome Council meeting (IGC on EMU, Dec. 1990) 269, 276 Rome NATO summit (Dec. 1991) 448 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 476, 596 Ross, Dennis 25, 446 Russia 5, 8, 54, 395–6, 400, 408, 438, 447, 448, 451, 456, 463, 507, 511, 556, 569 Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Institute 576 Russian Communist Party (RCP) 396, 399 Russian Council of Ministers 245 Russian Federation 451, 458, 576: becomes full member of IMF and World Bank 479; economic reform and transition 469–71, 479, 484–5; and G 7 479–82; and Helsinki II CSCE summit 485–6; Putin’s vision for 594; reclassification of US Ambassador to 457; and START I and II treaties 473–4; transition from imperial to post-imperial state 481–2; US peace and arms negotiations 472–9; Western aid for 466–7, 469, 471–2, 478, 479–81; Western attempts to integrate into NATO and G8 595; world status and identity 481–3, 485; see also Russia Russian Republic: and breakdown of Soviet Union 450, 459, 461–2, 591; and mutual security pact with Baltic States 417–18; nationalist sentiments 395–6, 419; situation pre-break-up of Soviet Union see Soviet Union; and Union Treaty 426–7, 438; Yeltsin as president of 341 and note, 382, 442; and Yeltsin-Gorbachev power struggle 383, 398–9, 440–52, 457–8 Ruvolo, Jim 377 Ryzhkov, Nikolai 245, 247, 394, 400, 402 Ryzhkov State Commission 400, 401 Sakharov, Andrei 59 Santer, Jacques 492 Sarotte, Mary 108 Saudi Arabia 320, 322, 329, 330–1, 333, 334, 336, 337, 342, 364, 370, 372, 373, 560, 562 Schabowski, Günter 144–5 Schlesinger, James 336 Schleswig-Holstein 506 Schloss Gymnich 113 Schlüter, Poul 420 Schmidt, Helmut 508 Schönhuber, Franz 158 Schreckenberger, Waldemar 2 Schult, Reinhard 109 Schürer, Gerhard 141 Schwarzkopf, Norman 373, 376 Scowcroft, Brent: agrees to deploy troops to Somalia 521; and aid to Russia 469; at Paris G7 summit (1989) 91, 93, 100; at Malta summit (1989) 193-94; background 25–6; and China’s revisionist road 595; comment on changes in Poland 105–6; conversations with Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng (1989) 61–3; and crisis in the Baltic States 420; and Eastern Europe 40; and European security 512; and German membership of NATO 221–2; and Gorbachev-Yeltsin power struggle 443; and Kuwait crisis 321–2, 324, 328, 335-6, 357, 374, 524; in Japan 555; and Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 167; meeting with Mitterrand 209–10; meets Han Xu 35; memo to Bush on Soviet Union 341–2; and Oder-Neisse line 307; relationship with Bush 24–5; scepticism concerning Soviet Union 28, 346; and US leadership in the world 525; use of ‘messy world’ phrase 524; visit to Beijing (Dec. 1989) 559–61; warns of Chinese claim to seat at the G7 table 481 SDP (SozialDemokratische Partei in der DDR) 135 Second World War 20, 26, 68, 161, 459, 480, 499, 548, 549, 582, 584, 594 SED see Socialist Unity Party of Germany SED Politburo 114, 117, 125–6, 138, 140–1, 142, 143 Seoul 534, 540, 576 Serbia 487, 488–9, 494, 497, 503, 511, 513 Service, Robert 409 Sevastopol 444 Shakhnazarov, Georgy 34, 230, 417, 426 Shamir, Itzhak 363 Shanghai 571 Shaposhnikov, Yevgeny 448 Shatalin, Stanislav 401, 402, 418 Shenzen 571 Shevardnadze, Eduard 3, 402, 414; and acceptance of financial aid 168; agrees to support Soviet cooperation with the West 257; alarmed at pause in US-Soviet relations 379–80; blocks Baltic States appearance at Paris CSCE summit (1990) 317; first Soviet foreign minister at NATO HQ (1989) 185; and flight of East Germans 117; and full German NATO membership 230, 241, 243; and German situation 159, 171, 219, 229–30, 233, 236, 245, 287; and German-Soviet ‘good neighbour’ pact 249; and Kuwait crisis 325, 326–7, 332, 339, 340, 346, 354, 357, 358–9; meets Genscher and Baker in Namibia 227; and new Union Treaty 394; and non-interference in GDR 78; and perestroika 230; praised by Bush 457; reaction to fall of Thatcher 317; reinstated as Soviet foreign minister (1991) 449; relationship with Baker 219, 325, 346; and removal of troops from GDR 248; replaced by Bessmertnykh (1991) 374; resignation (1990) 409, 427, 575; sent to Tbilisi (1989) 393; willing to grant free hand to Hungarians 114 short-range nuclear forces (SNFs) 43, 44, 45, 85, 291 Shultz, George 19, 22, 31 SII see Structural Impediments Initiative Singapore 533, 541, 549, 550–1, 562 Single European Act (SEA) (1986) 96 Sino-American relationship 28–33, 37, 60–3, 94–5, 557–74, 586 Sino-Japanese relationship 548–9, 564 Sino-Soviet relationship 33–5, 47–55, 546, 558, 575–8 Sino-Soviet-American tripolarity 4, 594–5 Skubiszewski, Krzysztof 246, 264 Slovakia 456 Slovenia 486, 490–1, 493, 497, 501, 503, 509, 589 Smith, Jacqueline 540 Snetkov, Boris 138 SNFs see short-range nuclear forces Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 161, 213, 252, 253 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 150, 157 Solidarity 64, 67–8, 70–1, 74, 85, 94, 103–4, 105 Somalia 455–6, 516–23, 524, 526, 528, 589–90 Somogyi, Ferenc 114–15 Sosuke Uno 94 South Africa 436 South East Asia 196, 359, 495, 533, 539 South Korea 38, 371, 533, 534–41, 541, 546, 549, 551, 556, 562, 564, 598 Soviet Communist Party see Communist Party of the Soviet Union Soviet Gang of Eight 383, 575 Soviet Politburo 14, 19, 159, 245, 388, 390, 391–4, 397, 398, 403, 409, 425 Soviet Union 3, 5, 7, 27, 33, 349, 449; and 500 Days Plan 401–4, 429; Balkanisation of 5, 5–6, 227, 317, 589; break-up of 450, 459, 461–2, 505, 509, 568, 569, 590–1, 595; Bush’s awareness of situation in 85; comparison with PRC 574–5, 583; cooperation with the West over Kuwait 320, 524–5; coup 381-5, 440-3; and crackdown in the Baltics 414–15, 417–21; economic situation in 385–7, 400–2, 405–6, 421–2, 429; and flight of East Germans to Hungary and the West 115–16; food aid offered to 406–7; and Gorbachev-Yeltsin power struggle 440–52; Gorbachev’s vision for 16–20, 197, 441; internal crisis and unrest in 421–7; and new Union Treaty 390, 394, 404, 408–9, 425, 427, 438, 440, 441; political situation in 6, 387–96, 403–5, 407–9, 422–7; referendum held in 424–5; requests aid from Beijing 569; situation post-breakup see Russian Federation; and State Commission for Economic Reform 400, 401; transformation of 15–16, 27, 28; Western aid for 302–5, 409–10, 419–20, 429, 431, 433, 436–7, 446; Western analysis of 429–30; and world-power status 595 Soviet-American relationship 13, 19, 25, 41–2, 44, 191–2, 344, 354, 364, 395, 412, 458, 463–4, 471–9, 529–30, 538, 592–3 Soviet-Chinese Friendship Society 123 Soviet-Chinese relationship 33–5, 47–55, 546, 558, 575–8 Soviet-German relationship 79–82, 406 Soviet-Japanese relationship 545–8 Soviet-Korean Peninsula relationship 535–41, 546 Sovietskaya Rossiya newspaper 396, 427 Spain 274 SPD see Social Democratic Party of Germany Spector, Stanley 540 Spielman, Richard 593 Spratly archipelago 574 Stahmer, Ingrid 143 Stalin, Joseph 14, 20, 34, 54, 208, 480, 575 Stalowa Wola 71 START see Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty Stasi 108, 212–13 Stavropol 13, 14 Stoltenberg, Gerhard 265, 508 Strasbourg 84 Strasbourg EC summit (Dec. 1989) 176–8, 260, 269, 270, 273 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) 18, 21, 28, 195, 214, 296, 410, 411, 430, 431, 435–6, 439, 446, 456, 461, 473–4, 529–30, 537, 593 Strauss, Robert S. 482 Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) 544 Sweden 502 Syria 320, 334, 364, 560, 567, 594 Taiwan 533, 541, 563, 566, 574 Takeshita, Noboru 35 Tallinn 417 Taubman, William 106 Tbilisi 59, 106, 392–3 Teltschik, Horst 129, 157–8, 159–61, 168, 179, 200, 231, 237, 248, 269 Terms of Planned Withdrawal of the Red Army 250 terrorism 166, 350, 592, 596, 598 Texas A&M University 524, 526, 581, 600 Thailand 541 Thatcher, Margaret 290; at Houston G7 summit (1990) 304; at Paris CSCE summit (1990) 255, 317; at Paris G7 summit (1989) 94; attitude towards a new Europe 279–87; background 171–2; concerned about Gorbachev 230; dislike of Kohl 280; and EMU 281–2; fails to support German unification 3, 132, 154, 172, 210; and Kuwait crisis 332, 354, 357–8; and ‘inviolability of borders’ 176–7; meets Bush in Bermuda (1990) 285–7; and NATO 43, 45–6; praises Bush’s Aug. 1990 speech on Kuwait 334; reaction to Kohl’s Ten Point Plan 169, 172–4; refuses to sign European Community Charter of Social Rights 178; relationships with: Gorbachev 43–4, 287, Mitterrand 280–1, Reagan 44, 210–11 Third World 15, 27, 93, 306, 461, 524, 538, 539 Thompson, John A. 596 Tiananmen Square (1989) 3, 4, 5, 50, 55, 57, 59–60, 62, 63–4, 67, 100, 101, 122, 149, 340, 357, 360, 362, 393, 420, 436, 531, 548, 557, 558, 559, 563, 564, 566, 571, 583 Tibet 569, 576 Tierra del Fuego 543 TIME magazine 350, 367, 557 The Times 503 Titarenko, Mikhail 576 Titarenko, Raisa Maximovna see Gorbachev, Raisa Maximovna Titarenko Tito, Josip 487 Tokyo 576 Tokyo Declaration on Japan-US Global Partnership (1992) 552 Transatlantic Declaration (1990) 544 Transatlantic Economic Partnership (1998) 544 Transylvania 438 Treaty on the Conditions of Temporary Presence (1990) 250 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (1990) 257 Treaty on Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (1990) 246 Treaty on Transitional Measures (1990) 250 Truman Doctrine (1947) 478 Truman, Harry S. 208, 324–5, 371 Trump, Donald 8, 12, 303, 599–600 Tucker, Robert 460 Turkey 263, 329, 334, 337, 338, 374, 508 Tutweiler, Margaret D. 515 Tutzing 215, 216, 217, 221 Ukraine 5, 383, 394, 400, 408, 424, 438, 444, 445, 447, 448, 463, 473, 482, 483, 486, 497, 500, 507, 594, 598 UN Charter (1945) 486, 501, 525, 588 UN General Assembly 117 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees (1951) 109 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 113 UN Human Rights Commission 576 UN New York Summit (1992) 458–9, 569 UN Security Council 325, 340, 342, 344, 345, 349, 355, 356, 358–9, 365, 369, 457, 458–9, 490, 494–5, 500, 510, 511, 517, 525, 535, 545, 549, 562, 570 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights 13 Unified Task Force in Somalia (UNITAF) 522, 523, 524, 526 Union of Democratic Forces 187 Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics 408 UNITAF see Unified Task Force in Somalia United Arab Emirates (UAE) 334 United Nations 348, 378, 465, 500; Gorbachev’s speech (1988) to 12–13, 16–20, 21, 25, 27–8; peacemaking capacity 525–6, 528; role in post-Cold War future 569, 594; in Somalia 517, 518–20, 522, 523, 524, 528; and Kuwait crisis 320, 336, 354–61, 369, 370, 371, 376; Yeltsin’s speech to 462–3 United Nations Protected Areas 509 United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) 509 United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) 563 United States 3, 7; America First and Make America Great Again pledge 599; and Balkan conflict 489–90, 494, 495, 498–9, 500–1, 512, 515–16; and commitment to democracy policy 596–8; counter-terror war 596–7; domestic problems 323, 351–2, 365; and European security issues 512–16; and intervention in Kuwait 319–21, 490; and Latin American drug problem 542–3; and messiness of new world order 524–31; military humanitarian mission in Somalia 516–23, 528; multilateral approach 563–4; power based on alliances and economic interdependence 598–9; presses for truly global US-led free-trading system 5, 27; provides aid to Soviet Union 302–5, 409–10, 433, 466, 471–3, 476–80; reappraisal of foreign policy 505–6; relationship with China 28–31, 37, 60–3, 94–5; and START treaty 473–4; suspicious of French muscle-flexing 511–13; ‘trade not aid’ motto 543; and ‘victory’ after end of Cold War 461–2; and vision of ‘global community of nations’ 8 Uno, Sosuke 544 UNOSOM I 517, 518–20 UNOSOM II 522, 523, 524, 528 UNPROFOR see United Nations Protection Force UNTAC see United Nations Transitional Authority Urban, George 279 Uruguay Round (1986-1993) 97, 195, 306, 542, 543 US Bureau of International Organisation Affairs 518 US Defense Planning Guidance statement (1992) 529 US Foreign Relations Authorisation bill (1990) 561 US Forward Strategy on Freedom (2003) 597 US News and World Report 350 US-Chinese relationship 28–33, 37, 60–3, 94–5, 557–74, 586 US-Japanese relationship 541–50, 551–6 US-Korean Peninsula relationship 535, 536–8, 540 US-Soviet relationship 19, 44, 191–2, 344, 354, 364, 395, 412, 458, 463–4, 471–9, 529–30, 538, 592–3 USSR 5, 16, 54, 83, 85, 106, 108, 115, 180, 263, 342, 385, 395, 444, 445, 456, 463, 483, 500, 562, 569 Uzbekistan 394–5 Van Buren, Martin 23 Vance, Cyrus 495, 499 Varennikov, Valentin 427 Védrine, Hubert 305 Veil, Simone 507 Velvet Revolutions 189, 192–3, 258, 456, 486 Venezuela 543 Vereinigte Linke 135 Versailles Treaty (1919) 32, 308, 316 Vezović, Dobrosav 501 Vienna 584 Vietnam 20, 26, 33, 344, 350, 355, 364, 366, 367, 369, 377, 515, 526, 546, 562, 563, 574 Vilnius 415, 417, 419 Vladivostok 546 Vogel, Ezra 541 Waigel, Theo 246, 248, 406 Wałęsa, Lech 67, 87, 70-2, 86-7, 94, 103–5, 129 Wall Street Journal 351 Walters, Barbara 520 Walters, Vernon 217 war on terror 596, 598 Warsaw 42, 51, 67, 68, 85, 89, 91, 95, 98, 100, 104, 116, 161 Warsaw Ghetto 129, 130 Warsaw Pact 89, 172, 218, 299, 449, 584; Bucharest summit (1989) 139; commitment to disarmament 124–5; and cooperation with NATO 258, 314–15; dissolution 423; East Germany sealed off from 120; and expansion of NATO 216–17, 448; fate of 187, 207, 214, 217, 227, 264, 298, 461, 588; and flight of East Germans 114, 115, 116, 143; GDR membership of 180, 228; Gorbachev’s attitude towards 127, 198, 256; Hungary as member of 90; interventions by 69, 71, 73, 84; joint meeting with NATO in Ottawa (1990) 222; and NATO London Declaration (1990) 300; Moscow meeting (Dec. 1989) 211; and opening of Austro-Hungarian border 77; Poland as member of 68, 90, 104; and right to leave 231; and Thatcher 173; and a unified Germany 219, 233 Washington Conference (1992) 446, 466; see also Coordinating Conference on Assistance to the New Independent States Washington Post 366, 422, 466, 521 Washington summit (1990) 232–5 Waters, Maxine 477 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 540, 565 Weinberger, Caspar 364 Weizsäcker, Richard von 35, 100, 506–7, 507 West Germany see Federal Republic of Germany Western European Union (WEU) 223, 486, 494, 511, 512, 527 WEU see Western European Union Whitney, Craig 115 Whitten, Jamie L. 478 Wilson, Woodrow 596 Windhoek 230 WMD see weapons of mass destruction Wojtas, Wieslaw 71 Wolf, Christa 143 Wolfowitz, Paul 521 World Bank 30, 86, 87, 410, 429, 434, 435, 465, 471–2, 479, 560, 561 World Economic Forum 279 World Trade Agreement 306 World Trade Center 596 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 5, 582, 594 Wörner, Manfred 39, 222, 223, 238, 290, 291, 292–3, 299, 332, 450, 512 Wright, Sir Oliver 285 WTO see World Trade Organisation Xi Jinping 594, 595 Xinjian 569 Yakovlev, Alexander 412, 419 Yanaev, Gennady 381, 382, 441 Yang Shangkun 37, 50, 61, 567, 577–8 Yanukovych, Viktor 598 Yao Yilin 124, 137, 559 Yavlinsky, Grigory 400, 429, 430, 433 Yazov, Dmitry 245, 363, 383, 393, 415, 417, 441, 546 Yeltsin, Boris 7, 595; and the 500 Day Plan 401–2; anger at Pyongyang’s reluctance to adhere to NPT 538; at UN Summit in New York (1992) 458; background and rise to power 397; and the Baltic States 417–18; Bush’s view of 428–9; character and description 397, 398, 428, 442; commitment to political freedom and cooperation 462–4; and coup 384; and country’s transition to capitalist democracy 5, 591; and dinner with Gorbachev and Nazarbayev (1991) 439–40; and dissolving of USSR 497; and economic reform 422, 470, 479, 484–5, 576; elected president of Russia 426; and improving people’s lives 424–5; at Joint Session of US Congress (1992) 475–6; meetings with Bush (1991, 1992) 432, 463–4; and new Union Treaty 404, 408; plans his political comeback 397–9; prevented from meeting Baker 428; reaction to Tiananmen Square 59; reasserts his position of power 470–1; relationships with: Bush 455, 464, 592, Gorbachev 341, 383, 397–9, 400, 402, 425–7, 440–52, 457–8; Japan 546–7; resigns from CPSU 399; and revival of Russia as great power 530–1, 595; signs joint declaration with PRC 577–8; signs START II treaty (1993) 456, 530, 537, 593; speech to UN in New York (1992) 462–3, 479; status and identity of 481–3, 484; talks with Li Peng (1992) 570; threatened arrest of 382 Yemen 325, 331, 355 Yeutter, Clayton 306 Yongbyon 537, 538 Young Democrats (Hungary) 107 Yugoslav National Army (JNA) 486, 490–1, 495, 497, 510 Yugoslavia 5, 32, 264, 438, 456, 459, 462, 486–505, 507, 509, 513–15, 526, 527, 589; see also Balkan states Zagladin, Vadim 168–9 Zaire 355 Zelikow, Philip 591 Zhang Zheng 575–6 Zhao Ziyang 32, 51, 55, 571 Zhivkov, Todor 187, 190 Zhu Qizhen 573 Zhuhai 571 Zimbabwe 355, 597 Zoellick, Robert 204–5, 429 Zuckerman, Mortimer B. 350 List of Illustrations Here Gorbymania in Manhattan, 7 December 1988 (Richard Drew/AP/Shutterstock) Here George H. W. Bush with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Governors Island, 7 December 1988 (Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library) Here George and Barbara Bush in the Forbidden City, 25 February 1989 (Diana Walker/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images) Here Protest in Beijing, 17 May 1989 (Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images) Here Deng Xiaoping with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Beijing, 16 May 1989 (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) Here China crackdown, Beijing, 5 June 1989 (Liu Heung Shing/AP/Shutterstock) Here Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 5 June 1989 (Jeff Widener/AP/Shutterstock) Here Poland’s round table, Warsaw, 6 February 1989 (AFP/Getty Images) Here Gyula Horn and Alois Mock cut the Iron Curtain, near Sopron, Austria–Hungary border, 27 June 1989 (Bernhard J.

And the Western leader who would have to cope with the fallout was a cautious new American president who felt considerable scepticism about his magnetic Soviet counterpart and was wary about the true intentions behind Russia’s headline-grabbing reforms. George H. W. Bush had been vice president for all eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–9). He would enter the White House determined to take stock of US–Soviet relations and rethink his priorities as he started building a new agenda that would distinguish him politically from the Reagan administration.[4] In fact, his main concern in early 1989 was how to handle the ‘reinvention’ of communism that was under way not in Europe but in Asia

This meant reducing US hostility (disengaging from the arms race) and making compromises in the Third World (including ideological recognition of the right to self-determination). So domestic policy was inextricably bound up with foreign policy. Seeking a less confrontational relationship with the United States, Gorbachev was keen to talk with his American opposite number.[9] At first glance, however, US president Ronald Reagan seemed an unlikely partner. Born in 1911, and so the same age as the man Gorbachev had just replaced, Reagan was a vehement anti-communist who had intensified the arms race once he came to power in 1981. He was notorious for his denunciation of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and for his prediction that the ‘march of freedom and democracy’ would ‘leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash heap of history’.[10] This all-out ideological competition, he believed, justified the military build-up of his early years.


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

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

The leaders even tried to recover some of the funds stolen under the civilians, but Britain and other western governments and banks, nervous about getting a reputation among dictators and crooks for not protecting their lucrative cash deposits from foreign investigations, disgracefully declined to help.39 But the soldiers became more authoritarian, bulldozing informal settlements and markets, and imprisoning many people. Fela’s “Beasts of No Nation,” which he wrote in jail while serving time for foreign currency violations, captures the spirit of the time. The album cover depicts Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and South African apartheid president P. W. Botha with devil horns and blood dripping from their mouths. Even as the oil revenues collapsed, the factions kept guzzling cash, so yawning deficits opened up, and foreign debt grew.40 In the boom years Nigeria had found it easy to borrow money (bankers love lending to rich people, and in the 1970s their coffers were stuffed with Arab petrodollars), and foreign debt had reached $5 billion by 1980.

Savimbi burned UNITA dissidents on public bonfires,5 along with their families. Graffiti in Luanda succinctly embraced the character of the two sides: “UNITA kills, the MPLA steals.” Savimbi slept with his aides’ wives, to put his underlings in their place and to make them worry what he knew about them. Apartheid South Africa invaded to support him, and Ronald Reagan, who sent him guns and missiles in the 1980s, once hosted him in the White House and predicted that Savimbi would win “a victory that electrifies the world.” In 1985, the now-disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff joined Savimbi in southern Angola to host a meeting of Afghan Mujahedin, Nicaraguan Contras, Laotian guerrillas, and what one South African newspaper called the “Oliver North American Right.”

There were some on the left of the Socialist Party who indeed intended just that. A lengthy political struggle ensued that finished with an almost complete victory by the old Foccart networks, whose effective leader was Bongo.” As part of his strategy, Bongo even threatened Mitterrand with the nuclear option: turning toward the Americans under the recently elected Ronald Reagan.51 But he never did. Instead, a compromise was reached, which left the Clan unscathed: French rightwingers kept their fingers firmly in the fabulous Gabonese pie, but it was expanded to let the French Socialists get a piece too. It is remarkable to think how far this African president had influenced politics in a big western democracy.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

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

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

In 1982, just months before succeeding Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told Soviet foreign intelligence officers abroad to more directly incorporate these “active measures” into their standard work. As the officially designated “Main Adversary,” the United States was the top target, and the KGB followed up Andropov’s order by designating an ambitious priority for the stepped-up operations: preventing the 1984 reelection of Ronald Reagan. Soviet agents were instructed to infiltrate American party and campaign staffs in search of embarrassing information to leak to the press, while Soviet propagandists pushed a set of story lines to the Western media to try to reduce public support for the popular president. They sought to portray Reagan as a militarist who aided repressive regimes and fueled a dangerous arms race.2 Soviet agents successfully seeded scores of negative news stories around the world while disseminating forged government communications to American allies and the press.

A review of Soviet operations for 1982 and 1983 conducted by the KGB’s chief foreign operations arm noted that “the range of questions dealt with by means of active measures has been continually widening.”3 These types of activities were, of course, not unique to Moscow; the CIA’s own media interventions and manipulations during the Cold War have been well documented.4 Ultimately, the Soviets’ “active measures” did not penetrate American public consciousness in a material way in the 1984 election. Ronald Reagan handily defeated Walter Mondale, taking forty-nine states and 525 of the 538 electoral college votes. Analogous efforts aimed at Margaret Thatcher during the UK’s 1983 general election had also come up short, as she, too, won reelection in a landslide. Reagan’s victory was obviously overdetermined, but, even had the US presidential election been close, the Soviet Union faced huge obstacles during the Cold War in influencing the American electorate—or voters in other democracies—with its propaganda and disinformation.

Rather, by relying on the reader’s belief that common sense—whatever it is—is axiomatically good, Paine insisted that his conclusion required no further justification. Rosenfeld argues that this combination of features—simultaneously desirable and devoid of specific content—has made common sense extremely popular among American politicians as a rhetorical device. In the modern era, for example, invocations of common sense are widespread and bipartisan. Ronald Reagan claimed that “preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it’s common sense.” Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have argued for “commonsense gun control” efforts such as legislation that would require universal background checks. Paul Ryan has called for “commonsense conservatism,” including immigration reform and rolling back of FDA regulations.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

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

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

Whole populations forced to march more or less in lockstep were freed to find their own drummers, an upending of the existing order that found visceral expression in events such as the Christmas 1989 execution of the Ceausescus in Romania and the January 1990 storming of East Germany’s Stasi headquarters—the secret-service organization that represented one of the darker pinnacles of postwar bureaucratic achievement. Economies trapped in a mostly closed system were opened to foreign investment and trade championed by a burgeoning herd of multinational corporations. As General William Odom, Ronald Reagan’s National Security Agency director, observed: “By creating a security umbrella over Europe and Asia, Americans lowered the business transaction costs in all these regions: North America, Western Europe and Northeast Asia all got richer as a result.”3 Now those lower transaction costs could be extended, and with them also the promise of greater economic freedom.

In those countries, minority parties held fewer than 10 percent of seats three decades ago; now their average share has risen to nearly 30 percent.16 So when politicians claim a “mandate” these days, they are more often than not engaging in wishful thinking. The type of clear-cut election victory that could justify this terminology is simply too rare. Political scientists point out that even in the United States, where the two-party system would seem to produce clear winners and losers, only one recent presidential election—Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, defeating Walter Mondale—qualified as a landslide. Reagan not only swept all but one state and the District of Columbia and their electoral votes but also won a massive share of actual votes, with 59 percent—a margin that no US candidate since then has equaled or beaten.17 This sort of victory is even less likely in systems with three, four, five, or more major parties and many small ones splitting allegiances.

Yet, as is also the case in other arenas discussed here (politics, war, etc.), beyond the information revolution there are forces at work that have altered the way power is acquired, used, and lost in the business world. In the last three decades, for example, government actions have drastically altered long-fixed business structures. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched a wave of policy changes that spurred competition and changed the way of doing business in a variety of sectors from telephones and air travel to coal mining and banking. Starting in the late 1980s, developing countries from Thailand to Poland to Chile implemented their own revolutionary economic reforms: privatization, deregulation, trade opening, elimination of barriers to foreign investment, freer currency trading, financial liberalization, and a host of other competition-boosting changes.


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

In the years after NRDC was first started, with funds from the Ford Foundation, it was almost entirely dependent on foundation money. Gifts from wealthy individuals were “small potatoes,” recalled James Gustave Speth, a cofounder of the group with Adams. “It was not part of the culture in those early days.” During the 1980s, though, Ronald Reagan’s environmental policies created alarm among many Americans, including those in the upper class, and NRDC started to receive more money from individuals. By 1987, only 40 percent of its money came from foundations. The group stepped up its focus on individual donors in the 1990s, as the great boom of that decade got under way, and began to pull environmentally minded corporate leaders onto its board.

The charges leveled at the rich by Johnston and other critics are all too true—some of America’s wealthiest individuals really have led a concerted, and often deviously dishonest, attack on progressive taxation. That attack has been under way for more than three decades, it has been extremely well funded, and it has been very successful. The lower tax rates for the rich ushered in by Ronald Reagan saved the top 1 percent of U.S. households trillions of dollars in taxes between 1981 and 2009. All of the revenue lost due to these cuts was replaced by borrowed money—a lasting legacy to future generations. Polls show that the affluent, on average, are more likely to oppose tax hikes than any other group is.

Some of the most activist members of the liberal money class are the products of this synthesis. We have seen this movie before, but in reverse. The early postwar era of California prosperity yielded a notably conservative culture c08.indd 168 5/11/10 6:24:49 AM left-coast money 169 and two iconic Republican leaders, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Many business leaders in the new West leaned libertarian, combining the fierce individualism of that region with a bias against social-engineering elites and tax-and-spend government. Fueled by a booming defense sector, Southern California was the most suburbanized area of the United States, and its politics reflected the conservatism that once was synonymous with suburban living.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

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

Special Operations commandos made their way through downtown Kabul to reclaim the embassy, which had been shuttered during Afghanistan’s civil war and the years of Taliban rule. Gary Berntsen, a counterterrorism officer, was one of the first Americans to set foot in the embassy since 1989; he found rotary-dial telephones and official photographs of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush on the wall. On the floor of the ambassador’s office Berntsen found a more somber memento: a photograph from the funeral of Adolph Dubs, the last U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who was killed in an exchange of fire during a botched hostage rescue attempt at a Kabul hotel in 1979.22 Among the many bureaucratic tribes in Washington, the Foreign Service had always conceived of itself as something of an elite.

* Asked about his recollection of the briefing, Wolfowitz told me through an intermediary that Mines’s story “doesn’t square with his recollection of this event from eight years ago,” without offering any further account of what happened at the meeting. CHAPTER 2 The PowerPoint Warrior The cavernous, air-conditioned auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington was packed to capacity with Pentagon bureaucrats, defense contractors, and men and women in dress uniform. Covering a naval research and development conference was not the most exciting reporting assignment, but Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address that day.

.”* Still, after a few months of persuading, Hillen received the National Security Council’s blessing to begin working on whole-of-government counterinsurgency guidelines. “Which is probably why Dave [Petraeus] cannily pushed it off on me,” Hillen told me. “I mean, why should he get the crap beat out of him in Washington for three months, when I was willing to do it?” The governmentwide counterinsurgency conference was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington that September. The agenda read like a roster of luminaries from the counterinsurgency world: An opening panel on counterinsurgency best practices featured David Kilcullen, the Australian military officer who had won a cult following with his “Twenty-Eight Articles,” and Colonel H.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

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

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

Afterward, I walked out into the heavy, blinding heat—the Washington Monument and National Mall to my right, the White House just a couple of blocks behind me. What could I do in politics to top this? Something gnawed at me, though. I’d moved down to Washington just over two years earlier to be a part of the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks. The Wilson Center was in the Ronald Reagan Building. Every day I’d go to work, walking past the slab of the Berlin Wall displayed prominently at the building’s entrance like the ancient spoils of some imperial victory. Then I’d walk past Wilson’s stirring words carved into a stone wall: WE WILL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS CARRIED NEAREST OUR HEARTS.

Obama used to talk to me about the old war movies set during or after the battle, how there was usually some unit at the center of the story that shorthanded the diversity of America—the wisecracking Jew from Brooklyn, the Southern-accented sharpshooter, the Irish guy from Chicago, the jock from somewhere out west, all coming together to do this great and necessary thing. There wasn’t usually a Black guy, unless the cast was sprawling enough to have room for cooks and valets. Still, he saw something aspirational in this positive mythologizing of diversity—a national identity forged out of differences. For a person of my generation, Ronald Reagan crystallized the D-Day myth on the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. Standing with his back to cliffs scaled by American troops, he told the story of one unit of Rangers—how they’d fought, and struggled, and helped one another get over the top. Then he addressed those same Rangers, now gone gray, assembled before him: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.

Lee High School, punched his ticket to Rice University, earned a law degree from the University of Texas, and moved north. I was formed from these opposites. A Jewish mother from New York and a Christian father from Texas. A liberal Democratic mother who came of age revering the Kennedys and a conservative Republican father who revered Ronald Reagan. A woman of the sixties who dabbled in drugs and protest politics and a man of the fifties who loved Willie Nelson and long drives. An American love story in which each had disappointed their parents by marrying after meeting in Lyndon Johnson’s Washington, breaking the unspoken promises of their identities: My mother was supposed to marry a Jewish doctor from New York and my father was supposed to marry a Texas debutante.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness, as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows. And if there are a lot of you, or you’re openly, proudly communist, that’s just as bad. As McCarthyism took off, anything smelling even remotely like communism was expelled from polite American society. A young actor named Ronald Reagan imposed a loyalty oath on all the members of the Screen Actors Guild, the powerful union he led at the time. At the levels of government that mattered, everyone who remained was a fanatical anticommunist—which meant that some of the smartest experts in the State Department, the US diplomatic service, were purged.

The Philippines was the site of Washington’s largest experiment with direct colonial rule, and its independence had been carefully managed to keep Manila in the Western camp, ever since the CIA had defeated the left-nationalist Huks using terror and psychological warfare in 1954. US bases in the Philippines were used in 1958 when the CIA attempted to break up Indonesia. The right-wing Marcos, re-elected under slightly suspicious circumstances in 1968, and his wife, Imelda, were close friends of California Governor Ronald Reagan, who attended the gala opening of Imelda’s lavish, multimillion-dollar Cultural Center.43 Some of the anti-Marcos students were followers of Communist José Maria “Joma” Sison, a Maoist literature professor inspired by Lumumba, Castro, and Western New Left intellectuals. Sison studied in Indonesia before the fall of Sukarno and came to the conclusion in 1965–66, just like Pol Pot, that the unarmed PKI had left itself too vulnerable.

D’Aubuisson also attended the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Taiwan, which by then had provided training to officials from almost every Latin American nation.50 In 1983, D’Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well. “You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.”51 When the Salvadoran civil war got underway, the military backed by Ronald Reagan made scorched earth tactics a routine part of its modus operandi. On December 11, 1981, reports surfaced of a massacre at El Mozote village. Salvadoran troops executed more than nine hundred men, women, and children with US-made assault rifles. The next day, Reagan appointed a Harvard-trained former liberal named Elliott Abrams to serve as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

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

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

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency briefed the press that Rosenqvist was a right-wing stooge of Mrs. Thatcher and the British electricity industry. In fact, Rosenqvist was a Second World War Jewish resistance hero. He was also a communist and deemed a security risk and barred from attending scientific conferences in the United States. Without brave scientists such as Rosenqvist, the Ronald Reagan Administration would have to fight the scientific consensus on what to do about acid rain with one hand tied behind its back. NAPAP, put in train by the Carter Administration, would independently confirm the thrust of Rosenqvist’s conclusions but would deliver its final report after Reagan had left the White House.

But the authors had not properly understood the effects of their “ratiocinations” on the world at large. All this on the strength of a one-dimensional model? “Many one-dimensional models are remarkably predictive,” Maddox answered. “For the time being, at least, the issue of nuclear winter has also become, in a sense, irrelevant.”38 It had been rendered irrelevant by Ronald Reagan in what Henry Kissinger calls “an astonishing performance.”39 The Kremlin had made opposition to deployment of cruise and Pershings the linchpin of Soviet foreign policy. Its dismissal of the “zero-zero” option (under which NATO would dismantle cruise and Pershings if Moscow did the same with its SS-20s) had, according to Kissinger, turned out to be a “stunning victory” for Reagan and Helmut Kohl.40 The leaders of the West prevailed in the face of the most determined and sophisticated propaganda campaign since the fall of Nazi Germany.

The defense industry would be closed down and its engineers and scientists redirected to creating a new energy paradigm based on solar and other forms of renewable energy, to transform society from its dependence on fossil fuels. By harvesting the sun from the Sahara, Europe would be transformed into a hydrogen society.20 New Scientist asked Scheer how, without any background as a physicist or engineer, he had gotten involved in solar energy. It was the time of Ronald Reagan and his Strategic Defense Initiative. “I had not read a single book on renewable energy. I just did my own thinking and I wrote a chapter suggesting a new SDI, the Solar Development Initiative,” Scheer replied.21 Unsurprisingly Scheer found little to celebrate in the ending of the Cold War. In A Solar Manifesto, published four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Scheer condemned the leaders of the West for “their self-deceiving euphoria of victory.”22 Even so, Scheer managed to profit from this apparent reverse.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

With the goal of maximizing the concentration of capital within the ruling class, neoliberal governments shift risks away from society at large and onto individuals, choosing to cut public funding and instead fund tax cuts to benefit the wealthy. This is achieved through austerity budgets that defund public education and social programs. As a bonus to the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who in the 1980s slashed welfare spending on their respective sides of the Atlantic, austerity also allows the poor to be blamed for their perceived moral failures, even when such retribution might cost society more money. For instance, it would actually be cheaper for governments to provide permanent housing to people without homes or to keep the underclass from acquiring pathogens in the first place, but austerity hawks would rather pay more to punish the poor.

Lorena wound up in coercive situations, trafficked as a sex worker against her will. When she moved to Jackson Heights, according to El Diario, she was living with twenty other transgender women who were also trafficked. She began to use crack cocaine. By 1986, Lorena said, she was “able to obtain my documents by President Ronald Reagan,” eventually obtaining a green card under the amnesty program. In the subsequent years, she decided to get sober, and when she did, she became relentless about helping other people. She eventually worked for the Community Health Network. But much of her work was on a volunteer basis. “Sometimes, our transgender folks don’t even have the self-esteem to think that they’re worth organizing for and fighting for their own rights,” Daniel Dromm, an openly gay member of the New York City Council and its representative for Jackson Heights from 2010 to 2021, also told Queens Public TV.

Postal Service were once considered private, but their envelopes are now scanned so the government can see who is mailing whom; or of how telephone calls were once largely protected as confidential, but now electronic communications can easily be analyzed by corporations.) Of course, Republican presidents do this, too. But whereas Republican presidents (especially Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) have ignited significant protests against their investments in the carceral state, Democratic presidents largely have not, slipping under the radar. Democratic legislators, mayors, and governors receive relatively little pushback against creating a police state, allowing it to grow almost unchecked.


pages: 196 words: 53,627

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

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

All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas. And the marvelous thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.— RONALD REAGAN Someone’s knockin’ at the door, Somebody’s ringin’ the bell. Do me a favor. Open the door, and let ’em in. — PAUL MCCARTNEY INTRODUCTION The magazines and the illustrators are long gone and largely forgotten, but the images endure. Like the 1903 print from Judge, a popular political magazine of the period.

They cite special circumstances that made the past acculturation of European and Asian immigration possible but render it impossible for Latinos. They view these foreigners as a liability rather than an asset. They want an immigration “time-out.” WHAT WOULD REAGAN DO? If you’re a free-market conservative in the Ronald Reagan tradition, this debate has been doubly depressing because so much of the bellyaching has originated with the political right, where many people have convinced themselves that scapegoating immigrants for America’s economic and social ills—real and imagined—is a winner at the polls. On the topic of immigration, at least, too many conservatives have pocketed their principles and morphed into reactionary Populists.

Some of us watched in disbelief as principled conservatives morphed into reactionary populists. These profiles in courage used immigration to declare their independence from Bush at a time when he was highly unpopular. Gee, how brave. Limbaugh and Bennett, who normally worship at the political altar of pro-immigrant Ronald Reagan, were instead urging Republicans to follow in the footsteps of Pete Wilson. Ingraham regularly denounced the Republican “elites” supporting comprehensive immigration reform at the supposed expense of America’s working class. Ingraham, self-styled enemy of “elites,” is a Connecticut-bred, Ivy League-educated, former Supreme Court law clerk.


pages: 88 words: 22,980

One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic by Lawrence Lessig

collapse of Lehman Brothers, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, jimmy wales, Occupy movement, Ronald Reagan, Yochai Benkler

The 1 percent, as the Occupiers would brilliantly frame the meme, had been saved. The 99 percent continued to suffer. And when you think about it like that, the movement had a point. Whether intentional or not, whether planned or accidental, there is something outrageous about a safety net for the rich only. This is not the social justice of John Stuart Mill, or even Ronald Reagan. It is the social justice of the Titanic: Our economy had hit an iceberg. The first class had their lifeboats made ready by the crew; the rest of us were told to swim. This recognition has fueled its own passion. The majority of that passion has come from the Left. Some from the Far Left. Some even from the anarchist Left (or Right, depending on how you classify anarchists).

But we’ve not seen Congress take the lead on fundamental reform since Reconstruction. I don’t have high expectations that Congress will recover its capacity for leadership anytime soon. Instead, it has been presidents who have been the engine of reform in American politics. FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan—these were the transformational figures of the last century. It thus makes sense to look to the presidency for the leadership that this movement will require. Or maybe it did make sense, until Barack Obama showed us once again that we were Charlie Brown, and reform presidents were Lucy, pulling the football out from under us.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The very richest… Of the richest women on the 400 over the last 25 years, only one (Doris Fisher, cofounder of the Gap with her husband) didn’t inherit her money from a family or spouse. …and the working rich Most of the working women on the 400 are heiresses. But some, like eBay’s Margaret Whitman, Pleasant Rowland (creator of the American Girl doll empire), Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart are self-made. * * * While Ronald Reagan wasn’t solely responsible for the historic economic boom reflected in the Forbes 400, there can be little doubt that he created the environment in which the list took root and flourished. Elected to the presidency in 1980, two years before the list was invented, Reagan was in certain respects a characteristic voice of the corporate fifties: After his movie career faded, he became well-known as a spokesman for General Electric (GE) and as the genial program host for its hit television show, General Electric Theater.

What happened to McNamara as secretary of defense during the 1960s—as American culture was shocked in turn by the assassination of a president, a failed war, and the rise of the counterculture—helped bring this idealization of the corporation to an end. The company man became, in the eyes of many, a soulless automaton. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, moreover, a frightening inflation ripped through the economy, destroying public faith in the weight and stability of the dollar. As president, Ronald Reagan inherited a nation that had lost its confidence in business. He instinctively knew that the country was not in a mood to restore the corporation to iconic status. Instead, he invoked a simpler era, exalting individual pluck over institutional power. It was the entrepreneur, not the bearer of a famous name or the holder of a corporate title, who represented the true spirit of wealth in America.

The sets of Dynasty were luxuriously furnished, and so was his own home, one of Hollywood’s largest. Once he had a ton of snow5 trucked to his 123-room home so his family could enjoy a white Christmas. When, in 1983, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Justice, and Commerce Departments under then president Ronald Reagan decided to rescind the regulations regarding the sale of syndication rights, a move that would hurt the Hollywood studios but help the Big Three TV networks, Wasserman lobbied hard to maintain the status quo. Among other things, he visited6 President Reagan, his former client, in the Oval Office, and the decision was eventually reversed.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

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

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

The 1930s Hollywood film White Zombie incorrectly associated voodoo, African beliefs syncretized with Christianity, with exotic superstitions and occult practices. Unscrupulous practitioners made a fortune out of fake potions, powders, fetishes, and talismans to ward off evil. In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan embraced voodoo economics. At about the same time, banks created voodoo banking. It’s a Wonderful Bank! Every Christmas, Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life is repeated. For some, it probably isn’t Christmas until they have seen it again. James Stewart plays every banker George Bailey, who owns and runs the town’s bank.

In support of their argument, Glassman and Hassett pointed to the fact that 6 years earlier in January 1993 the Dow had been around 3,300. A reviewer in the Publishers Weekly noted the only thing missing was an exhortation to buy stocks for the Gipper—one George Gipp, an American college football player, immortalized by Knute Rockne’s famous “Win just one for the Gipper” speech later used as a political slogan by Ronald Reagan. For many authors (David Elias, Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting from the Greatest Bull Market in History; Charles W. Kadlec, Dow 100,000), it was an act of faith that the stock market would go up. Louis Rukeyser once drew investors’ attention to the risk of falling as well as rising markets: “Trees don’t grow to the sky.”22 Glassman and Hassett’s book was not without fans.

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


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

Over the years, Ardeshir Zahedi compiled a formidable Rolodex of famous names ranging from Hollywood celebrities to heads of corporations and presidents, kings, queens, and prime ministers. As ambassador and foreign minister, Zahedi was especially attentive to the great men who ruled American public life during the Cold War and especially Republican politicians like Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. He was a Nixon favorite, whom he once described with great feeling as “a great man.” After losing the California governor’s race in 1962 Nixon had walked away from politics and public life. Zahedi reached out to him and the two stayed in touch. One evening in early 1967, Zahedi joined Nixon and William Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general, for dinner at the “21” Club in Manhattan.

Bill Simon walked into Rumsfeld’s rifle sight in late December 1974 when the president convened a two-day summit of his economics and energy advisers at Vail, Ford’s favorite getaway. The first family was spending the Christmas holidays at the luxury ski resort. Ford was under mounting pressure from conservative Republicans, and especially from former California governor Ronald Reagan, not to add to the national deficit by spending his way out of the recession. Simon and Arthur Burns, the Fed chief, made the case against a big fiscal stimulus. They wanted to keep federal spending under control and prevent the deficit from going over $20 billion. Budget Director Roy Ash and Ford’s political advisers took the opposing view.

Kraft went so far as to publish a list of names “who would add distinction to the Cabinet and bring new competence to the Treasury.” With Bill Simon’s future hanging in the balance, a great clamor arose from the conservative free market wing of the Republican Party against the president’s deficit spending plan and in favor of keeping Simon on. Ronald Reagan, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, and Senator James Buckley of New York rallied to provide Simon and the budget hawks with cover. Arthur Burns also intervened on his colleague’s behalf. He told Ford that changing the guard at Treasury in the midst of the worst financial crisis since 1929 would be sheer “folly.”


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

iv. 1984–5: Clapham Between my first kiss and my first A level, there was Trotsky. I am sure I would have met him sooner or later, plastered against the wall in a Student Union bar, or on a street corner hiding behind a petition. But he came to me on a sunny day in Hyde Park. It was 1984; the year of the miners’ strike, the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton and Ronald Reagan’s second victory in the US presidential elections. I was fifteen, a self-important teenage vegetarian who felt that all was not quite right with the world. I had spent most of the day wandering around London alone, protesting against the visit of the South African president, P. W. Botha, when a young man with acne caught me unawares and offered me a copy of Young Socialist.

Mr Sessions went on to insist that Sotomayor’s statement went “against the American ideal and oath that a judge takes to be fair to every party. And every day when they put on that robe, that is a symbol that they’re to put aside their personal biases and prejudices.” Sessions knew a thing or two about personal biases. When Ronald Reagan nominated him to be a judge on the District Court for the southern district of Alabama, four Department of Justice lawyers who had worked with him testified that he had made racist statements. As an assistant attorney, he had branded a white civil rights lawyer who concentrated on voting-rights cases a “disgrace to his race” and described the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as “un-American” and a “Communist inspired” body that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

A 2005 Yale Law Journal study found not only that “female judges were significantly more likely than male judges to find for ... plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases” but also that “the presence of a female judge significantly increased the probability that a male” on a three-judge panel “would find for the plaintiff.” The experiences of the only two female judges to have sat on the court at that point, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal Jew from Brooklyn appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton, and Sandra Day O’Connor, a conservative Protestant appointed by Republican Ronald Reagan, bear this out. “As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” said Ginsburg. This is not just true for gender. A study in the Columbia Law Review in 2008 found a similar effect with race in voting-rights cases.


Comedy Writing Secrets by Mel Helitzer, Mark Shatz

Albert Einstein, built by the lowest bidder, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, elephant in my pajamas, fake news, fear of failure, index card, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, Yogi Berra

A good speaker is one who rises to the occasion and then promptly sits down. A speech, including introductory material, should never take more than twenty minutes. The normal speaking rate is two and a half words per second, and that means a speech should be a maximum of 3,000 words long. That was Ronald Reagan's favorite time frame, and his motto was that an immortal speech should not be eternal. If you can't write your message in a sentence, you can't say it in an hour. —Dianna Booher Sentences in speeches must be shorter than sentences meant for reading, because the audience members have no chance to reread something they haven't comprehended.

Personalize and localize the humor whenever possible, even though many in the audience will know it's fabricated. Humor, as we've already 206 Comedy Writing Secrets noted, permits the audience to set aside disbelief. No one will stand up and challenge you. Use words like "I" and "last week," and mention local names and places. President Ronald Reagan usually began each speech—particularly the less formal ones—with self-deprecating humor. For example, when hundreds of school principals and teachers gathered on the South Lawn of the White House for a recognition ceremony, the president's gag writer gave him a typical Reagan charmer. Y'know, I've been out of school for some time now, but I still get nervous around so many principals.

Richards's oft-quoted remark opened the humor floodgates, and Bush was stigmatized as a mixed-up, double-talking politician for his entire losing campaign. John F. Kennedy lambasted Richard Nixon's dark facial make-up by claiming, "Nixon was offered two million dollars by Schick to do a TV commercial for Gillette." Unquestionably, former president Ronald Reagan was the most expert at delivering great lines. Like this triple: Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when President Carter loses his. During his campaign against Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan's humor completely spiked the Democrats' best personal attack—the age issue 218 Comedy Writing Secrets (Reagan was seventy-two years old).


pages: 386 words: 92,778

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today by Jay Barbree

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, dark matter, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, white flight

Despite his taste for beer, the President’s brother was a great guy, as were all members of President Carter’s family, and I was most grateful for the assignment and for the Carters’ hospitality. The NBC News Desk made sure I received most of President Carter’s vacation and down-home assignments and before you knew it, it was election time again, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House, and I came home to Cape Canaveral, where the launch team was working full speed ahead to get Columbia, the first Space Shuttle, into orbit. As a journalist, I have always taken pride in being apolitical, but hanging out with the Carters was fun. There’s something to be said about the fresh wind of naiveté, and Jimmy Carter had it.

For years we reporters had been told the first citizen in space would be a journalist, and I found it easy to imagine myself an astronaut only temporarily earthbound. I had visions of broadcasting every second of the thundering and rattling ride into orbit no matter how scared out of my wits I was, but President Ronald Reagan was on the prowl for votes he didn’t need. His 1984 reelection campaign went after the large National Teachers’ Union with the promise “a teacher will be the first citizen in space.” The people voted, and Reagan swept the country and kept his promise. No one could disagree. The teachers’ choice, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, was simply perfect.

Two minutes later the huge assemblage broke into wild cheers as the boosters, blamed for the Challenger accident, burned out and peeled harmlessly away from the Shuttle and its human cargo. Six minutes later, the main engines shut down, and the five seasoned astronauts sailed safely into Earth orbit. Cheers erupted from the Launch Control Center at the Cape and in the Mission Control Center near Houston. President Ronald Reagan opened an awards ceremony in the White House Rose Garden with the announcement, “America is back in space.” NASA had spent thirty-two months fixing the O-ring seal and other Shuttle problems, but to make sure they drove down the road of caution, Discovery’s mission was designed to be as benign as possible.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

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

Martin, memo on DNA New Alternatives Workshop, June 17, 1985 (Wohlstetter, 88/22); Wohlstetter, “The Basic Premises of LRRD II.” 35 J. J. Martin to Albert Wohlstetter, May 8, 1986 (Wohlstetter, 89/12). 36 President Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983 (available at reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1983/32383d.htm). 37 Wohlstetter, “Thoughts after the President’s Speech on Defense,” March 23, 1983 (Wohlstetter, 180/7). 38 George Keyworth to Fred Iklé, May 16, 1985, SDI collection, box 1, folder 1985, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA. 39 Wohlstetter, “The Problem of Technology Transfer,” June 1982 (Wohlstetter, 117/17). 40 Wohlstetter, “A Note on the Costs and Horrors of Conventional War,” July 16, 1983 (Wohlstetter, 117/26). 41 James Fallows, “America’s High-Tech Weaponry,” Atlantic 247 (May 1981), 21; James Fallows, National Defense (New York: Random House, 1981); Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981).

After a flurry of news reports about the Stealth bomber in summer 1980, the Pentagon held a press conference at which Bill Perry and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown publicized the existence of Stealth. Given the timing, in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, some observers smelled a political motive behind the announcement—and perhaps behind the leaks that led up to it. The Carter administration had canceled the B-1 bomber in 1977, and in the 1980 campaign Ronald Reagan was using the issue to hammer Carter as being soft on defense. Carter asked Brown and Perry if the administration could reveal the Stealth program, and added that he would respect their judgment if they said no. But Brown and Perry decided it was safe to publicize the existence though not the details of Stealth.

Tony Chong, Layne Karafantis, and Mihir Pandya read the manuscript and provided valuable feedback. I owe special thanks to Mihir for many collegial conversations and for sharing his insights into Southern California aerospace in general and Stealth in particular. I thank archivists at the Hoover Institution, Smithsonian Institution/National Air and Space Museum, and Ronald Reagan Presidential Library; at the Huntington Library, I must single out Brook Engebretson, Mario Einaudi, and Brooke Black for their help. For help with photos, I thank Tony Chong at Northrop Grumman, Melissa Dalton and Kevin Robertson at Lockheed Martin, and Scratch Thompson and Jessica Conway. Many thanks as well to Andrew Stuart, my agent, for understanding what I wanted to do with this book and providing wise guidance on how to do it.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 3. 2 Andrew Mark Miller, “Black Lives Matter co-founder says group’s goal is ‘to get Trump out,’ ” Washington Examiner, June 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/black-lives-matter-co-founder-says-groups-goal-is-to-get-trump-out (April 22, 2021). 3 Jason Lange, “Biden staff donate to group that pays bail in riot-torn Minneapolis,” Reuters, May 30, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-biden-bail/biden-staff-donate-to-group-that-pays-bail-in-riot-torn-minneapolis-idUSKBN2360SZ (April 22, 2021). 4 Levin, Ameritopia, 7. 5 Ted McAllister, “Thus Always to Bad Elites,” American Mind, March 16, 2021, https://americanmind.org/salvo/thus-always-to-bad-elites/ (April 22, 2021). 6 Ronald Reagan, “Encroaching Control (The Peril of Ever Expanding Government),” in A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan 1961–1982, eds. Alfred A. Baltizer and Gerald M. Bonetto (Chicago: Regnery, 1983), 38. CHAPTER TWO: BREEDING MOBS 1 Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 6–7. 2 Ibid., 7–8. 3 Ibid., 16. 4 Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2014), 2 5 Ibid., 2–3. 6 Capital Research Center, “What Antifa Really Is,” December 21, 2020, https://capitalresearch.org/article/is-antifa-an-idea-or-organization/ (April 6, 2021). 7 Scott Walter, “The Founders of Black Lives Matter,” First Things, March 29, 2021, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/03/the-founders-of-black-lives-matter (April 6, 2021). 8 Levin, Ameritopia, 11. 9 Ibid., 13. 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, ed. and trans.

Admittedly, in numerous ways today’s threat is more byzantine, as it now inhabits most of our institutions and menaces from within, making engagement difficult and complicated. Nonetheless, I fervently believe America as we know it will be forever lost if we do not prevail. I closed my book Liberty and Tyranny, which was published a short twelve years ago, with President Ronald Reagan’s fateful and prescient observation, which compels our attention especially now for it is more imperative than ever: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”6 PATRIOTS OF AMERICA, UNITE!

LEVIN, nationally syndicated talk-radio host, host of LevinTV, chairman of Landmark Legal Foundation, and the host of the Fox News show Life, Liberty & Levin, is the author of six consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers: Liberty and Tyranny, Ameritopia, The Liberty Amendments, Plunder and Deceit, Rediscovering Americanism, and Unfreedom of the Press. Liberty and Tyranny spent three months at #1 and sold more than 1.5 million copies. His books Men in Black and Rescuing Sprite were also New York Times bestsellers. Levin is an inductee into the National Radio Hall of Fame and was a top adviser to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. He holds a BA from Temple University and a JD from Temple University Law School. www.MarkLevinShow.com @marklevinshow (Parler) @marklevinshow (Rumble) FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Mark-R-Levin SimonandSchuster.com ThresholdEditions @Threshold_Books ALSO BY MARK R.


pages: 449 words: 127,440

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

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

In May, accompanied by Raisa, their daughter, Irina, and interpreter Pavel Palazchenko, Gorbachev also travels to the United States, on a trip cohosted by Ronald Reagan and George Shultz and organized by his American admirer Jim Garrison, and is once more able to drink in the intoxicating brew of celebrity adulation and peer worship so lacking at home.7 The wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes Jr. puts his private jet, named Capitalist Tool, at Gorbachev’s disposal to fly the party around eleven American cities, where they are accommodated in five-star hotels and greeted by fawning hosts, among them Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and David Rockefeller. Twenty thousand people come to hear Gorbachev speak in Fulton, Missouri, the location of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech.

The recipients comprise an A list of current and former world leaders whom he has met and befriended during his years in office: George H. W. Bush, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, John Major, Giulio Andreotti, Bria n Mulroney, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the heads of the governments of Korea, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iran, and Norway. Gorbachev has worked hard to get the tone and content of the letters right. The warm relationship with his counterparts abroad is most important to the Soviet president. It is a measure of his international standing, a recognition of what he has achieved in reforming the Soviet Union, and an assurance of global approval for lessening world tensions, reversing the nuclear arms race, allowing the Berlin Wall to fall, and letting Eastern European countries have their freedom.

We had worked very hard to push the Soviet Union in this direction, at a pace which would not provoke an explosion in Moscow, much less a global confrontation.”11 Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has made a number of trips to Moscow, reckons Gorbachev hoped to revive a dying patient “without replacing its Marxist heart.” He believes that the end of the Cold War was made possible because of the bold brand of leadership practiced by Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. “That Christmas Day, the unimaginable happened,” he wrote. “The Soviet Union disappeared. Without a fight, without a war, without a revolution. It vanished . . . with the stroke of a pen.”12 CHAPTER 25 DECEMBER 25: NIGHT Boris Yeltsin can hardly bring himself to look at the television screen in his office as Gorbachev begins to speak.


Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, diversification, diversified portfolio, eat what you kill, Elliott wave, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, global macro, hiring and firing, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It is not an exaggeration to say that at a time of extreme distress and crisis, she saved and reformed Britain and then re-created its place in the world. In addition, she was the intellect behind and articulator of Ronald Reagan’s strategy of economic and military competition with the Soviet Union. In the end, this strategy bankrupted the Soviet Union, caused the collapse of the Soviet system, and brought an end to the Cold War. She articulated a vision of the world that Reagan only sensed. Remember the famous picture of Thatcher speaking at dinner in Number 10 as Ronald Reagan, seated next to her, stares raptly up at her. Reagan sent her the picture with the following inscription in his own hand.

At seventy-seven, the lady’s health is a little frail, and she has suffered several small strokes, but the wisdom and passion are still there. First, I somewhat lamely asked Lady T (as her staff calls her) a silly question to the effect of who were the most impressive figures she had encountered over the years. I did not get a puffball answer. Well, Ronald Reagan was a great one, she said, and it was easy for lesser men to underrate him. His style of work and decision making were detached, but he laid down general policy directions and expected his subordinates to execute them. “Ronnie understood the really big things like taxes, Russia, and the Cold War.”

In fact, he is much better on the giant slow ideas than the short-term twitches. No one is perfect, but he has had some great long-term calls. I could give you some big investment names who regularly check in with Vince. In 1973 he nailed the Nifty Fifty, and in 1980 he was talking about the oil price bubble bursting, interest rates peaking, and arguing that Ronald Reagan meant disinflation. He has had some big wrongs, too, particularly on Japan, and he was early on tech. He doesn’t change his mind easily. Vince now runs his own small hedge fund, which is mostly his own money and a few friends who believe he may be a prophet. Certain other people think Vince is a kook, and maybe he is a little crazy.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Alan Greenspan was not philosophical; he was practical and, either by nature or by design, vague, remote, and impenetrable. Greenspan used his Randian acquaintances to climb the political ladder. He joined Martin Anderson’s policy research group during Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign for the presidency. Anderson, who traveled in Objectivist circles, later introduced Greenspan to Ronald Reagan. Greenspan was riding the wave of the growing influence of accredited economists. By the late 1950s, Greenspan’s stock market predictions and economic forecasts were quoted in Fortune and the New York Times. His forecasts were usually wrong, as are those of most economists. Accuracy was less important than publicity.8 6 Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) Table 6.16B,C,D.

Greenspan is classified as a Republican. In practice, however, his flattery was nonpartisan. When Ted Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination in 1980, Greenspan hosted a breakfast for the Massachusetts senator in New York with “key Wall Street figures.”19 At the 1980 Republican convention, Greenspan almost corralled Ronald Reagan into offering him the position of treasury secretary. 17 Ibid., p. 127. 18 John H. Allan, “Thrift Adrift: Why Nobody Saves,” New York Times, February 17, 1980. 19Steven Rattner, “The Candidates’ Economists,” New York Times, November 18, 1979, p. F1. Greenspan remained in the public eye during the early Reagan years.

Anderson’s role included meeting and screening outside economists on behalf of the candidate.32 Theory aside, a presidential candidate intent on halting the dismal results of the past three presidencies would be on the lookout for a new voice. Supply-side economics emphasized the need to cut personal income taxes to stimulate the economy. Ronald Reagan was opposed to state interference in people’s lives. Whether it all added up (literally—would the rising tax revenues cut the mountainous Carter budget deficits?) was never his prime concern. Alan Greenspan was an outsider to supply-side economics. An expert juggler, Greenspan became an economic advisor to Reagan after Reagan was nominated as the Republican candidate.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Although under Carter the United States had come close to endorsing the Palestinians’ national rights and their involvement in negotiations, the two sides found themselves farther apart than ever. Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration. Begin and his successors in the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and then Benjamin Netanyahu, were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people with national rights did not exist.

This is surprising, given just how extensive were Israel’s efforts to liquidate them.17 Israel’s leaders were clearly unconcerned about killing civilians trying to do so: after an air attack in July 1981 destroyed a building in Beirut with heavy civilian casualties, Begin’s office had stated that “Israel was no longer refraining from attacking guerrilla targets in civilian areas.”18 ‘Arafat himself was a prime target. In an August 5 letter to Ronald Reagan, Begin wrote that “these days” he felt as if he and his “valiant army” were “facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.”19 Begin often drew such parallels between ‘Arafat and Hitler: if ‘Arafat was another Hitler, then killing him was certainly permissible and justified, whatever the cost in civilian lives.20 One of Israel’s most notorious supposed spies, known to Beirutis as Abu Rish (“father of the feather”: he sometimes wore a feather in his cap), often camped out opposite my mother-in-law’s apartment building in the Manara district of West Beirut, and sometimes even in her lobby.

The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Some of the hundreds of activists who had transformed the mess into a genuine park called it “a cultural, political, freak out and rap center for the Western world.”1 The University of California, which owned the land, considered the creation of the park an illegal trespass. Governor Ronald Reagan, who called the university a “haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,”2 believed the park was a “calculated political act” intended to “bring down capitalism.”3 Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who had once led a crowd of five thousand Berkeleyites in a jeering chorus of “Fuck Ronald Reagan,” had recently challenged the governor, a regent of the university, to a duel.4 Al Alcorn liked People’s Park and had made it the subject of a personal photography project.

The Wall Street Journal introduced its “Small Business” column and Forbes its “Up-and-Comers” section around that time. BusinessWeek began an “Information Processing” section and Fortune began featuring an “Entrepreneurs” slug. Andrew Feinberg, “Why Entrepreneurs Make Good Copy,” Venture, July 1982: 44. 3. Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union: January 25, 1983,” Papers of the Presidents: Administration of Ronald Reagan, 107. Reagan also established an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Task Force whose members included Bob Noyce, Spectra-Physics founder Herb Dwight, and Larry Sonsini’s law partner Mario Rosati. 4. This figure is for Santa Clara County only.

Taylor, interview by author, March 18, 2013 and April 22, 2013; Nerd Paradise — Al Alcorn 1. The Berkeley Barb article (“Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” by “Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner”) is quoted in its entirety in The “People’s Park”: A Report on a Confrontation at Berkeley, California, Submitted to Governor Ronald Reagan (Office of the Governor, State of California, July 1, 1969): 2–3. 2. Reagan, quoted in “You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970” exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 3. The “People’s Park”: 5, 16. 4. Eldridge Cleaver, in Marcia Eymann and Charles M. Wollenberg, What’s Going On?


Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

This in turn changed as world cotton prices plummeted and farmers turned to sugarcane and peanuts, the region’s main crops to this day. El Corinto – these days Nicaragua’s busiest commercial port – has entered the history books in a big way twice: first when it was the landing site for William Dampier and a band of French and British pirates in the only recorded pirate attack on León, and second when US president Ronald Reagan ordered the illegal mining of the bay, which set in motion a series of machinations that would eventually lead to the Iran-Contra affair. León pop 201,100 / elev 110m Intensely political, buzzing with energy and, at times, drop-dead gorgeous (in a crumbling, colonial kind of way), León is what Managua should be – a city of awe-inspiring churches, fabulous art collections, stunning streetscapes, cosmopolitan eateries, fiery intellectualism, and all-week, walk-everywhere, happening nightlife.

From the UNAN campus, head south on 1a Av NO for the 1615 Iglesia de La Merced (Click here), another of León’s signature churches, then head west on 1a Calle NO to Galería de Héroes y Mártires (Click here), with photos of the revolution’s fallen. Continue west, stopping at La Casa de Cultura (Click here), with its excellent art collection (including a portrait of former US president Ronald Reagan that you’ll want to photograph), then head south on 3a Av NO. Tired? Fortify yourself at Hotel El Convento (Click here), with an amazing collection of colonial-era religious art and a good, if pricey, restaurant. Attached Iglesia de San Francisco (Click here) was badly damaged during the revolution but is slowly being restored to its former glory.

El Corinto pop 18,000 / elev 10m Nicaragua’s only deep-water port, El Corinto actually inherited the job from a much older town, Puerto El Realejo, founded on February 26, 1522, and subsequently attacked by such famous pirates as William Dampier and John Davis. As the centuries passed and sand filled in the estuary, the barrier island of Punto Icaco became the port, where El Corinto was founded in 1858. This was the port that US president Ronald Reagan mined in 1983, after which Congress passed a law specifically forbidding the use of taxpayer dollars for overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. Thus began the Iran-Contra affair. Today, just 19km from Chinandega, El Corinto’s 19th-century wooden row houses, narrow streets and broad beaches score high on the ‘adorability potential’ scale, although actual adorability ratings are much lower.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

MEANWHILE, IN THE REST OF THE WORLD … Kohlberg and Turiel had pretty much defined the field of moral psychology by the time I sat in Jon Baron’s office and decided to study morality.15 The field I entered was vibrant and growing, yet something about it felt wrong to me. It wasn’t the politics—I was very liberal back then, twenty-four years old and full of indignation at Ronald Reagan and conservative groups such as the righteously named Moral Majority. No, the problem was that the things I was reading were so … dry. I had grown up with two sisters, close in age to me. We fought every day, using every dirty rhetorical trick we could think of. Morality was such a passionate affair in my family, yet the articles I was reading were all about reasoning and cognitive structures and domains of knowledge.

Jews ever since have been among the most reliable voters for the Democratic Party.26 My morality wasn’t just shaped by my family and ethnicity. I attended Yale University, which was ranked at the time as the second most liberal of the Ivy League schools. It was not uncommon during class discussions for teachers and students to make jokes and critical comments about Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party, or the conservative position on controversial current events. Being liberal was cool; being liberal was righteous. Yale students in the 1980s strongly supported the victims of apartheid, the people of El Salvador, the government of Nicaragua, the environment, and Yale’s own striking labor unions, which deprived us all of dining halls for much of my senior year.

Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools). But Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions). And after they embraced Christian conservatives during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and became the party of “family values,” Republicans inherited a powerful network of Christian ideas about sanctity and sexuality that allowed them to portray Democrats as the party of Sodom and Gomorrah. Set against the rising crime and chaos of the 1960s and 1970s, this five-foundation morality had wide appeal, even to many Democrats (the so-called Reagan Democrats).


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

President James Monroe, who helped former American slaves give birth to the longest-lived democracy in Africa, founded in 1847. Its democracy dropped dead when, in 1980, a Corporal Sam Doe marched every member of the elected president’s cabinet out to the nearby beach, tied them to poles and shot them, TV cameras rolling. Ronald Reagan was elated and helped the killer dictator Sam Doe turn Liberia into a Cold War killing zone. One in ten Liberians would die. Richard and I arrived in Liberia without two clues to rub together. But Ricardo had one. He had just learned some Arabic the hard way: As an involuntary guest of some bad guys in Basra, Iraq.

She wasn’t stalking; she had decided to work for me and needed to find a way to inform me of her decision. My research chief, Oliver Shykles, a genius with a rational dose of paranoia, hated working in front of that huge floor-to-ceiling window, especially after nearly one hundred threats of death and bodily harm that came after I published what The Guardian called my “robust” obituary of Ronald Reagan (“Reagan: Killer, Coward, Con Man”). Ollie had removed all signs visible from the street identifying our location. I loved that office up the dirty stairs. Lots of sun for a downtown place and, at night, when it rained, the red blur of ambulance lights and the caffeine of their sirens. It was midnight.

Did BP and Exxon and ChevronTexaco and Phillips (now of ConocoPhillips) have some kind of magical fairy dust that made them invisible to the Justice Department? It seemed so. And I think I know the names of some of the fairies. Most were in the “P-group,” a slough of top politicos, a lobbying power team headed by Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff, Michael Deaver, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and former Justice Department lawyer Reid Weingarten. Reid told Thornburgh’s successors in the Bush Jr. Administration that naming Nazarbayev in the indictment would mean the axe for U.S. oil companies, an odd legal defense but extraordinarily effective.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

He and the rest of the staff treated me as if I were royalty. I wasn’t like those other Americans with their stupid dollars. For the rest of my stay, no merchant or restaurant wanted my business until I demonstrated I could pay in lire. The subsequent efforts of Fed chairman Paul Volcker and the newly elected Ronald Reagan would save the dollar. Volcker raised interest rates to 19 percent in 1981 to snuff out inflation and make the dollar an attractive choice for foreign capital. Beginning in 1981, Reagan cut taxes and regulation, which restored business confidence and made the United States a magnet for foreign investment.

All three of these phrases are shorthand for shared norms of behavior in international finance, what are called the rules of the game. The Washington Consensus arose after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the late 1970s. The international monetary system was saved between 1980 and 1983 as Paul Volcker raised interest rates, and Ronald Reagan lowered taxes, and together they created the sound-dollar or King Dollar policy. The combination of higher interest rates, lower taxes, and less regulation made the United States a magnet for savings from around the world and thereby rescued the dollar. By 1985, the dollar was so strong that an international conference was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York in order to reduce its value.

What is the source of the dollar’s value? How does it hold up as an example of trust consistently honored? To answer that question, one needs to dig deeper. The dollar itself, whether in paper or digital form, is a representational object. What does the dollar represent? To whom is the trust directed? When trust is required, Ronald Reagan’s dictum applies: Trust, but verify. The Federal Reserve System, owned by private banks, is the issuer of the dollar. The Fed asks for our trust, but how can one verify if the trust is being honored? In a rule-of-law society, a customary way of verifying trust is the written contract. A first-year law student in contracts class immediately learns to “get it in writing.”


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

González-Murphy and Rey Koslowski, “Understanding Mexico’s Changing Immigration Laws,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Mexico Institute), March 2011, www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/GONZALEZ%20%2526%20KOSLOWSKI.pdf; Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, January 19, 1989, www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/011989b. Peter W. Schramm quote: “Born American, but in the Wrong Place,” Claremont Review of Books 6, no. 4 (fall 2006), https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/born-american-but-in-the-wrong-place. 7.

But more than a half century later, by 2016, nearly 90 percent of new arrivals were non-Canadian or of non-European ancestry and without native English fluency. Immigrants and the non–native born, as a percentage of the US population, soared during this period from less than 10 percent of the population to over 13 percent.10 The next radical change came mostly from both Democratic and Republican pressures on the Ronald Reagan administration. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, known better as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, was a bipartisan effort intended not so much as a compromise as a gifting of concessions to a wide variety of special interests all unhappy with then existing immigration enforcement. Traditional conservatives were, in theory, assured that employers would be required to authenticate their workers’ immigration status and would soon be fined if caught hiring illegal aliens.

They believe that their own racial unity enhances being Chinese and are certainly not eager to expand the idea of citizenship to non-Han Chinese, such as the Muslim Uyghurs, who are often relegated to reeducation camps, frequently in the hundreds of thousands. In one of the last speeches of his presidency, Ronald Reagan emphasized these very points: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”


Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

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

Keeping to high office for illustration, at the dovish extreme we find Jimmy Carter, who explained, in the course of one of his sermons on human rights, that we owe Vietnam no debt, because ‘the destruction was mutual’, as a walk through Quang Ngai province and San Francisco quickly reveals. There was no reaction, apart from margins of the usual margins. At the other extreme, we find Ronald Reagan—or more accurately, those who handed him his note cards—and the Senators who demand that we continue to punish Vietnam for the crimes it committed against us. And in the middle there are the moderates, like George Bush, who explained that ‘Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past’.

Similarly, the huge social engineering project that led to the ‘suburbanization of America’, with enormous consequences, relied on extensive state intervention, from the local to national level, along with major corporate crime that received a tap on the wrist in the courts; consumer choices were a slight factor.12 There are fluctuations, to be sure. The statist reactionaries of the Reagan years broke new records in protectionism and public subsidy, boasting about it quite openly to their business audience. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker ‘proudly proclaimed that Mr Ronald Reagan had “granted more import relief to US industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century”’, international economist Fred Bergsten writes, adding that the Reaganites specialised in ‘the most insidious form of protectionism’: ‘managed trade’ that most ‘restricts trade and closes markets’, and ‘raises prices, reduces competition and reinforces cartel behaviour’.

For similar reasons, overwhelming majorities support more help for the poor but call for cutting welfare: why spend our hard-earned money for Black mothers in Cadillacs who breed like rabbits to get more welfare cheques? And having been deluged with these and other fairy tales—sometimes related by figures like Ronald Reagan, who may even have believed his famous anecdotes—they also much overestimate the share of the Federal budget that goes to welfare, and are quite unaware that it has fallen radically over the past 20 years from a level that was low to begin with by comparative standards. A similar barrage leads the public to feel crushed by an overwhelming tax burden; only Turkey and Australia are lower, relative to GDP, among the OECD countries (1991).


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

Kihuen had come to the country with a visa, following his father, a farmworker, but he had overstayed it and spent several years as an unauthorized immigrant. He only legalized his status thanks to the amnesty offered by Ronald Reagan in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, a deal that brought 3.1 million unauthorized immigrants, a majority of them Mexicans, out of the shadows. It’s “thanks to Ronald Reagan, a Republican, that I’m here in the United States,” says Kihuen, a Democrat. While he didn’t make the US Olympic Team, the owner of one of Mexico’s top teams, Chivas, spotted him and invited him to Guadalajara, the city he’d grown up in as a boy, to try out for the Mexican professional league.

Americans knew little about their neighbor to the south, and Mexicans greatly distrusted their neighbor to the north. But Mexico’s economy had been in a tailspin throughout most of the 1980s as the result of a global debt crisis and the government’s own mismanagement, and newly elected president Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) was looking for a way to turn it around. A decade before, American president Ronald Reagan had proposed a trade agreement with Mexico but was rebuffed. Now Salinas proposed the idea to Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush. The timing worked in Mexico’s favor. The Berlin Wall had come crashing down just months before, and the Soviet Union was in the process of imploding. Bush was a strong believer in free trade, but he also saw a new world order emerging after the end of the Cold War, and he wanted to ensure a close relationship with America’s two closest neighbors.

Overall, the poll finds much lower positive views of Mexico than all other recent polling, but the break-out of reasons points to some real underlying unease among Americans. James S. Taylor, “Vianovo-GSD&M Poll Shows Mexico’s Brand in U.S. Remains Battered,” Vianovo, June 28, 2016. They have a comparison poll from 2012 as well. There are also growing signs: Gallup, “Gallup Poll Social Series: World Affairs.” Republican Presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and especially George W. Bush, had been some of the most active promoters of closer relations with Mexico during their presidencies. But today Republicans appear to be the most skeptical toward Mexico. This polarization is also evident on Americans feelings about immigration and immigration policy, as the Gallup poll’s tracking on this issue suggests, and how Americans feel about Mexican immigrants specifically, as recent polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has shown.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They are slow to learn the techniques of public relations, because outdated assumptions about representative democracy and the public sphere prevent them from having to do so. The question politicians should be asking, Bernays argued, is how best to use imagery, sound, and speech in combination, so as to produce the right form of popular sentiment. The election of Ronald Reagan, a former film star, to the office of American president would have made perfect sense to Bernays. The arrival of a reality TV star in the Oval Office in January 2017 took things a stage further. The Internet has given new forms to the multimedia aspect of crowd dynamics, including what some might call “propaganda.”

Research has shown that while the income of the American population rose by 58% between 1978 and 2015, the income of the bottom half actually fell by 1% over the same period.8 The gains were clustered heavily among those at the top end of the income distribution: the top 10% of earners experienced a 115% increase over this period, while the top 0.001% saw their incomes rise by an astonishing 685%. The richer one is, the faster one’s wealth and income has grown. The practical implication of this data is that half the American population experienced no form of economic progress in nearly forty years. Every time Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama stood up and shared some good news about “the economy,” they were speaking about something that effectively excluded half the population. This is an astonishing state of affairs. Could anyone possibly be surprised if that lower 50% lost interest in statistical economic pronouncements of politicians and experts?

Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth rebutted Neurath’s argument, at a time when socialism was gaining rapidly in popularity in so-called “Red Vienna.” In the process, it laid the foundations of an entirely new way of understanding the virtues of the free market, that would eventually wind its way into the policy programs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Like all these subsequent followers, Mises was consumed by a deep animosity toward socialism, to the extent that he initially viewed fascism as an acceptable way of resisting the rising red tide. While Mises’ argument was multifaceted and sophisticated, at its core was a simple claim about the advantages of free markets: they calculate the value of goods in real time.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

“If we stick together and follow the proper procedures, we can hold this company accountable.” Now the new union local needed to push the labor movement to the limit and do battle with the shipyard. With the arrival of the eighties, Newport News Shipbuilding received its biggest boost in defense contracts in decades. Ronald Reagan charged into Washington with a mandate and a plan to make America strong again. Reagan wanted a six-hundred-ship navy and soon bought two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, bringing with them thousands of additional workers—and more potential union members. Bowser and Axsom made the rounds, bringing as many as possible into the steelworkers fold.

Bill Bowser asked new Local 8888 president Alton Glass at the Union Hall. The company, Glass said, wanted the steelworkers to give up vacation days, forgo pay raises, and drop requests for better pensions. Otherwise, the company might not be able to give the navy the kind of deal necessary to secure funding for the aircraft carrier CVN 76, later to be named the Ronald Reagan. Without that carrier, Bowser and other union leaders knew, they needn’t worry about getting into any harsh negotiations with the company. There wouldn’t be a company to negotiate with, at least not the vaunted carrier builder on the James. Glass rode to Washington to lobby for the carrier. Bowser helped persuade yard steelworkers to give something back to keep their jobs—a tough sell in a place where the jury still deliberated on the value of the union and a graph of union membership numbers resembled a roller coaster.

“It is my great honor to join you aboard America’s lone warrior, the USS Harry S Truman, where for more than twenty years you’ve been ‘giving ’em hell’ on every deployment,” Pence told the sailors, who followed their orders and applauded him with lusty emphasis. “Last year, President Trump signed the largest investment in our national defense since the days of Ronald Reagan and called for the building of a three-hundred-fifty-ship navy. And we are on our way,” Pence boasted. More spirited clapping—although more than one sailor was thinking, Yeah, that isn’t going to include our ship. You’re gonna mothball our ship. They knew the Trump budget called for an early Truman retirement to pay for a bunch of robot boats.


Comedy Writing Workbook by Gene Perret

Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan

This exercise adds another dimension to your comedy writing. It expands your references and adds a zaniness to your writing. HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES I'll stick with the same premise from the last workout—George Bush's new $600,000 limousine. I asked myself why he needed a new limo and came up with the line: "They had to get rid of Ronald Reagan's old limousine. The fuel line was clogged with jelly beans." I asked how you would care for and worry about a car that cost that much and got the line: "The first person who puts a scratch in that car is going to be appointed Ambassador to Libya." 96 COMEDY WRITING WORKBOOK I wondered about other things that would be in that price range and came up with this observation: 'That's typical of American consumerism.

Profit from the inspiration. It's difficult to illustrate this method because it's so capricious, but I'll try. Let's suppose the original jokes was about how old commercial planes are getting. It reads: "Planes are getting so old now they fly on a mixture of jet fuel and prune juice." For some reason—maybe that Ronald Reagan flies around to his speaking engage ments, or maybe the prune juice reminded you of Reagan's age—it brings to your mind the fact that he gets $50,000 a speech. That motivates you to compose this line: "Reagan now gets $50,000 for after'dinner speaking. That's a nice way to get a free lunch and a small fortune all at the same time, isn't it?"

"Several show business friends were out on a fishing trip when they were surrounded by a school of sharks. One of the theatrical agents fell overboard. The people on the boat watched helplessly as the sharks approached the terrified agent. Suddenly the sharks turned and swam away. One actor said, 'It's a miracle!' Another agent said, 'No. It's just professional courtesy.' " * * * * * "Ronald Reagan is one politician who doesn't lie, cheat, or steal. He's always had an agent do that for him." * * * * * "One factory supervisor—the meanest boss in the whole plant—died suddenly. He had no friends, yet people turned out in droves for his funeral. One worker couldn't understand it. He said to his companion, 'How can he get this many people to show up at his funeral?'


pages: 261 words: 65,534

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau

British Empire, Ford Model T, Lewis Mumford, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War

“The extra hour of daylight enables us to enjoy seeing for sixty minutes longer,” explained Mindy Berman, speaking for the RP Foundation at a congressional hearing. “To someone slowly losing his or her vision, every second of sight is valuable.” In 1985, congressional advocates of daylight saving time, with the strong support of President Ronald Reagan and the Daylight Saving Time Coalition, introduced several bills to extend DST. The most popular of these was a proposal to establish DST from the first Sunday in April to the first Sunday in November, lengthening the DST period by three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall. Senator Slade Gorton of Washington, chief sponsor of the bill, noted that the bill represented a rural-urban compromise: “We acknowledge the logic and benefits of a two-month extension, but we wish to cause a minimal amount of dislocation for those people, approximately 15 percent of our population, who live in the western regions of their time zones and who already have the benefits of later sunrises and sunsets.”

This maneuver greatly disappointed the candy manufacturers, who had wanted DST on Halloween, but the rest of the Daylight Saving Time Coalition was more concerned with the three-week spring extension. “The front end is the real moneymaker anyway,” Coalition Director Benfield pointed out. The Senate passed the fire prevention bill with its DST provision by a voice vote, and the House passed it 386 to 28. On July 8, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1986 into law, including the additional three spring weeks of DST. With the three-week extension, the nation seemed to have found a balance that satisfied both pro- and anti-DST forces. Pressure for any change—to make the DST period longer or shorter—virtually disappeared for a long while, and daylight saving time became a generally accepted, noncontroversial part of daily American life. 99TH CONGRESS, PUBLIC LAW 99-359 FEDERAL FIRE PREVENTION AND CONTROL APPROPRIATIONS ACT OF 1986 To authorize appropriations for activities under the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That . . .

Johnson Library (Austin, TX) Manchester (NH) Historic Association Middlesex Law Library (Cambridge, MA) National Archives National Cigar Museum New York Public Library Newfoundland and Labrador Legislative Library Newfoundland Historical Society Nixon Presidential Materials at the National Archives (College Park, MD) Office of the Manhattan Borough Historian Palm Springs Historical Society Pathé Exchange Collection (Los Angeles, CA) Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library of Steubenville (OH) and Jefferson County Richard M. Nixon Library (Yorba Linda, CA) Ronald Reagan Library (Simi Valley, CA) Saskatchewan Library State Historical Society of Iowa Thunder Bay (Ontario) City Archives Thunder Bay (Ontario) Historical Museum Society ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deep appreciation to the many people who have helped make this book a reality.


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

And that—in a nutshell—is what this book is about: helping you recognize all the “everydata” in your life, showing you how to interpret it, and offering proven tips for avoiding common data traps so you can become an educated consumer of data—and make better decisions in your everyday life. Here we go. 2 The Challenger Challenge How Sampling Can Affect Results In one cruel moment, our exhilaration turned to horror; we waited and watched and tried to make sense of what we had seen.”1 On January 31, 1986, President Ronald Reagan stood outside the Johnson Space Center, addressing the family, friends, and colleagues of the seven astronauts who had died earlier that week, when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart in midair. Over the next few months, experts spent countless hours interviewing key witnesses, examining the evidence, and documenting their findings.

Based on the latest data, smarter people: Wear glasses (AOL)2 Use an iPhone (CNN)3 Are Republican (Pew Research Center)4 Listen to Radiohead (Wall Street Journal)5 Stay up late (Esquire)6 Are left-handed (The New Yorker)7 Drink more alcohol (Psychology Today)8 Every single factor here has been cited as a characteristic linked to intelligence. So if you really want a “Proud parent of an honor roll student” bumper sticker for your minivan, apparently all you need to do is get your kids glasses and an iPhone, have them watch a few Ronald Reagan speeches, play some Radiohead, don’t let them fall asleep before midnight, turn them into lefties, and start them drinking (once they reach legal age, of course). Have we lost our minds? No. We’ve just read a lot of studies and media reports that seem to draw the wrong conclusion from statistical analyses—specifically, reports and articles that confuse correlation with causation, and therefore, sometimes unintentionally, mislead the reader about the key takeaways.

Sy opened a competing store, but when he lost a legal fight to call it “Sy Merns,” he renamed it SYMS—and then changed his own name to match. “Sy Syms, Founder of SYMS Corp., Dies at Age 83,” PR Newswire website, November 17, 2009, accessed July 29, 2015, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sy-syms-founder-of-syms-corp-dies-at-age-83-70407382.html. Chapter 2 1. Ronald Reagan, “Challenger Memorial Speech,” January 31, 1986, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, YouTube, accessed April 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhI9OQp6ADg. 2. President Reagan used this phrase—originally penned by British aviator John Gillespie Magee—in a speech to the nation on the day of the accident, at 5 p.m.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Computers and telecommunications technologies have allowed for private equity managers to make tens of millions of dollars through international arbitrage while sitting in their pajamas in Westport, Connecticut (also known as “Northern Hedg-istan” to financial industry insiders). As much as the left likes to blame Ronald Reagan (and the two Bushes) for the steady rise in income inequality, much of it had to do with computer technology. And then there are the second-order effects of rising inequality on the economy. Paradoxically, the fastest-growing number of jobs in the first decade of the third millennium is projected to be in food preparation and service.38 Computers were supposed to eliminate low-skilled jobs and create high-skilled ones.

In the case of giving money to so-called not-for-profit broadcasters, corporations are seeking to buy credibility and moral stature. In the case of cause marketing, they are doing that while directly trying to increase sales by pressing the moral pressure point on the soft, guilt-ridden underside of the American consumer. American Express presaged Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” 1984 campaign message by promising that for every purchase made with the charge card, the company would donate one penny to the fund supporting the restoration of the Statue of Liberty (never mind the implications of the fact that we needed to go begging in the private sector to take care of something that was government property—this was the Reagan administration, after all).

And then there is the rise of the “family foundation”: 40,000 of them9 helping to contribute to the fact that the United States enjoys $240 billion of private giving each year.10 Our donations approach 2 percent of GDP, and given the size of our economy, in raw dollar amounts we give more than the next thirteen countries combined.11 Of course, keeping in line with its moral function, most of this goes to churches. We must never forget the spiritual dimensions of the economic system. 1∗Of course, we can’t just blame Ronald Reagan. In the last Gilded Age of staggering inequality (ca. 1885), insufficient funds were appropriated for the construction of the pedestal on which the French gift—Lady Liberty—would stand. The newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer used his editorial pages to shame America’s rich folks into donating more money to support the effort.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

That one of the country’s wealthiest men could, by his own admission, pay no tax at all was so absurd that it reinforced the central narrative of the Trump campaign: The Washington, DC, establishment had failed the country. The tax code, like everything else, was rigged. In Trump’s answer there was an echo of President Ronald Reagan himself, who famously compared the tax code to “daily mugging.” In both Trump’s and Reagan’s views, the relentless pursuit of self-interest supports the prosperity of all. Capitalism harnesses human greed for the greater good. Taxes are a hindrance and avoiding them is the right thing to do. At the same time, “That makes me smart” exposed the paradox of this ideology.

Chapter 3 HOW INJUSTICE TRIUMPHS The weather in Washington, DC, was beautiful; it was one of those Indian summer days with a crisp breeze and pale blue sky that makes October the most pleasant month in the country’s capital. Orange and red leaves on the trees glowed against the white marble monuments on Pennsylvania Avenue. On the South Lawn at the White House, surrounded by about two dozen senators and representatives from both parties, Ronald Reagan was sitting by a little wooden table, a fountain pen in hand, elated. The president had made overhauling taxation with dramatically lower tax rates the top domestic priority of his second term. On that 22nd of October 1986, about to sign into law the Tax Reform Act, he had reason to be joyful.

Given that tax collections typically fall by several percentage points during recessions, it is safe to predict that when the next recession hits, the ratio of taxes to national income will reach its lowest level since . . . the 1960s! A decline in the tax-to-GDP ratio of almost four percentage points over the course of two decades is an exceptional historical development. Until recently, nobody—neither Ronald Reagan, nor Margaret Thatcher, nor any other conservative leader—had managed to pull off such a feat. Under Reagan, tax revenues fluctuated as a share of GDP, with no discernible trend. In the United Kingdom, tax collections were higher when the Iron Lady left Downing Street in 1990 than when she arrived in 1979.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

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

Government cannot possibly protect us from ourselves in situations where we should know better. Government should not be responsible for supporting people who are capable of supporting themselves; people who can work should work. The notion of welfare queens driving Cadillacs has often been overstated and exploited. (Ronald Reagan’s original anecdote to this effect appears to have been woven from whole cloth.) Still, anyone looking to redistribute income in the United States should appreciate a core element of the American psyche: no hardworking person likes to pay taxes to support people whom they perceive to be taking advantage of the system.

We should not try to agree on a federal policy when we don’t have to. That is the beauty of a system with relatively powerful state and local governments. The Republicans have historically been strong on national defense, which is inarguably a core responsibility of the federal government. (It is hard to imagine Jimmy Carter, rather than Ronald Reagan, standing in West Berlin and declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) More recently, the same logic has been applied to antiterrorism efforts. No individual can protect against a terrorist attack or prevent a North Korean missile launch. Government is the mechanism by which we collectively protect ourselves against these kinds of potentially devastating threats.


pages: 639 words: 212,079

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman

Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Neil Armstrong, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Thomas L Friedman, Unsafe at Any Speed

That was what Hama was all about and that is what politics in places like Syria, Lebanon, the Yemens, and Iraq are so often about—men grabbing for the egg and its shell, because without both they fear that they may well be dead. 5 The Teflon Guerrilla PLAYBOY MAGAZINE: For years, people around the world have seen and heard you represent the PLO position on television. You’re probably one of the most recognizable men in the world. YASIR ARAFAT: You think so? PLAYBOY: Your face and your Palestinian head dress are instantly recognizable. If someday people forget what Jimmy Carter or even Ronald Reagan looked like, they probably won’t forget what you looked like. YASIR ARAFAT [smiling broadly]: “Thank you. It’s a good idea, no? —Interview with Yasir Arafat in PLAYBOY magazine, September 1988 The true relationship between a leader and his people is often revealed through small, spontaneous gestures.

“I lost four of my family inside,” the woman sobbed, “but I have nine more and they are all for you.” I reported about Yasir Arafat on and off for almost ten years. He is without a doubt one of the most unusual characters and unlikely statesmen ever to grace the world stage. He is, in many ways, the Ronald Reagan of Palestinian politics—an agent of change for his nation, a great actor who understands the soul of his people and how to play out their greatest fantasies, and, most of all, the ultimate Teflon guerrilla. Nothing stuck to Yasir Arafat—not bullets, not criticism, not any particular political position, and, most of all, not failure.

My landlord in Beirut, Fast Eddy Ghanoum, was forever shouting at me from his balcony in his baritone voice: “Thomaaaaaas, come have coffee.” I always thought of this invitation as a mating call, beckoning me into Eddy’s diwan for some sort of Arabesque negotiating encounter. It always meant that Eddy wanted something from me: more rent, a new lease, a phony receipt for the tax man, in one case, an autographed picture of Ronald Reagan—but always something. And always, over coffee, we would work out some compromise. When he was a young boy, my friend Fouad Ajami used to be sent out by his landlord father in Beirut to collect rent. “Before I would go,” Fouad once told me, “my father would always say to me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t have coffee or tea with anyone.


Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

Alongside all of that power and history, Washington’s prestigious arts and theatre venues showcase America’s talents. The Capitol / ANUSKA SAMPEDRO / GETTY IMAGES © y In This Section National Mall Capitol Hill Sights Activities Tours Entertainment Eating Drinking & Nightlife Ronald Reagan National Airport / PANORAMIC IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES © 8 Arriving in Washington, DC Ronald Reagan National Airport Metro trains (around $2.50) depart every 10 minutes from 5am to midnight. Taxis to the center cost $13 to $22. Dulles International Airport Silver Line Express buses run every 15 to 20 minutes to Wiehle-Reston East Metro. The bus and train combined (around $11 total) takes 60 to 75 minutes to the center.

(www.barcharley.com; 1825 18th St NW; h5pm-12:30am Mon-Thu, 4pm-1:30am Fri, 10am-1:30am Sat, 10am-12:30am Sun; mDupont Circle) 8 INFORMATION Destination DC (Map; %202-789-7000; www.washington.org) DC’s official tourism site, with the mother lode of online information. 8 GETTING THERE & AROUND TO/FROM THE AIRPORT Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA; www.metwashairports.com) Has its own Metro station; trains (around $2.50) depart every 10 minutes or so from 5am to midnight (to 3am Friday and Saturday nights) and reach downtown in 20 minutes. Taxis cost $13 to $22 and take 10 to 30 minutes. Dulles International Airport The Metro Silver Line is slated to reach Dulles in 2018.

o The Best Ethnic & Cultural Sites Ellis Island, NYC National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles National Museum of the American Indian / PAUL FRANKLIN / GETTY IMAGES © Pax Americana & the War on Terror In 1980, Republican California governor and former actor Ronald Reagan campaigned for president by promising to make Americans feel good about America again. The affable Reagan won easily, and his election marked a pronounced shift to the right in US politics. Reagan wanted to defeat communism, restore the economy, deregulate business and cut taxes. To tackle the first two, he launched the biggest peacetime military build-up in history, and dared the Soviets to keep up.


pages: 559 words: 178,279

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

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

In East Germany, the fundamentals of the dictatorship, symbolised by the omnipresence of the Stasi secret police, remained firmly in place. And détente did not last. It had already stalled by the time the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan in 1979. A year later, the chill in relations worsened when the United States responded by boycotting the Moscow Olympics. The boycott was initiated by President Carter; Ronald Reagan’s election as US President later in 1980 returned the world to heightened tensions and new fears of war. So, did the ‘Cold Peace’ of the 1970s lay some of the groundwork for the transformations of the 1980s that would reunify Europe and end the Cold War? Or did it only bring a semblance of dialogue and better relations, solidifying a status quo that made change less likely?

The Soviet Air Defence Command classified it as a military target, probably an intruding American spy plane, and gave the orders to fire air-to-air missiles to bring it down. It was a moment of dangerous, tragic drama at a point when tensions between Moscow and Washington were already climbing to new heights. President Ronald Reagan called it an ‘act of barbarism’ and a ‘crime against humanity which must never be forgotten’. The Kremlin leader, Yuri Andropov, apologised for the loss of life but claimed it was the result of a deliberate American provocation and blamed Washington for a ‘criminal act’. Two months later, there was another Cold War scare.

From the point of view of Western powers, Moscow no longer looked like a viable partner. They pointed to increasing Soviet meddling in Third World conflicts, the direct intervention in 1979 in Afghanistan and the imposition of martial law in 1981 to crush Solidarity in Poland. From Moscow’s perspective, the arrival of President Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1981 meant they were now dealing with an unapologetic Cold Warrior whose mission was to undermine and ultimately destroy Soviet Communism. Reagan made no secret of the fact that his conservative Republican presidency was a world away from the previous presidency of the Democrat Jimmy Carter.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Then he embraced his father’s profession, but with greater ambition. Brown’s first successful political campaign was for California secretary of state, and he established his reputation as a principled reformer. Mercurially, he ran for governor in 1974 and won. His administration peeled away from the rock-ribbed social conservatism of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. The media portrayed him as a young radical with progressive visions for the future. He earned the nickname “Governor Moonbeam” after floating the idea that California should form its own NASA-like space exploration agency and starting a short-lived agency, the Office of Appropriate Technology, geared toward the technical aspects of a transition toward a greener, space-age future.2 But Brown’s star fell after he unsuccessfully ran for president as a left-liberal alternative to the centrist Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980.

Entrenched state and municipal power structures, like the one in Oakland, realized that such restructuring according to the demands of people of color and white progressives meant relinquishing their own power and privilege. Oakland’s civic fathers declined to use federal resources to reshape the local economy more equitably. Many of Oakland’s political elite gravitated to the hard-line law-and-order and anti-Communist politics championed by California governor Ronald Reagan and President Richard Nixon during their ascent in the 1960s and early 1970s. As governor, Reagan and Oakland attorney Edwin Meese killed the Oakland Economic Development Council, the nonprofit that had channeled more than $20 million in federal grants to the city’s poor, when they vetoed its 1971 block grant.43 As president, Nixon would complete the demobilization of the poverty war’s foot soldiers while ramping up federal spending on police and prisons as part of his nascent War on Drugs.44 Instead of doing their best to reshape the local economy and provide opportunities for the poor to thrive, Oakland’s leaders chose to have the police contain the increasingly destitute and frustrated Black masses.

“He rose with his face bloodied, surrounded by Oakland police officers.” When a few of the protesters defended themselves, the police became even more savage. “One demonstrator threw a road flare at a California Highway Patrol officer. He was knocked unconscious and was still laying in the gutter fifteen minutes later.”91 Governor Ronald Reagan praised the police riot, stating it was “in the finest tradition of California’s law enforcement agencies.”92 District Attorney Coakley hit arrestees with maximum bail to keep them jailed as long as possible. Chief Charles Gain defended the OPD’s harsh tactics, which he witnessed from a nearby rooftop: “I take exception to the use of force being described as a beating,” he told reporters.


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An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Many wondered if the American century was coming to a premature end. As a result, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, an elected incumbent president was turned out of office in a landslide. The American people voted decisively for change, and they got it. Ronald Reagan would prove to have the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century, save only for that of Franklin Roosevelt, a man and a president he greatly admired. WHILE RONALD REAGAN is often given the credit for deregulation and lower taxes, they were, in fact, already under way when he took office, although he helped powerfully to continue and increase the restructuring of the American political economy.

To help end the stagflation that was plaguing the American economy in the 1970s, Congressman Jack Kemp and Senator William Roth proposed cutting the marginal rates on personal income taxes, just as President Kennedy had done more than a decade earlier with great success, and to index tax rates to inflation so that people were not pushed into higher brackets when their incomes were not rising in real terms. The Kemp-Roth tax proposal was ridiculed by the Democrats. President Jimmy Carter, running for reelection, tried to tie his opponent in 1980, Ronald Reagan, to the proposal by calling it the Reagan-Kemp-Roth proposal, a move that his opponent shrewdly welcomed. Gas shortages reemerged in the late 1970s while inflation only increased. Stock prices, which had recovered from their disastrous 1974 low, began to decline again. American industry was having more and more trouble competing with other countries.

Together they agreed to further cuts in the marginal tax rates, the highest being reduced to a mere 28 percent, the lowest since the 1920s. In exchange, thousands of deductions and loopholes were closed, greatly simplifying the tax code and further improving the investment climate. BY THE TIME RONALD REAGAN took office, even inflation was finally being brought under control, thanks to the Federal Reserve and its new chairman, Paul Volcker. Volcker, appointed by Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979, changed the old Federal Reserve policy of controlling interests to one of seeking to rein in the money supply that had been growing very quickly and fueling the inflation.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

M0 was the narrowest definition and just included notes and coins in circulation, while M4, the broadest definition in the British context, included bank and building society deposits. Of course, critics also suggested that monetarism, by squeezing the money supply, constricted economic growth and exacerbated recessions. Similar problems in defining money and in the practical application of monetarist ideas were also encountered in the United States. Ronald Reagan had been elected as the fortieth President of the United States in 1980. Born in Illinois in 1911, Reagan was nearly seventy when he was inaugurated in January 1981. He had a showman’s gift for communication and could win an easy rapport with almost any audience. Intellectually, perhaps as a consequence of his age, he did not pay such close attention to the musings of economists as did Margaret Thatcher.

He was a strong, idealistic budget hawk, who like his master saw government as ‘the problem not the solution’. He hated government spending, and was openly ideological in his support for what he called the ‘Reagan Revolution’. Revolutions, as described by Stockman in his 1987 account The Triumph of Politics, were characterized by ‘drastic, wrenching changes in an established regime’. This was not ‘Ronald Reagan’s real agenda in the first place’. It was Stockman’s mission, however, and ‘that of a small cadre of supply-side intellectuals’. ‘The Reagan Revolution, as I had defined it, required a frontal assault on the American welfare state.’ In Stockman’s radical analysis, ‘forty years’ worth of promises, subventions, entitlements, and safety nets issued by the federal government to every component and stratum of American society would have to be scrapped or drastically modified’.

At 3.6 per cent, inflation was ‘far milder than the double-digit nightmare people remembered from the 1970s’.59 In Britain too, inflation had been tamed. Nigel Lawson could boast that inflation ‘was down to 3.5 per cent in 1986’, a startling change from the 1970s when the inflation rate had hit over 20 per cent.60 Thatcher’s attempts to balance the books were probably more successful than those of Ronald Reagan, although such public-finance figures were flattered by the asset sales known as privatizations. By 1988, Thatcher could boast of a £14 billion projected surplus for the 1988–9 fiscal year,61 though this may have been somewhat misleading as it reflected very buoyant economic conditions. Looking back at the Thatcher era in Britain and the Reagan era in the United States, many people have drawn different conclusions.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

A six-month notice was required “to terminate this declaration,” a commitment plainly violated when the Reagan Administration, three days before Nicaragua’s complaint was filed, attempted to modify the 1946 declaration so as to exclude “disputes with any Central American states or arising out of or relating to events in Central America.”12 The Reagan Administration was also sharply criticized by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York for “forsaking our centuries-old commitment to the idea of law in the conduct of nations” and for its “mysterious collective amnesia” in “losing the memory that there once was such a commitment,” losing “all memory of a vital and fundamental tradition.” Our UN Delegation headed by Jeane Kirkpatrick “does not know the history of our country,” he proclaimed, echoed by Anthony Lewis, who decried Reagan’s “failure to understand what the rule of law has meant to this country.”13 Once again, history teaches a different lesson: in fact, it is Ronald Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick who understand “what the rule of law has meant to this country.” The World Court incident serves as a clear illustration. It is a reenactment of events of the Taft and Wilson Administrations 70 years earlier. In 1907, at US initiative, a Central American Court of Justice was established to adjudicate conflicts among the American states.

But the facts about the historical and contemporary US attitude towards “pluralistic democracy” in Central America are virtually never discussed in this context, a Nicaraguan proposal to demilitarize the borders with the aid of the Contadora group receives a 40-word notice (a Nicaraguan proposal 3 months later for a joint patrol with Honduras to eliminate border incidents apparently was unmentioned), and the Times reports its neutral and objective poll which asks Americans whether they agree with Ronald Reagan, who “says the U.S. should help the people in Nicaragua who are trying to overthrow the pro-Soviet Government there”; even with this wording, they were unable to generate majority support for the operation.136 6.3 The Elections and the Opposition US war aims are further clarified by the hysterical reaction to the Nicaraguan election in November 1984.

The incident can leave no doubt that once again, the US fears a political settlement and prefers that disputes remain in the arena of military conflict, in which its supremacy is unchallenged. We might ask what term other than “hysterical fanaticism” can be used with reference to the President’s declaration of May 1, 1985, announcing an embargo “in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government’s aggressive activities in Central America”: I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat. And what term applies to the “key Congressional leaders” who, in this grim emergency situation when our very existence is under threat, “generally praised President Reagan’s imposition of a trade embargo as a useful first step in pressing the Sandinista Government to change its policies”?


pages: 498 words: 145,708

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

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

There is perhaps no more touching, certainly no more atavistically compelling figure in recent times than George Gilder, who between stints in the 1960s as a critic of feminism and today as a champion of futuristic digital technology, managed in the early 1980s to seize on and romanticize the radical supply-side fervor of neoliberals such as David Stockman and Jack Kemp. Just as their libertarian doctrines were being put into grandiose rhetoric if not actual practice by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Gilder wrote a book aimed at capturing what he was pleased to call “the high adventure and redemptive morality of capitalism.”12 In his Wealth and Poverty, far from abjuring Weber’s thesis, he ups the ante, gilding Weber’s dispassionate language of capitalist rationality with an ardent rhetoric of creativity, risk taking, and entrepreneurial epiphany.

Like Weber, he thinks of them as more selfless than acquisitive, much as modern consumers may see the “greed” attributed to them as instrumental to higher purposes.14 He will not be shamed in the face of inequality because, like the English political philosopher John Locke (who was a powerful influence on the New England Puritan preachers of the eighteenth century), he reckons that the poor are motivated as much by laziness, envy, and contentiousness as by ill fortune or injustice—an absence of zeal rather than an absence of opportunity.15 He sees in capital accumulation not the work of exploiters and expropriators of the labor of others but the achievement of creative risk takers, altruists, and even martyrs: “A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profit, and invest them again.” Gilder insists that “most successful entrepreneurs contribute far more to society than they ever recover.”16 Gilder was not wrong about the moralizing spirit of supply-side economics and its political champions like Ronald Reagan who, like Gilder, thought of poverty as “less a state of income than a state of mind” and celebrated themselves as altruists martyring their immediate pleasures to the productive risks of entrepreneurial creativity. Indeed, Gilder seems quite prescient inasmuch as his moralization of private profit and corporate self-interest captures perfectly not only televangelism’s compromise with materialism, but the spirit of President Bush’s successful campaign strategy in 2004 when he managed to keep piety and profits in the same fold, convincing evangelicals that big-time global capitalism was their best friend and persuading capitalists that they had nothing to fear from anti-materialist Christian fundamentalism.

In its latest guise, privatization ideology takes aim squarely at the public and those democratic philosophies that created the last century’s prudent balancing of capitalism and popular sovereignty, with fateful consequences for citizens. Privatization strategies have shaped the dominant political paradigm at least since the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher adopted them as the official political philosophy of conservatism. These strategies assail the idea of collective social entities even as they celebrate the private and the personal and have recently become dominant in Western Europe and Asia where communitarian and welfare-state models had long been popular.


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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

She was appalled that the only voters he had drawn to his banner were southern whites: “As it stands, the most grotesque, irrational and disgraceful consequence of the campaign is the fact that the only section of the country left in the position of an alleged champion of freedom, capitalism and individual rights is the agrarian, feudal, racist South.” 50 The only glimmer of hope had been Ronald Reagan’s principled and philosophical speech on behalf of Goldwater, but it had been too little, too late. Despite her enthusiasm for Goldwater, Rand was blazing a trail distinct from the broader conservative movement, as indicated by the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness.

For all the emotional upheavals she had suffered, rationality was still her only guide and source of wisdom, individualism her favored theme. “Well, I told you so,” she sighed. “I have been telling you so since We the Living, which was published in 1936.”70 Rand had one last word of warning to issue. Referring to the upcoming Republican primaries she wrote, “I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan.” Reagan was a conservative in “the worst sense of the word,” she told her readers.71 Not only did he support a mixed economy, a compromise between laissezfaire and government controls, but his opposition to abortion demonstrated a dangerous disregard for individual rights. Reagan represented the triumph of all the political trends on the right Rand had fought throughout her long career.

Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Joseph Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 28. Although it did not become widely used until the 1950s, “libertarian” was in circulation prior to the New Deal. It emerged after Roosevelt popularized a new understanding of “liberal,” the term formerly used by advocates of limited government.


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Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Nonetheless he pushed the limit in expanding government, thus continuing the circumvention of a constitutionally limited federal sector begun under Woodrow Wilson. 199 Sharecroppers $1,000,000 90 80 Marginal Tax Rate (%) 500,000 70 60 250,000 50 100,000 40 30 75,000 20 45,000 10 0 2007 1993 1982 1987 1964 1941 1932 1913 25,000 Year Figure 8.1 Marginal Tax Brackets of Various Inflation-Adjusted Incomes (1913–2007) However, near-confiscatory tax rates did not make the scene until the advent of World War II, and in inflation-adjusted terms these remained in effect until the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The mountainous formation of this era dominates the center of the chart, and makes it hard to appreciate how upper-middle class tax rates remained higher than in the Roosevelt era even after the Reagan revolution occurred. Figure 8.1 thus reveals that the era of the 1930s looks little different from the post-Reagan/Bush years (which include Clinton and a Congress inspired by the Contract with America).

So entrenched is the modern socialistic and technocratic state that political strategies that buck the trend and advocate restraint of government expenditures have been barred from consideration since prior to the crash of 1929. Even notable conservatives who shared power with a liberal Congress or executive branch, such as Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich, respectively, were unable to restrain the growth of government, much less undo the empowerment extended beyond its original constitutionally enumerated powers. Chapter 9 The Heart of the Financial System ousing is probably the most heavily subsidized industry in the United States.

A video of the proceedings is available on YouTube.10 If accounting had been the only issue as things stood in the precarious market conditions that emerged in 2008, a fix could have been made and cash flow would have remained unchanged at presumably healthy levels. If management had been the problem, executive housecleaning would have sufficed. However, the underlying proposition of why the entities exist, whether they are achieving their mission, and most important, whether they are counterproductive are the questions that must be asked and resolved. Ronald Reagan quipped in his first 216 ENDLESS MONEY inaugural address (1981) that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”11 The record shows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac follow in the footsteps of previous failures. As Ronald Utt writes, “… federally sponsored financial institutions, including those that the federal government closely regulates and insures, have a knack of frequently exploding in hugely horrific and costly ways.


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After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Reviving the HOLC was not the only foreclosure mitigation idea to emerge from the academy in 2008, and they didn’t all come from spend-thrifty (actually borrow-thrifty) Democrats like me. Two weeks after my HOLC piece appeared, the Wall Street Journal—a newspaper not known then or now for its Left-leaning views*—published an op-ed by Martin Feldstein of Harvard, who had once chaired Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Feldstein offered a plan to replace 20 percent of each homeowner’s mortgage with a low-interest loan from the government. The new loans would be made with recourse, however, so the government could go after other assets of any defaulting borrower. In October 2008, Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, who had been George W.

How about perpetrators? President Obama was labeled a socialist and worse by arch-conservatives, who railed against “big government.” By the time of the November 2010 elections, Tea Party Republicans were running—and often winning—on virulently antigovernment platforms that placed them far to the right of Ronald Reagan, whom they professed to idolize. Think about it: The crisis was the result of a series of grievous errors, misjudgments, and even frauds by private companies and individuals, aided and abetted by a hands-off policy from a government unduly enamored of laissez-faire. America was plainly a victim of too little regulation, not too much.

Keynesian policy is often identified with the idea that governments can and should spend their way out of recessions—hence, the common association with “big government.” But that is an overly narrow interpretation of Keynesianism. For one thing, governments can fight recessions by cutting taxes rather than by raising spending, which is just what Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did—two Keynesians in deed though not in word. More germane to the present discussion, most American Keynesians (including Bernanke) have long believed that expansionary monetary policy is a better way to fight recessions than expansionary fiscal policy. Using monetary policy to expand the economy means, principally, cutting interest rates.


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More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Not only did this start a long clash between the Islamic world and the West, but it also, along with the hostage crisis that followed, doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter and helped ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, a strong advocate of free markets and a fierce anti-communist. In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher, a politician with similar convictions, became British prime minister. Ronald Reagan’s electoral prospects were given another boost by the anti-inflationary policies of Paul Volcker. As mentioned in the last chapter, he became chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979 and swiftly pushed up interest rates to eye-watering levels.

It is tempting to see the Romans solely as colonial oppressors – the arrogant overlords portrayed in the French comic strip Asterix the Gaul. Ruthlessness and brutality are required to build an empire, but, as the historian Ian Morris points out, the disintegration of empires can be ruinous.4 When a government fails to keep order, trade declines because banditry becomes more profitable than industry. Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine scariest words are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; on the contrary, Ian Morris says, the ten scariest words are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.” Migration in the form of invasion is such a common historical development that the descendants of the invaders can easily forget that it happened.

In retrospect, monetarism seems a classic example of an economic policy proposal that looks convincing in theory, and has some mathematical backing, but which crumbles in the face of the complexities of the real world. It is rather like the sports fan who can describe in detail how the professionals got it wrong, but who would fall flat on his face if he ever made it on to the pitch. The new wave of politicians Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both elected, in part, because of the mess left by their predecessors. Among the first acts of both politicians was to cut taxes, particularly for the highest earners. In America, these were 70%, and in Britain 83% at the end of the 1970s. By the time Thatcher and Reagan had left office, the highest US income tax rate was 28% and the British rate 40%.18 Reagan was a former Hollywood actor whose sunny personality proved electorally popular, after Carter’s troubled presidency.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Subject: Re: SDT membership application Importance: High Louise, Are you interested in a joint appointment as a member of the Europa SDT and cochair of the Ganymede SDT? Dave Senske of JPL will chair with you. Thanks, Curt66 Replied Louise: “Yes please!”67 And now it was her job to get NASA back to Jupiter. Chapter 3 The Dark Ages FOR PLANETARY SCIENTISTS, THE JIMMY CARTER–Ronald Reagan years were in retrospect like the Dark Ages, and they, the monks tending in enclaves to the embers of civilization.68 For a solid decade starting in late 1978,69 NASA launched no planetary science missions, and pretty much the only space science data trickling back to Earth came from the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys of the farthest planets of the solar system, where you’d get three weeks of data and then three to five years of silence—hardly enough to sustain an entire field of scientific inquiry.70 The Voyager findings at Jupiter fueled a desire by the careworn planetary science community to return there, but that required Reagan to fund the spacecraft Galileo—something his administration worked diligently to avoid doing upon assuming power in 1981.

In the near term, it would be a space laboratory, but it would eventually serve as a layover for astronauts on their way to the moon.194 You could assemble, service, and support lunar rovers and spacecraft from there, and in the very long term, do the same for Mars-bound crews and cargo—a literal station, as for trains and busses. It would be pricey, yes, but not wildly out of line with what NASA did every day. When it was first formally proposed by Ronald Reagan, the agency estimated that the station would cost eight billion dollars.195 That kind of cash request was not well met, but Congress appropriated sufficiently to stand up the program and see what might come out of it. Funding continued into the Bush administration. This wasn’t driven entirely by a love for NASA or a whirlwind congressional crush on a flying bus stop.

She studied political science and economics, and while there, did Semester at Sea spending time in developing countries, seeing with her own eyes levels of poverty previously unimaginable, and it was there that Lori Garver, clinically raised Republican stock—she’s seeing this and learning that Ronald Reagan was cutting foreign aid to these people, who had nothing, who were harming no one, and she was aghast and she came home and sought out the person most likely to defeat Reagan, and she asked for a job on his campaign, and got it. Concurrently: in 1983 Sally Ride was selected for flight on the seventh space shuttle mission, and with the launch of Challenger became the first American woman in space.368 (Challenger disintegrated shortly after launch three years and eight missions later.369) Until then, Lori was cognizant of the space program—I mean, she knew we had one.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

I would send people cards to wish them a happy birthday. I’d send them research reports or books or articles that I thought would interest them. I’d send them notes saying how much I’d enjoyed meeting them. At around the same time that I read Cialdini’s books, I also stumbled upon a book that included many of Ronald Reagan’s letters. He wrote to an amazing range of people, and he seemed to have a genuine interest in every one of them. He shared jokes and advice, addressed their concerns, encouraged kids. It seemed to me that this was part of the secret of his success. He wasn’t the most cerebral American president, but he mastered the art of caring for others, and he expressed his care through letters.

But at a deeper level, that simple email is a gift of true friendship—an act of sharing, trust, generosity, and affection. This act is also built on an understanding of the unsurpassed power of friendship—a recognition that, when we join together with good intentions, we are much more than the sum of our parts. As Mohnish often says, quoting an old adage that Ronald Reagan loved, “There’s no limit to what you can do if you don’t mind who gets the credit.” What more could I ask for than a friend like this? I hope that I’m making this sufficiently clear because it’s almost certainly the most important point in this book—even though it may seem blindingly obvious to you.

Or, A Good Hard Look at Wall Street by Fred Schwed Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich by Jason Zweig Literature 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Hamlet by William Shakespeare Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig Miscellaneous Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth by Mahatma Gandhi City Police by Jonathan Rubinstein Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Reagan: A Life in Letters by Ronald Reagan The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell The New British Constitution by Vernon Bogdanor The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers Vor 1914: Erinnerungen an Frankfurt geschrieben in Israel by Selmar Spier Walden: or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil Philosophy and Theology A Theory of Justice by John Rawls Anarchy, the State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick Destination Torah: Reflections on the Weekly Torah Readings by Isaac Sassoon Halakhic Man by Joseph Soloveitchik Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Annaeus Seneca Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Pirke Avot: A Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics by Leonard Kravits and Kerry Olitzky Plato, not Prozac!


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

The great supply-side thinker Warren Brookes wrote in his classic book The Economy in Mind (1982) that between 1921 and 1925 the income tax rate was cut “four times, by a grand total of 66%, from a top range of 4%–73% to a final range of 1.5%–25%.” Brookes added, “Despite the enormity of these cuts, the actual revenues to the Treasury from the income tax actually rose every year except in 1923 (when there was a recession).”1 In his masterful two-part biography of Ronald Reagan, The Age of Reagan, the brilliant Steven Hayward helped set up the certain genius of the Reagan tax cuts with a revenue argument, too. In particular, he cited a speech by President John F. Kennedy (his tax cuts were actually passed by Lyndon B. Johnson after Kennedy was assassinated): “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”2 Since Kennedy remains a hero to many on the American Left, it’s almost sport among supply-siders to spout JFK’s quotes on taxes in order to tweak Kennedy-loving lefties who shudder at the notion of tax cuts.

This wasn’t the first modern instance of a falling dollar giving the illusion of oil scarcity, or for that matter, abundance. For background on volatility in the price of oil, it is worthwhile to take a trip back to the 1970s and 1980s. We begin with a press conference staged in 1981 by newly elected President Ronald Reagan. Asked about the falling price of oil, Reagan’s answer was nontraditional to say the least: One economist pointed out a couple of years ago—he didn’t state this as a theory, but he just said it’s something to look at—when we started buying oil over there, the OPEC nations, 10 barrels of oil were sold for the price of an ounce of gold.

Happily, for at least the next two decades, the dollar rebounded. Its rebound helped an economy reliant on investment begin to right itself. What, or who, was the driver of the dollar’s revival? The answer lies in the simple truth that markets never price in the present. They always reflect the future. In this case, Ronald Reagan’s primary wins for the Republican presidential nomination started piling up in the early part of 1980. Even better, Reagan affirmed on the campaign trail, “No nation in history has ever survived fiat money, money that did not have a precious metal backing.”16 Markets seemingly priced Reagan’s victory before polling data and the pundits did, and as presidents get the dollar they want, investors weren’t going to wait for Reagan’s inauguration to begin correcting the dollar’s value upward.


pages: 233 words: 75,477

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

Here was an example of what happens to people when their country is “lost” to the Soviet bloc. Resettlement constituted powerful moral ammunition for the Reagan Doctrine. But when did President Reagan ever speak out about it? Maybe he did, once or twice. If so, it was a reference too obscure for even Ethiopia experts to remember. Resettlement was the issue Ronald Reagan had been waiting for all his presidency. If not Reagan, why not Bush, at least? As one State Department official observed cynically, “Bush should have taken on resettlement as his issue. If ever there was a guy who needed— and was always looking for—his own issue it was Bush.” Reset-tlement, which Bush criticized in the context of his trips to Africa but never really jumped on in Washington, was perhaps the only cause available to him at the time that was original and would have helped to shore up his credentials as a presidential candidate among conservatives, without alienating moderate elements in the Republican party.

The USSR moved more than $1 billion in arms to take over a country while the United States did nothing except stand on ceremony. In coming years, hundreds of thousands would die as a result. Ethiopia obviously took up a significant amount of Carter's time at the beginning of his term in office. But it's difficult to find a reference about Ethiopia in his memoir Keeping Faith. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, Ethiopia was well on its way to becoming Moscow's first African satellite. Although the maturation of the Eritrean and Tigrean guerrilla resistances offered Reagan the chance to destabilize the Dergue through the use of proxy armies, the conservative Republican president, while willing to arm less competent guerrilla groups in other parts of the globe, did next to nothing in Ethiopia.

In 1974, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was over-thrown—leading to a Marxist regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam—Eritrean guerrilla activity did not cease, and from then on the Eritreans fought an Ethiopia backed this time by the Soviet Union. Yet despite their ability to grind away at a Soviet-supplied war machine, which featured MIG fighter jets and Soviet generals on the battlefield, the secretive and independent-minded Eritreans received no aid under the Reagan Doctrine (President Ronald Reagan's program of arming Third World anticommunist insurgencies). Nevertheless, in 1991 Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas, fighting on separate fronts, defeated Mengistu, with Eritrean tanks rolling triumphantly into the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Thus, in the minds of the Eritreans, they fought and won a three-decade struggle against a state ten times as populous, with no help from either of the superpowers or the rest of the outside world.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

Here, except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It goes nowhere.” The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed.

Over the past few decades, we have watched the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries, or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state, and judicial authority. The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.”

These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. These statistics reduce the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The lies employed to camouflage the economic decline have been in place for several decades. President Ronald Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force to magically reduce the nation’s unemployment rate by 2 percent. President Clinton decided that those who had given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time jobs but could find only part-time employment, were no longer to be counted as unemployed.


pages: 261 words: 79,883

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

They are more innovative, and most importantly, they are able to sustain all these things over the long term. Many of them change industries. Some of them even change the world. The Wright brothers, Apple and Dr. King are just three examples. Harley-Davidson, Disney and Southwest Airlines are three more. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were also able to inspire. No matter from where they hail, they all have something in common. All the inspiring leaders and companies, regardless of size or industry, think, act and communicate exactly alike. And it’s the complete opposite of everyone else. What if we could all learn to think, act and communicate like those who inspire?

The laws they drafted tried to protect the intangible set of values and beliefs by protecting the symbol of those values and beliefs. Though the laws have been struck down by the Supreme Court, they have spurred contentious and emotionally charged debates. They pit our desire for freedom of expression with our desire to protect a symbol of that freedom. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, knew all too well the power of symbols. In 1982, he was the first president to invite a “hero” to sit in the balcony of the House chamber during the State of the Union address, a tradition that has continued every year since. A man who exuded optimism, Reagan knew the value of symbolizing the values of America instead of just talking about them.

.,” MLK Online, http://www.mlkonline.net/dream.html. 160 American flag on a soldier’s right arm?: Brendan I. Koerner, “Soldiers and Their Backward Flags,” Slate, March 18, 2003, http://www.slate.com/id/2080338/. 161 “Don’t let anyone tell you that America’s best days are behind her”: President Ronald Reagan’s Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress Reporting on the State of the Union, January 26, 1982, http://www.c-span.org/executive/transcript.asp?cat=current_event&code=bush_admin&year=1982. 163 “Mostly, it says I’m an American”: Randy Fowler, general manager of a Harley-Davidson dealership in California, personal interview, January 2009. 165 In 2003 and 2004 Apple ran a promotion for iTunes with Pepsi: http://www.apple208m/pr/library/2003/oct/16pepsi.html. 170 Volkswagen introduced a $70,000 luxury model to their lineup: “2006 Volkswagen Phaeton Review,” Edmonds.com., http://www.edmunds.com/volkswagen/phaeton/2006/review.html; “VW analyses Phaeton failure, reveals new details about next-gen model,” MotorAuthority.com, February 18, 2008, http://www.motorauthority.com/vw-analyses-phaeton-failure-reveals-new-details-about-next-gen-model.html.


pages: 296 words: 78,227

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, delayed gratification, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, inventory management, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, The future is already here, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

What we must do is to plant firmly in our minds that hard work, especially for somebody else, is not an efficient way to achieve what we want. Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we ourselves want lead to high returns. Decide on your own patron saints of productive laziness. Mine are Ronald Reagan and Warren Buffett. Reagan made an effortless progression from B-film actor to darling of the Republican Right, governor of California, and extremely successful president. What did Reagan have going for him? Good looks, a wonderfully mellifluous voice which he deployed instinctively on all the right occasions (the high point of which undoubtedly consisted in his words to Nancy when shot, “Honey, I forgot to duck”), some very astute campaign managers, old-fashioned grace, and a Disneyesque view of America and the world.

This means that there is very little work to do. He pours scorn on the conventional view of investment portfolio diversification, which he has dubbed the Noah’s Ark method: “one buys two of everything and ends up with a zoo.” His own investment philosophy “borders on lethargy.” Whenever I am tempted to do too much, I remember Ronald Reagan and Warren Buffett. You should think of your own examples, of people you know personally or those in the public eye, who exemplify productive inertia. Think about them often. Give up guilt Giving up guilt is clearly related to the dangers of excessively hard work. But it is also related to doing the things you enjoy.

Instead, find a profession where supply and demand are more equally matched, but which is close in its requirements to your preferred vocation. Such adjacent professions usually exist, although they may not be immediately apparent. Think creatively. For example, the requirements of politicians are very close to those of actors. The most effective politicians, like Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, or Margaret Thatcher, either were or could have been successful actors. Charlie Chaplin was a dead ringer for Adolf Hitler and this was not accidental; sadly, Hitler was one of the century’s best and most charismatic actors. This may all seem pretty obvious.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The Republican Party of that era had its share of kooks and crackpots, such as Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who conducted an infamous communist witch hunt, and General Douglas MacArthur, who told the Republican convention of 1952 that the Democratic Party had “become captive to the schemers and planners who have infiltrated its ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state.” But for the most part, the party’s elders controlled the nutcases. Yet the Republican Party that emerged at the end of the twentieth century began to march backward to the nineteenth. Ronald Reagan lent his charm and single-mindedness to the movement, but he was not a true regressive. It was only when Newt Gingrich and his followers took over the House of Representatives in 1995 that regressives began retaking the GOP. The Koch brothers bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and in 2010 Tea Party Republicans led the way toward capturing the House of Representatives and many state governments.

The Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler found that more than 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they “have not used a government social program,” as do more than half of families receiving government-backed student loans, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security disability. Add in the relentless government hating and baiting of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rage radio; include more than thirty years of Ronald Reagan’s repeated refrain that government is the problem; pile on hundreds of millions of dollars from regressive billionaires like Charles and David Koch, intent on convincing the public that government is evil, and some public support for stop-at-nothing tactics is not all that surprising. Yet neither the regressives’ stop-at-nothing tactics nor their social Darwinist message would have gained much traction were it not for the stunning failure of Democrats to make the case for a strong and effective government that responds to the needs of average people.


pages: 801 words: 229,742

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

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

It also gets its aid when it annexes territory it has conquered (as it did on the Golan Heights and in Jerusalem), sells U.S. military technology to potential enemies like China, conducts espionage operations on U.S. soil, or uses U.S. weapons in ways that violate U.S. law (such as the use of cluster munitions in civilian areas in Lebanon). It gets additional aid when it makes concessions for peace, but it rarely loses American support when it takes actions that make peace more elusive. And it gets its aid even when Israeli leaders renege on pledges made to U.S. presidents. Menachem Begin promised Ronald Reagan that he would not lobby against the proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, for example, but Begin then went up to Capitol Hill and told a Senate panel that he opposed the deal.72 One might think that U.S. generosity would give Washington considerable leverage over Israel’s conduct, but this has not been the case.

Henry Kissinger may have used U.S. aid to Israel as a way to drive a wedge between Moscow and Cairo, but he admitted privately that “Israeli strength does not prevent the spread of communism in the Arab world … So it is difficult to claim that a strong Israel serves American interests because it prevents the spread of communism in the Arab world. It does not. It provides for the survival of Israel.”32 Ronald Reagan may have called Israel a “strategic asset” when he was campaigning for president in 1980, but he did not mention Israel’s strategic value in his memoirs and referred instead to various moral considerations to explain his support for the Jewish state.33 Thoughtful Israeli analysts have long recognized this basic reality.

According to Max Boot, a leading neoconservative pundit, supporting Israel is “a key tenet of neoconservatism,” a position he attributes to “shared liberal democratic values.”71 Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist who has written extensively about American politics as well as anti-Semitism, convincingly argues that one of the main reasons that the neoconservatives moved to the right was “their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes.” In particular, writes Ginsberg, they embraced Ronald Reagan’s “hardline anti-communism” because they saw it as a “political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security.”72 Given their hawkish orientation, it is not surprising that the neoconservatives tend to align with right-wing elements in Israel itself. For example, it was a group of eight neoconservatives (led by Richard Perle and including Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) that drafted the 1996 “Clean Break” study for incoming Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

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

The British colonists were thus benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.27 The Great Seal is a graphic representation of “the idea of America” from its birth. It should be exhumed from the archives and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all the Kim Il-Sung–style worship of the grand murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost,” so we learn from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and who blissfully described himself as the leader of a “shining city on the hill” while orchestrating the ghastly crimes of his years in office, leaving not only slaughter and destruction in much of the world but also major threats of nuclear war and terror, and as an extra benefit, a major contribution to global jihadism.28 The conquest and settling of the West did indeed show individualism and enterprise, as Cohen observed.

“There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them,” he warned. “We are outnumbered 15 to 1. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” So we have to stop them in Vietnam. Similar fears were voiced by Ronald Reagan when he strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a national emergency in 1985, warning that the fearsome Nicaraguan army was only “two days driving time” from Harlingen, Texas, an imminent terrorist threat if we don’t stop them in Managua. And when he bombed the nutmeg capital of the world, Grenada, because the Russians might use it to bomb the United States, if they could find it on a map.

The Financial Times reported the enthusiasm of the PR industry over the marketing of “brand Obama.” Particularly impressed were those who “helped pioneer the packaging of candidates as consumer brands 30 years ago,” when they designed the Reagan campaign. Obama, some felt, is likely to “have more influence on boardrooms than any president since Ronald Reagan, [who] redefined what it was to be a CEO” by teaching the lesson that “you had to give them a vision.” Reagan’s visionary performance led to “the 1980s and 1990s reign of the imperial CEO,” an office that registered such towering successes as destroying the financial system and exporting much of the real economy while amassing huge personal fortunes based largely on ability to choose the boards that determine salary and bonuses, thanks to regulations established by the nanny state for the rich.7 Obama himself had expressed his admiration for Reagan as a “transformative figure.”


pages: 382 words: 116,351

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Our accounting office was becoming apoplectic. The Air Force sympathized and told me to keep my chin up but rejected my appeal for renegotiations to build inflationary spirals into a shared customer-government cost outlay. By the middle of the presidential campaign of 1980, Carter was catching hell from all directions. Ronald Reagan blasted him for weakening the military and made a campaign issue out of Carter’s cancellation of Rockwell’s B-1 bomber, which had cost eight thousand jobs in voter-rich Southern California. The Carter White House asked me to draft a briefing paper for Reagan that would privately inform him about the very sensitive stealth project in the hope he would back off his attacks on the outmoded B-1.

I don’t have the slightest doubt that MaryEllen could make you very happy.” He thanked me and proposed to MaryEllen a few days later. When the couple returned from their Hawaiian honeymoon, in June 1970, he began inviting Faye and me to join them for dinner or to be weekend guests at Kelly’s 1,200 acre cattle ranch, near Ronald Reagan’s big spread, overlooking Solvang, California. Kelly had seldom socialized with any employees except at occasional company functions, or even more rarely, asking a couple of guys to join him for a quick round of golf at a local country club, where Kelly would breeze through eighteen holes using only a six iron, which he claimed was just fine for all shots, near and far.

Had I been less preoccupied juggling several big stealth projects simultaneously I might have given more thoughtful consideration to life without Bill Perry at the Pentagon. Because as the presidential campaign heated up and we headed into the fall election, President Carter was clearly in deep political trouble and the chances were growing that Ronald Reagan was about to become the new commander in chief. Perry was a Democrat and was certain to be replaced by the Reagan defense team. Perry enjoyed respect both in the Pentagon and on the Hill for his technical acuity; without him, the Skunk Works lost a true believer in stealth technology, willing to push against the Pentagon bureaucracy to get important work done.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

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

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

Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of “states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.

FEAR OF A BLACK PRESIDENT The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.

Her achievements from then on are significant. She helped pioneer the farm-collective movement in America, and co-founded New Communities—a sprawling six-thousand-acre collective that did everything from growing crops to canning sugarcane and sorghum. New Communities folded in 1985, largely because Ronald Reagan’s USDA refused to sign off on a loan, even as it was signing off on money for smaller-scale white farmers. Sherrod went on to work with Farm Aid. She befriended Willie Nelson, held a fellowship with the Kellogg Foundation, and was short-listed for a job in President Clinton’s Agriculture Department.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

When it turned out to be an order of magnitude more complicated, Americans quickly grew tired of the effort. In 1968, four years after the War on Poverty was launched, Richard Nixon won election to the White House, in part by stoking popular resentment against welfare recipients. Twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected president on a platform of rolling back much of the Great Society. Today, after four decades during which tackling economic hardship took a distant backseat to other priorities, one in six Americans live below the poverty line, their lives as constricted and as difficult as those of the men, women, and children who peopled the pages of The Other America in the Kennedy era.

After all, it’s easy to castigate someone; it’s much harder to truly understand his or her circumstances. Both major political parties have been guilty of this sleight of hand in recent decades, though the Republicans, and their talk radio allies, have taken it to new levels—turning verbal denigration of the poor into something of an art form. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sneeringly referred to “welfare queens,” Cadillac-driving moochers impudently turning up at government offices to claim their checks. The answer was to ratchet up means testing, drug testing, fingerprinting, and other intrusive checks for welfare applicants. In other words, to assume the worst of applicants, to have as a bureaucratic default position the belief that all applicants would cheat the system if they could, rather than that most were simply people who were mired in hard times and needed assistance to survive from one day or one week to the next.

“In a few years this nation basically eliminated hunger as a problem,” wrote the authors of the 1985 Harvard University School of Public Health–sponsored report Hunger in America, as they examined the extraordinary demise of hunger in the postwar period and bemoaned its woeful and entirely unnecessary reemergence during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “The success was relatively swift and not difficult to see,” they continued. “We have enough food to end hunger in this land. All that remains is the political will.”11 Johnson’s expanded safety net yielded results in other arena too. As recently as 1959, for example, upward of 35 percent of the elderly were living in poverty—much of it caused by high medical bills.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

PRIVATE DEBT, FINANCIAL INNOVATION, AND ECONOMIC INSTABILITY The British acted first, electing in 1979 a Conservative Party government that chose free-market lioness Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. She immediately embraced a program of minimally fettered capitalism, and over more than a decade in office largely implemented it. The Republicans under Ronald Reagan, in turn, won the U.S. presidency in November 1980. They soon supported, albeit with some reservation, a harsh crackdown on double-digit inflation by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker. More enthusiastically, they embraced a policy of returning to the old-time economic religion.

Financial Mercantilism: Bailouts, Debt, and the Socialization of Credit Risk, 1982-2007 I wrote back in 1994 that “the investment community also buzzed with another rumor that the Federal Reserve, sheltered in the secrecy of its unsupervised, free-from-audit status, had gone even further by quietly buying S&P futures to prop up the stock market on critical days.”32 Actually, what would later be nicknamed the Plunge Protection Team may have been sheltering such activity behind something far more reassuring: stated but imprecise presidential authority, contained in a proclamation establishing the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets issued by Ronald Reagan on March 18, 1988, four months after the October 1987 crash. The secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board were the designated big hitters, but others—the several stock market chief executives, for example, and the president of the New York Federal Reserve Board—could be added to the attendees as needed.

Milton Friedman, a conservative economist whose work combined emphasis on the nation’s money supply as the key to inflation with a staunch belief in the market as a self-correcting mechanism, began to sell these positions within the Republican Party. So did other colleagues from the academic seat of American free-market economics, the University of Chicago. From Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the United States to Margaret Thatcher in Britain, conservatives harked to Friedman’s and the Chicago School’s essential message: that government interference with the operation of the market was ill-advised and doomed to failure. They also took quiet and secondary comfort from his defense of speculators and greed, a tolerance welcomed by party contributors.


A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina

addicted to oil, big-box store, book value, carbon tax, clean water, cognitive dissonance, energy security, Exxon Valdez, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jones Act, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan

An American graduate student and a Mexican biologist airlift 10,000 endangered sea turtle hatchlings to an oil-free part of the Gulf. Late 1970s. President Jimmy Carter envisions a future array of energy sources and represents this vision with solar panels on the White House roof. After Carter’s one-term presidency, Ronald Reagan has the solar panels dismantled and junked. By the end of 1985, when Reagan’s administration and Congress have allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era has faded. Solar water heating has gone from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses have gone bankrupt.

The report further noted, “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.” On May 19, Interior Secretary Salazar announces that he’s dividing the disgraced Minerals Management Service into three units. One might say he’s dispersing the agency. The agency had been created by Ronald Reagan’s infamous Interior secretary James Watt. That explains some things. The current agency’s three missions—energy development, enforcement, and revenue collection—“are conflicting missions and must be separated,” Salazar says. Applause. No more sex, drugs, and rock-and-oil. In a few days the agency’s chief will quit under pressure.

When the benefits of drilling accrue to a private company, but the risks of that drilling accrue to we the American people, whose waters and shoreline are savaged when things go wrong, I as Fake President stand on the side of the American people, and say to the industry: From this day forward, if you cannot handle the risk, you no longer will take chances with our fate to reap your rewards. Maybe Maddow will someday throw her sombrero into the presidential ring. And if she wins, she will join every president since the 1970s in saying that America must get off oil. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. And Rachel Maddow. But until the country realizes that our Congress and our courts must serve people with belly buttons, not multinational corporations … More congressional hearings and briefings. The Interior Department’s acting inspector general, Mary L.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.3 The media campaign was an extraordinary success.

As the Edsalls explain, “the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income distribution against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged—particularly for disadvantaged blacks—is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the responsibility of the larger society.”62 Just as race had been used at the turn of the century by Southern elites to rupture class solidarity at the bottom of the income ladder, race as a national issue had broken up the Democratic New Deal “bottom-up” coalition—a coalition dependent on substantial support from all voters, white and black, at or below the median income. The conservative revolution that took root within the Republican Party in the 1960s did not reach its full development until the election of 1980. The decade preceding Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency was characterized by political and social crises, as the Civil Rights Movement was promptly followed by intense controversy over the implementation of the equality principle—especially busing and affirmative action—as well as dramatic political clashes over the Vietnam War and Watergate.

., Chicago Metropolis 2020: 2006 Crime and Justice Index, (Washington, DC: Pew Center on the States, 2006), 5, www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=33022. 23 Ibid., 37. 24 Ibid., 35. 25 Ibid., 3; see also Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 12. 26 Street, Vicious Circle, 3. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 See chapter 1, page 61, which describes the view that President Ronald Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the “emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.” 30 For an excellent discussion of the history of felon disenfranchisement laws, as well as their modern day impact, see Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 31 Cotton v.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

But this was a moment of genuine hope for Carter, who could believe that he was presenting Americans with the choice of a different kind of leadership as he headed into the campaign against Gerald Ford (who just managed to hold onto the Republican nomination the following month in Kansas City, against a Ronald Reagan insurgency that almost swept him away). So Democrats left New York fired by the politics of optimism. The atmosphere was certainly exhilarating. For me, it was also a little strange, summed up in a midweek episode that was quite unexpected and left me with the bizarre feeling that I’d spent the whole time on a stage set.

Would they make peace? Clearly their animosity had intensified during the campaign. It was reported that Carter said he wanted to ‘whip his ass’ and Kennedy’s feelings about him were well known – that the president’s leadership at a time of trial was inadequate to the task. For party reasons, with Ronald Reagan having swept to the Republican nomination in Detroit the previous month, it was important that these differences should be patched up and that they shouldn’t go their separate ways at the start of the fall campaign. But first, in old Boston style, Kennedy was ready for his last hurrah. I happened to have a grandstand view.

There was nowhere better to quicken the senses about the profound political change that had taken place in the preceding months. The 1960s and ’70s were behind us, and slipping away fast. We were in the Reagan era. CHAPTER 4 THE GENIAL REVOLUTION The shadows were lengthening on the White House lawn on the evening of 4 July 1981 when I first saw Ronald Reagan. It was his first Independence Day as president, and quite important for him to look relaxed, because Washington was still wondering how much damage had been done in the assassination attempt three months earlier, a couple of miles away outside the Washington Hilton. His performance that day was a perfect emblem of the presidency he wanted to create.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

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

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

“They are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes,” New York’s billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “They’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.… [I]f we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.” Federal spending on cities has been declining for decades, but it was President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 with a mandate to slash budgets, who really sealed the fate of many urban centers. Reagan cut all nonmilitary spending by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities’ abilities to pay for public housing.

This is what pissed off Hugo the most—the idea that these people felt they had more of a right to space than he and his friends; that the amount of time spent in a community and the traditional ways of doing things, of accessing public space, did not matter, and only money did. 8 Growth Machine What’s happening in San Francisco is not an anomaly, but simply one of the most extreme examples of what’s happening in nearly every city in the United States. President Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the rich from around 70 percent to about 30 percent, and, along with cuts to spending on housing and transportation at the federal level, that’s forced cities to figure out how to fund themselves. As we saw in Detroit and New Orleans, that means cities are now trying to attract as many rich people as they can in order to feed their budgets for infrastructure, education, pensions, and everything else.

A video taken of the incident went viral: MissionCreekVideo, “Mission Playground Is Not For Sale,” YouTube, uploaded September 25, 2014, https://youtu.be/awPVY1DcupE. “the gentrification of the mind”: Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Chapter 8: Growth Machine President Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the rich: Edwin Feulner, “Reagan’s Tax-Cutting Legacy,” The Heritage Foundation, July 14, 2015. a $10 billion budget surplus by 2017: “California to Have $10 Billion Budget Surplus by 2017, Analyst Says,” CBS News, November 20, 2013. In Urban Fortunes, their foundational work: John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xv.


pages: 300 words: 84,762

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

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

McMurphy in his book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Jack Nicholson played McMurphy in the 1975 movie); and the New England Journal of Medicine hailed this therapy as the birth of “a new psychiatry.” But the procedure proved worthless and cruel. Maurice Hilleman receives the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan, 1988. ALTHOUGH NOT RECOGNIZED BY THE PUBLIC, THE PRESS, OR THE Nobel Prize committee, Hilleman was honored by his colleagues. In 1983 he received the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award; in 1985 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; in 1988 he received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan; in 1989 he received the Robert Koch Gold Medal; in 1996 he received a Special Lifetime Achievement Award by the WHO; and in 1997 he received the Albert B.

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


pages: 220 words: 88,994

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

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

He returned home to become head of the KGB and had been a leading light in advocating the brutal suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. His promotion to the top job was greeted with despair in a Poland still labouring under martial law. Washington saw him as a fittingly sinister head for what President Ronald Reagan now termed the ‘evil empire’. A few months later, in September 1983, we reached one of those bleak moments when the awful reality of the superpower standoff came home. Soviet fighter pilots shot down a South Korean airliner which had – allegedly because of a navigational error – strayed into prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka peninsula, home to some of Moscow’s missiles sites.

And a more human face on display to the world. Gorbachev had retired foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, the dour face of the Soviet Union abroad for nearly three decades and nicknamed Mr Nyet. He had suspended the deployment of SS-20 missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and preparations were apace for him to meet Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik. Britain’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher had said he was a man she could ‘do business with’. But the horizon was not without clouds. There were more disconcerting ripples of change running through Yugoslavia, the self-appointed leader of the ‘non-aligned’ movement that in the Soviet bloc was regarded by ordinary people as a soft semi-capitalist paradise and in the West as a cheap holiday destination ‘sort of’ behind the Iron Curtain.

The East German and Soviet leaders still greeted each other on arrival and departure with the old comrades’ kiss – just as they had done in Brezhnev’s day – even if those of us who considered Soviet kisses another branch of Kremlinology couldn’t help but notice that Gorbachev puckered up as if kissing a lemon. Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and delivered a challenge to the Soviet leader that would, more than two years later, seem like a prophetic demand: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

There have always been industrial policies, but this is an industrial strategy that says, “This is about a whole government approach, about looking across the whole country to ensure that we’re making the best of the expertise and the advantages that different parts of the country have, but ensuring that we are seeing that growth spread.”’ May believes not that government is the problem, as Ronald Reagan once declared, but that it is and should be a force for the common good. In her 2016 conference speech in Birmingham, she denounced the templates of both the socialist left and the libertarian right. I asked what it was about the libertarian right that she disliked. ‘I suppose it’s the concept that it’s only the individual who matters, that there is no common good, if you like.

This was the raison d’être of social democracy, and it was connected to a larger purpose, which was to empower those who were not at the top of the class system, to empower working people and ordinary men and women, and also to nurture a sense of solidarity and an understanding of citizenship that enabled the entire society to say we are all in this together. But over the past, well, three or four decades, this sense of purpose has been lost, and I think it begins with the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher era. JC You mean the neoliberal turn at the end of the 1970s – the advent of what you have called ‘market triumphalism’? MS Right. It began there. But even when Reagan and Thatcher passed from the political scene, and were succeeded by the centre-left political leaders – Bill Clinton in the US, Tony Blair in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany – these leaders did not challenge the fundamental assumption underlying the market faith of the Reagan/Thatcher years.

He had no equivalent book to Nineteen Eighty-Four or Homage to Catalonia. He was not a philosopher or novelist and made no original contribution to intellectual thought. His anti-religious tract God Is Not Great is elegant but derivative. His polemical denunciations and pamphlets on powerful individuals, such as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, feel already dated, stranded in place and time. Ultimately, I suspect, he will be remembered more for his prodigious output and for his swaggering, rhetorical style as a journalist and speaker – as well as for his lifestyle: the louche cosmopolitan and gadfly; the itinerant, sardonic man of letters and indefatigable raconteur.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

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

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

Moynihan’s Law had no jurisdiction, and Halabja joined Guernica, Katyn and My Lai in that eccentric but necessary list of comparatively small twentieth-century massacres which act as shorthand notes for atrocities that are too colossal to comprehend. There was a media storm, but that quickly passed as media storms do. Galbraith persuaded the US Senate to pass a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq, but the House of Representatives blocked it. George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, condemned Iraq, but the State Department was a true friend to dictators in adversity and his officials calmed him down. To its enormous credit, the only political faction to stand up consistently against fascism and genocide was the liberal-left. Human Rights Watch established itself as an alternative to Amnesty International on the strength of its investigations in Iraq.

The theorists’ obscurantism marked the conclusion of the strange story of the 1968 generation of radicals, many of whom ended up standing on their heads and using the language of the Left to justify the far right. When they were young, of course, nothing could have been further from their minds. Their real achievements had little to do with the socialism so many of them espoused. If anything, they anticipated Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan by breaking down old communal bonds and prejudices and affirming the primacy of the individual. They liberated women, gays and blacks by rethinking roles and challenging every custom from housework to racist language. And jolly good much of what they did was, too. (It was the Sixties generation in Russia and Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet Empire, after all.)

Social status came with the money as governments abandoned the ideas of professors at the London School of Economics and turned to successful corporations to find the magic formulas to make the state bureaucracies work. The public sector experts from the liberal middle class had to live with the bitter knowledge that the very people they had tried so selflessly to help were in part responsible for the crumpling of their social status and their relative economic decline. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won repeatedly because large numbers of voters from the skilled working class supported them. They were never forgiven for that because from their different points of view Fabians, liberals and Marxists had hoped the working class would take power under their leadership. When it didn’t, they despised the working class for its weakness and treachery and condemned its members for their greed and obsession with celebrity.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

Incorporation need not always require, for example, that corporate representatives sit on review committees that judge new drugs or gather in the office of the vice president to consult on energy policies. Power is typically exercised in a context where the participants know their cues. Recently a major television network withdrew a program dealing with Ronald Reagan after the Republican National Committee protested a scene where the former president was portrayed as less than inclusive about homosexuals.21 This surrender occurred at the precise moment when the Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission was promoting greater concentration of media ownership and, in the process, ignoring an unprecedented outcry from thousands of citizens.

In the narrative of the political archaist the United States was blessed with a once-and-for-all-time, fixed ideal form, an original Constitution of government created by the Founding Fathers in 1787. In that view, the original Constitution is the political counterpart to the Bible, the fundamental text, inerrant, unchanging, to be applied—not “interpreted” by “activist judges.” As the political fundamentalists see it, except for the Edenic era of Ronald Reagan, the form of government decreed by the Constitution has been under siege by “the liberal media” and liberal administrations abetted by their minions in Congress and by judges who “legislate” instead of “following the letter” of constitutional scripture. The nation is perceived as a wayward sinner who frequently wanders from the straight and narrow and needs to be sobered, returned to its sacred text, its Word.

The elect and the elite, the elected and the elect. The combination is as old as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans believed in both an elect destined by God for salvation and an elite destined to govern. When modern-day Republicans invoke the imagery of “a city upon a hill,” they may think that they are quoting Ronald Reagan, but historically the author was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who assumed himself to belong to the elect and the elite. Sadly, the archaists do not temper the dynamists but collude with them. Once upon a time, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Great Awakenings helped to further believers’ democratic impulses and to urge them into the forefront of the fight to abolish slavery.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

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

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

Then, in a major speech in December 1988, Gorbachev specifically called for “de-ideologizing relations among states” and, while referring to the Communist revolution in Russia as “a most precious spiritual heritage,” proclaimed that “today we face a different world, from which we must seek a different road to the future.”20 Most impressively, by February 1989, Gorbachev had matched deeds to words by carrying out his promise to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The United States was quick to react favorably. In December 1988, in his last presidential press conference, Ronald Reagan, stressing the ideological nature of the contest, said, “If it can be definitely established that they no longer are following the expansionary policy that was instituted in the Communist revolution, that their goal must be a one-world Communist state … [then] they might want to join the family of nations and join them with the idea of bringing about or establishing peace.”

As part of an expensive nuclear arms buildup that had begun after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union began adding sophisticated new intermediate-range (3,000 miles) triple-warhead missiles to its arsenal in Europe. NATO became alarmed because it had nothing comparable, and in 1979 it scheduled the deployment of similar countervailing weapons unless the Soviets could be prevailed upon to limit their missiles.9 Talks on this issue were ambling along unproductively when Ronald Reagan became president in the United States in 1981. Almost instantly he began to strike a lot of people as a fire-breathing warmonger. He announced that he would substantially build up U.S. military forces (expanding the policy of this predecessor, Jimmy Carter) and would seek to develop a strategy so that the United States might manage to come out ahead, or “prevail,” in a nuclear war (basically continuing a policy developed by Kennedy, elaborated by Richard Nixon, and accepted by Carter).

Duly alarmed, Carter sternly threatened to use “any means necessary” to counter a further Soviet military move in the area, and began a defense buildup.10 As part of this frantic display of outrage, Carter withdrew the SALT treaty from the ratification process, even though it was supposedly intended to reduce the danger of strategic nuclear war and was obviously completely irrelevant to the Afghan issue. Then, in elections in 1980 the country replaced him with Ronald Reagan, who had always strenuously opposed the treaty, though once in office he continued to abide by its strictures, indicating how generous and substantially unlimiting they actually were. The Freeze, SDI, INF As discussed in the previous chapter, fear over thermonuclear war became all the rage for a few years in the early 1980s, as the unthinkable, all but banished from public discourse after 1963, exploded back into popular consciousness, first in Western Europe and then in the United States, for the reasons outlined there.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

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

A Silicon Valley native who rebelled against her parents’ middle-class, conservative lifestyle, Friedenbach has taken a small salary and dedicated her life to working on homelessness since the 1990s.60 Friedenbach and other advocates for the homeless attribute the rise of homelessness to President Ronald Reagan. “The reason we have mass homelessness,” she said, “is the federal government’s fault. They divested or disinvested from funding housing in the early eighties by 78 percent.”61 A permanent supportive housing provider in the Tenderloin told me, “It’s absolutely undisputed that the homeless crisis in America began after severe cuts to federal affordable housing funds.”62 And an ACLU expert said, “The Reagan administration slashed the budget for our federal affordable housing programs by eighty percent.”63 But public spending on housing barely changed under Reagan, going from $41.8 billion to $40.6 billion between 1981 and 1989, in constant 2019 dollars.64 Reagan did oversee the end of public housing construction, but this was in the context of a shift away from federal housing projects toward rental subsidies which began under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and for good reason.65 In the late 1960s there was growing unhappiness with public housing, particularly high-rise apartment complexes for the urban poor.

President Jimmy Carter in 1977 came out for the decriminalization of marijuana and for drug policies to not “be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”108 The pendulum swung back toward prohibition in the 1980s, particularly among Baby Boomers, many of whom were settling down and starting families, and among women.109 President Ronald Reagan increased the US government funding and focus on law enforcement responses to drug dealing. First Lady Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign urging children not to use drugs. Efforts in the 1980s to crack down on drugs were partly motivated by the crack cocaine epidemic, which led to increases in addiction, open-air drug markets, and violence by dealers defending their turf.

This is a severe drug addiction crisis that needs greater intervention or everyone’s just going to die from fentanyl.”38 7 The Crisis of Untreated Mental Illness When you ask progressives who remember the 1980s why there are so many people on the street, many blame former California governor and president Ronald Reagan. “In the 1970s we never saw homeless people on the streets,” said Democratic political strategist Bill Zimmerman. “After Reagan shut down the mental hospitals, we saw people. Most of those people appeared to be mentally ill rather than addicted to drugs.”1 Susan Mizner, a senior attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed.


pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Even huge Dos Rios Dam would have reduced the thirty-five-foot crest of the monstrous 1964 flood by less than a foot—a fact which the Corps took pains to camouflage, but which its enemies, especially a local Dartmouth-educated rancher named Richard Wilson, who led the opposition, managed to bring out and make stick. It was Wilson, and Ronald Reagan—who, as governor, refused to approve the project—who ultimately killed Dos Rios Dam, but it was the infighting between the agencies that set the stage for its defeat—and for the ultimate collapse of the whole carefully orchestrated development push. By 1981, not a single one of the thirteen North Coast dams on the Corps’ and the Bureau’s priority lists had been built.

In Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee portrays him as a commissioner who led Reclamation on a terrific binge, plugging western canyons as if they were so many basement leaks. His reputation, even today, is outsize; he is often talked about in Washington, and in the conservationists’ annals of villainy he remains a figure as large as, if not larger than, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, the same James Watt. Watt, however, hopped around so much with his foot in his mouth that he didn’t really have a chance to do much that the environmental movement regarded as awful. But Dominy presided over Glen Canyon Dam, over Trinity Dam, over a dozen other big dams, over the federal partnership with California in that state’s own water project, which dammed the Feather River and allowed Los Angeles’ explosive growth to continue, and with it its appetite for even more water.

Ray jerked him around like a beaten dog.” It was against this system that Jimmy Carter, a rube from Georgia who had never been elected to public office outside the state, decided to declare war. Carter’s appointments alone probably got him off on the wrong foot; in their own way, they were like Ronald Reagan’s chemical-industry people taking over the EPA. His Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, had been governor of Idaho and, before that, a sawmill owner; but Andrus was a stranger to Washington, and he had made a reputation in Idaho as an unusually conservation-minded governor from a state full of millionaire sheep ranchers and irrigation farmers.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

On the leading political forum on public television, the nightly “MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” the public was uninvited, except as viewer of an endless parade of Congressmen, Senators, government bureaucrats, experts of various kinds. On commercial radio, the usual narrow band of consensus, excluding fundamental criticism, was especially apparent. In the mid-1980s, with Ronald Reagan as President, the “fairness doctrine” of the Federal Communications Commission, requiring air time for dissenting views, was eliminated. By the 1990s, “talk radio” had perhaps 20 million listeners, treated to daily tirades from right-wing talk-show “hosts,” with left-wing guests uninvited. A citizenry disillusioned with politics and with what pretended to be intelligent discussions of politics turned its attention (or had its attention turned) to entertainment, to gossip, to ten thousand schemes for self-help.

It was a rare journalist bold enough to point out, as Alan Richman of the Boston Globe did when the fifty-two hostages were released alive and apparently well, that there was a certain lack of proportion in American reactions to this and other violations of human rights: “There were 52 of them, a number easy to comprehend. It wasn’t like 15,000 innocent people permanently disappearing in Argentina. . . . They [the American hostages] spoke our language. There were 3000 people summarily shot in Guatemala last year who did not.” The hostages were still in captivity when Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980. That fact, and the economic distress felt by many, were largely responsible for Carter’s defeat. Reagan’s victory, followed eight years later by the election of George Bush, meant that another part of the Establishment, lacking even the faint liberalism of the Carter presidency, would be in charge.

In the seventies, with liberal justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall in the lead, the Court had declared death penalties unconstitutional, had supported (in Roe v. Wade) the right of women to choose abortions, and had interpreted the civil rights law as permitting special attention to blacks and women to make up for past discrimination (affirmative action). William Rehnquist, first named to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was made Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan. In the Reagan-Bush years, the Rehnquist Court made a series of decisions that weakened Roe v. Wade, brought back the death penalty, reduced the rights of detainees against police powers, prevented doctors in federally supported family planning clinics from giving women information on abortions, and said that poor people could be forced to pay for public education (education was not “a fundamental right”).


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Many questions about the world are debatable, but surely not this one. As for “Reaganesque rugged individualism” and its worship of the market, perhaps it is enough to quote the review of the Reagan years in Foreign Affairs by a senior fellow for international finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, noting the “irony” that Ronald Reagan, “the postwar chief executive with the most passionate love of laissez faire, presided over the greatest swing toward protectionimt since the 1930s”2—no “irony,” but the normal workings of “passionate laissez-faire”: for you, market discipline, but not for me, unless the “playing field” happens to be tilted in my favor, typically as a result of large-scale state intervention.

The tacit assumption is that no country has a right to defend civilians from US attack, a doctrine that reigned virtually unchallenged in the mainstream. The pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed Ronald Reagan, finding “that the policies and actions of the government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat,” arousing no ridicule.”23 By similar logic, the USSR had every right to attack Denmark, a far greater threat to its security, and surely Poland and Hungary when they took steps toward independence.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

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

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

We spend more time with them at work, make them our friends, and marry them. The Young Republican with the Ronald Reagan T-shirt waiting in an airport to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., may find himself chatting with the antiglobalization activist with a Che Guevara beret and a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, but it’s not likely he will be adding her to his Christmas card list—unlike the MBA student who collides with the Young Republican at the check-in line because she was distracted by the soaring eloquence of Ronald Reagan’s third State of the Union Address playing on her iPod. So we form social networks that tend to be more like than unlike, and we trust the people in our networks.

When the students are shown their original descriptions and are told that their memories have changed, they often insist their current memory is accurate and the earlier account is flawed—another example of our tendency to go with what the unconscious mind tells us, even when doing so is blatantly unreasonable. The mind can even fabricate memories. On several occasions, Ronald Reagan recalled wartime experiences that were later traced to Hollywood movies. These were apparently honest mistakes. Reagan’s memory simply took certain images from films he had seen and converted them into personal memories. Reagan’s mistake was caught because, as president, his comments were subjected to intense scrutiny, but this sort of invention is far more common than we realize.

These weapons were pointed at each other. They could be launched at any moment. Annihilation would come with nothing more than a few minutes’ notice and, in 1985, it increasingly looked like it would. The Cold War had been getting hotter since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, and we know now that Gorbachev and Reagan later met and steadily reduced tensions, that the Cold War ended peacefully, and the Soviet Union dissolved within a few years. But in 1985, that was all in the black void of the future. In 1985, what actually happened would have seemed wildly improbable—which is why almost no one predicted anything like it.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

It has used many others, sometimes to bamboozle the electorate into voting for its political parties, sometimes to obfuscate its fraudulent and criminal activities. Its politics, too, have undergone a series of mutations—from adherence to the ideas of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg to cheerleading for Ronald Reagan and Vladimir Putin. But it lives on to this day: a political cult that continues to suck the life out of its members on the promise that they are part of an intellectual elite that will, one day, acquire the power and the influence that is rightfully theirs. Its one fixed tenet is the infallibility of its leader, and his complex but essentially meaningless political theories.

“The practice of criticism and self-criticism,” asserts President Mack, “is the only means of changing men’s minds, of washing old brains and curing sick thoughts.” With the White House gained, he begins his cultural revolution. Mack curbs the powers of the FBI and fires 70 percent of its staff. Intelligence files on leftist agitators are closed, and new ones opened on their right-wing equivalents. Out in the political wilderness, Ronald Reagan, the deposed Republican governor of California, forms a covert resistance group called the Secret Center. Mack’s intelligence services fight back with a computer project that analyzes the activities of any Americans earning over $50,000 a year, and soon identifies the ringleaders. Found guilty of “conspiring to incite reactionary riots across state lines,” Reagan submits to a program of moral and political reeducation.

Then a call came through that the Soviets had got wind of the plan. To allay suspicion, hundreds of thousands more dollars would be required to stock the farm with animals to disguise its true function. Excited by this intrigue, LaRouche instructed his acolytes to hand over the cash. Not all of LaRouche’s contacts with power were imaginary. When Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, the organization made eyes at the new president’s advisers. The more respectable members of the Labor Committees invited Republican officials to policy seminars on Capitol Hill. Favored parties received free subscriptions to the glossy LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review, and to War on Drugs, a title founded as an echo chamber for Reagan’s views on narcotics.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

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

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

My study of economics had taught me that the ideology of many conservatives was wrong; their almost religious belief in the power of markets—so great that we could largely simply rely on unfettered markets for running the economy—had no basis in theory or evidence. The challenge was not just to persuade others of this, but to devise programs and policies that would reverse the dangerous increases in inequality and the potential for instability from the financial liberalization begun under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Troublingly, faith in the power of markets had spread by the 1990s to the point where financial liberalization was being pushed by some of my own colleagues in the administration, and eventually by Clinton himself.1 My concern with increasing inequality grew while I served on Clinton’s CEA, but since 2000 the problem has reached ever more alarming heights as inequality grew, and grew, and grew.

I show too that there is a set of eminently affordable policies that can make a middle-class life—the life which seemed within our grasp in the middle of the last century but now seems increasingly to be out of reach—once again the norm rather than the exception. Reaganomics, Trumponomics, and the Attack on Democracy As we reflect upon our current situation, it is natural to think back some forty years to when the Right again seemed triumphant. Then too, it seemed a global movement: Ronald Reagan in the US, Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Keynesian economics, which emphasized how government could maintain full employment through managing demand (through monetary and fiscal policy) was replaced with supply-side economics, emphasizing how deregulation and tax cuts would free up the economy and incentivize it, increasing the supply of goods and services and thereby the incomes of individuals.

That he is willing to make the people of Middle America worse off, taking away health care from thirteen million Americans, this, in a country already reeling from declining life expectancies, shows that he holds them not in respect but in contempt; and so too for the giving of tax breaks to the rich while actually increasing taxes on the majority of those in the middle.4 For those who lived through Ronald Reagan, there are striking similarities. Like Trump, Reagan exploited fear and bigotry: his was the welfare queen who robbed hard-earning Americans of their money. The “dog-whistle,” of course, was that they were African American. He too showed no empathy for the poor. Reclassifying mustard and ketchup as the two vegetables required for nutritious school lunches would be funny if it weren’t so sad.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

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

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

(Anybody who accuses Drucker in print of being a fan of big companies is in for a long letter, chronicling his enthusiasm for decentralization.) All the same, Drucker seemed more at home with the giant corporations that dominated the United States under Dwight Eisenhower than with the small to medium-size businesses that regalvanized the country under Ronald Reagan. He wrote nothing as good as The Concept of the Corporation about a small company. This is odd, given his history and personality. This prophet of the “age of organizations” was a quintessential individualist who was happiest ploughing his own furrow (one of his favorite sayings was “one either meets or one works”).

America possessed more than its share of companies that were producing new products, pioneering new processes, and working overtime to satisfy all their constituents—customers, employees, shareholders, and the public at large.4 Peters and Waterman sounded the “morning in America” theme two years before Ronald Reagan used it to seal his reelection. And, like “the great communicator,” they argued that there was nothing wrong with America that could not be cured by what was right with America. Management theory had met American patriotism. Peters also made the case for humanistic management: the good news that they had discovered across the country all resulted from treating people decently and asking them to shine, rather than treating them as merely factors of production; from producing things that people actually wanted, rather than just hitting the numbers.

Fast Company calls him “a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.”6 New York magazine calls him a “Geek pop star.”7 Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of Traffic and Syriana, is writing a film based on his second book, Blink (2005). Gladwell followed a more circuitous route into journalism than Friedman. The sprig of a liberal academic family—he was born in Britain and brought up in Canada—Gladwell was a rebel-inreverse: he embraced conservatism as a teenager and even put up a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall at the University of Toronto, a gesture that must have required considerable courage. His first job in journalism was with the Clinton-bashing American Spectator. He could easily have become lost in the echo chamber of right-wing journalism, perhaps joining the National Review, the ultimate journalistic dead end, and devoting himself to defending the true religion from various apostates.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

Sure, it seems to go against Americans’ hardy work ethic, but that ethic was conceived before there was 24/7 e-mail and online shopping. Now, if positioned as a public safety and productivity issue, the case for a midday break could be quite strong. And there have been famous nappers. Winston Churchill worked late into the night but took a serious, pajama-cloaked nap in the afternoon. Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were said to be big fans of the nap. Is America ready to give over “Early to Bed, Early to Rise,” in favor of “If You’re Tired, Just Close Your Eyes”? America has a big choice ahead—either enjoy the extra time awake, and figure out new and more productive activities for it; or say we can’t afford not to sleep eight hours, and figure out how to get it.

And so left-handedness has been routinely discouraged, or even beaten out of people. China and the Netherlands were particularly aggressive in “hand reorientation” until the twentieth century, and until the 1960s in the U.S., elementary school teachers—most famously in Catholic schools—slapped left-handed children for trying to write with their left hands. Ronald Reagan, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig were young lefties said to be forced by teachers to switch for writing. But in recent generations, this has all changed. Forcible switching has come to be seen as painful and unnecessary, and now what used to be abhorred in kids is suddenly respected. Just look at the shift in America among people alive today.

Maybe DIYDs—like nurse practitioners but on a smaller scale—can even become certified to practice DIY medicine. It wouldn’t let their Moms brag that Junior is a doctor—but it might make them feel better about the fact that Junior never goes to one. Hard-of-Hearers A 2006 survey found that Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have the highest favorability ratings of any U.S. presidents in the past forty years. Here’s what else they have in common: They are the only two sitting presidents to have admitted they were hard of hearing. When they announced it, people sat up and listened, because it was happening to them, too.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

This may be an era defined by smartphones, but the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and three of the top Democratic presidential candidates were all born in the 1940s, well before the invention of the color television, the polio vaccine, and the bikini. President Donald Trump was the oldest first-term president ever, elected mostly by white voters over sixty-five and enabled by one of the oldest Congresses in history. He is one of only four American presidents (alongside William Henry Harrison, James Buchanan, and Ronald Reagan) who were older than sixty-five when they were first inaugurated. The graying of US politics feels especially claustrophobic given that America’s most visionary leaders have typically been young. Alexander Hamilton was just thirty-two when he became the first secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King Jr. was thirty-four when he led the March on Washington, and John F.

But by the 1980s, many boomers had stopped asking what they could do for their country and started asking what their country could do for them. They liked the idea of being “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” After a decade of economic malaise in the 1970s, boomers largely embraced the exuberant materialism and cynical individualism that characterized much of the late twentieth century. They voted for Ronald Reagan (especially in 1984) and supported the tax cuts and financial deregulation that laid the groundwork for soaring income inequality. The two decades spanning the Reagan and Clinton presidencies amounted to a lurch to the right in American politics. Reagan oversaw a radical reduction in government investment, and Clinton’s “Third Way” attempted to triangulate a path forward for Democrats that prioritized market solutions over government programs and ended up boosting corporate profit more than middle-class wealth.

While most wealthy Americans found loopholes to shrink their effective tax rates, the basic structure worked well: it paid for social welfare programs and ambitious infrastructure projects, such as the interstate highway system, while lessening income inequality in what was then the greatest economic expansion in world history. The top marginal tax rate didn’t fall below 50 percent until the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan slashed it to 28 percent. But thanks to deregulation and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, income inequality today is back where it was before the Great Depression. According to historian Jill Lepore, in 1928 the top 1 percent of American families earned 24 percent of all income, but income inequality shrank significantly in the 1940s—by 1944, the middle class had grown and the top 1 percent earned only about 11 percent of the total.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

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

As the economist Donald Boudreaux points out, today American factories produce 11 per cent more than they did when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and 45 per cent more than when NAFTA was launched in 1994.67 US industrial capacity today is twice as big as it was in 1984 when a TV commercial for Ronald Reagan declared that, ‘It is morning again in America’ and that more Americans go to work than ever before. Today even more people go to work every morning, but fewer of them head for the mill and the docks after breakfast than they used to, because technological changes have automated many of those jobs.

A new protectionist world order would make armies of unemployed lose the belief in a better future back home, so they would join the millions already desperate to escape to richer countries in Europe and North America. 2 OPEN DOORS ‘Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.’ Ronald Reagan, 1989 If there is one policy that is even more beneficial than free trade, it is free immigration. The productivity of workers differs around the world, because in order to produce efficiently, you have to team up with complementary workers, machines and infrastructure. It also takes good institutions, like the rule of law and open markets.

Only those who identify the most with the region their ancestors come from are still in the data at that time, so obviously we think that immigrants are worse at assimilating than they are.55 In 2017, the Republican congressman Steve King said: ‘We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.’ But that is the genius of America. Ever since its founding it has been built on and carried forward by somebody else’s babies and, as Ronald Reagan said in his last speech as president: ‘We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.’56 Steve King, of German and Irish ancestry, happens to be an example himself of how somebody else’s babies can become a part of the country, and even advance to its highest ranks (admittedly, in this case, also proving that immigration does not necessary strengthen America every single time).


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Once a dish was up and running, they could pull down any TV signal without paying. They could get HBO for free. Studies suggested the industry could be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the free riders. Some cable executives wanted to push Congress for new regulation outlawing the piracy. But the environment in D.C. would be tricky. Ronald Reagan was just starting his second term as president, and fervent belief in deregulation was ascendant in Washington. Getting the government to crack down on recreational satellite usage was going to be a tough sell. In the hallways at HBO’s satellite center, they had a better idea. Beat the pirates with technology.

That January, HBO announced a new limited series from the Pulitzer Prize–winning “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau and the director Robert Altman. Following early success with movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975), Altman’s career had slowed down. Even so, by HBO standards, Altman was a huge get. With Ronald Reagan’s second term in office winding down, the United States was deep in the throes of a fierce presidential campaign. The Democratic and Republican fields were crowded with hopeful candidates. Tanner ’88 added one more into the mix. The series, shot in the style of a pseudo-documentary, followed the fictional candidacy of Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), a former Michigan congressman, stumping on the campaign trail in step with events unfolding in the real election.

The shows, like General Electric Theater, Schlitz Playhouse, and Heinz Studio 57, felt jarringly outdated and were impossible to sell into syndication. But the footage did have something going for it. It featured some of the era’s most recognizable actors, some long in the tooth, and some just getting their start, including Ronald Reagan, Groucho Marx, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Joan Crawford. It could be worth something, if someone had the right idea. For several months, Landis met with writers and tossed around potential concepts. Nothing clicked. Finally, Landis and Universal executives came upon Marta Kauffman and David Crane, a pair of struggling writers, who were doing menial jobs at a New York law firm while writing plays and musical theater on the side.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said, "mine, and mine alone." Kennedy's popularity soared. We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility."3 That doesn't cut it. Daniel Yankelovich, the highly regarded survey researcher, reports that although polls find that the public has an abiding mistrust of our major institutions, right below that cynicism is a "genuine hunger" for honesty and integrity.

You keep the message separate from the messenger. The goal is to become aware of the two dissonant cognitions that are causing distress and find a way to resolve them constructively, or, when we can't, learn to live with them. In 1985, Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres was thrown into dissonance by an action taken by his ally and friend Ronald Reagan. Peres was angry because Reagan had accepted an invitation to pay a state visit to the Kolmeshohe Cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, to symbolize the two nations' postwar reconciliation. The announcement of the proposed visit enraged Holocaust survivors and many others, because forty-nine Nazi Waffen-SS officers were buried there.

When asked whether the United States was winning the war, he said, "Absolutely, we're winning." 2 The American Presidency Project (online), www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php, provides documented examples of every instance of "mistakes were made" said by American presidents. It's a long list. Bill Clinton said that "mistakes were made" in the pursuit of Democratic campaign contributions, and later joked about the popularity of this phrase and its passive voice at a White House Press Correspondents dinner. Of all the presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used the phrase most, the former to minimize the illegal actions of the Watergate scandal, the latter to minimize the illegal actions of the Iran-Contra scandal. See also Charles Baxter's eloquent essay, "Dysfunctional Narratives: or: 'Mistakes were made,'" in Baxter (1997), Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

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

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

The strategy of stoking exurban white resentment against encroaching immigration, against the disappearance of old values, against pop-culture glitz, against government power, it all worked so well for the Republicans over the years that even Hillary Clinton borrowed it in her primary race against Obama. Now Palin’s We in St. Paul is, in substance, no different from anything that half a dozen politicians before her have come up with. But neither Nixon nor Hillary nor even Ronald Reagan—whose natural goofball cheerfulness blunted his ability to whip up divisive mobs—had ever executed this message with the political skill and magnetism of this suddenly metamorphosed Piedmont flight attendant at the Xcel Center lectern. Being in the building with Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience.

In 1968 he joined the campaign of Richard Nixon, going to work as an adviser on domestic policy questions. He then worked for Nixon’s Bureau of the Budget during the transition, after Nixon’s victory over Humphrey. This was a precursor to an appointment to serve on Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1974; he later ingratiated himself into the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980, served on a committee to reform Social Security, and ultimately went on to become Federal Reserve chief in 1987. There is a whole story about Greenspan’s career as a private economist that took place in the intervening years, but for now the salient fact about Greenspan is that this is a person who grew up in an intellectual atmosphere where collaboration with the government in any way was considered a traitorous offense, but who nonetheless spent most of his adult life involved in government in one way or another.

His misreading of the tech bubble of the late nineties is legendary (more on that later); he also fell completely for the Y2K scare and at one point early in the George W. Bush presidency actually worried aloud that the national debt might be repaid too quickly. But it wasn’t Greenspan’s economic skill that got him to the top banker job. Instead, it was his skill as a politician. During Ronald Reagan’s first and second terms, while the irritatingly independent Paul Volcker sat on the Fed throne, Greenspan was quietly working the refs, attending as many White House functions as he could. Former Reagan aides told Greenspan’s biographer Jerome Tuccille that “Alan made a point of regularly massaging the people who mattered.”


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

You’ve probably done it a thousand times. Alpha characters, especially alpha narcissists, are more explicit about things, and often they’ve got reason for pride, a fact that is conspicuously evident in American presidential politics—a true hothouse for narcissists. Men like Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan stand onstage at their national conventions holding the hand of their running mates aloft, and they look loose and comfortable and genuinely at ease. They had that poise before they assumed office, and they retained it once they were in power. The same was true of John Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt and even Franklin Roosevelt, who projected a jaunty self-assuredness without even the ability to rise from his chair.

There are scrapper presidents, people with humble—sometimes almost tragic—backgrounds who fight their way to the presidency and arrive there ebulliently (Bill Clinton), self-importantly (Jimmy Carter), eccentrically (LBJ), bitterly (Richard Nixon), but grab the prize all the same. There are happy presidents like Ronald Reagan; genial if awkward presidents like George H. W. Bush; war hero presidents like Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, men who have already been commanders once and decide that they enjoyed the experience so much they’d like to go right on running things, even if they have to do it in the drabber colors of civilian clothes.

The messages may be entirely different, but the huckster’s skills necessary to persuade millions of people to believe and follow are unsettlingly similar. It appalls and offends us to compare America’s celebrated leaders with history’s worst, but if a figure in our past were going to drive us over the edge the way Castro and Hitler drove their countries, would it have been the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, or would it have been Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole? The first group came equipped with powerful talents to persuade and seduce and used them in high-minded and civilized ways. The second group was just as wisely and principally inclined, but lacked the ability to make people feel anything terribly deeply, and mobilizing a nation to extreme behavior is all about the emotion.


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

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

While neoliberalism was an “experiment” imposed on Chile by Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean economists known as “the Chicago Boys” after their 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, it was the International Monetary Fund that imposed “structural adjustments” on the Global South over the next two decades. Similarly, while Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sought bold free-market reforms when they first came to power, neoliberalism also unfolded more subtly in Euro-Atlantic nations through techniques of governance usurping a 20 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s democratic with an economic vocabulary and social consciousness. Moreover, neoliberal rationality itself has altered over time, especially, but not only in the transition from a productive to an increasingly financialized economy.7 A paradox, then.

Hayek versus Milton Friedman — or those representing different political modulations — Gary Becker or Joseph Stiglitz, Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel, George Bush or Barak Obama. There are differences between the neoliberalism of the 1970s and the present, between neoliberalism as an experiment on and in the Third World and as the new enterprise society of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, between the socialism of François Mitterand, the Third Way of Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton, the ownership society of the second George Bush, and most recently . . . as austerity politics. So neoliberalism is doubly impossible to grasp: on the one hand, as our present in the making, it shares with all such forces the difficulties of apprehending and theorizing it.

Thus, far from restoring thrift and frugality as the virtuous paths to personal independence and lasting profit, the reign of deregulated finance defined success as leverage, understood as the ability to invest with borrowed funds, and compelled the less fortunate to stake their livelihood on perennial indebtedness. Much more than a mood swing, whereby the advocates of freer markets would temporarily prevail over the harbingers of a more protective State, the policies instigated under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and further refined by their “Third Way” successors, have successively transformed everything from corporate management to statecraft, household economics to personal relations. In the world shaped by these transformations — a world where the securitization of risks and liabilities greatly widens the realm of potentially appreciable assets — even the criteria according to which individuals are incited to evaluate themselves no longer match the civic, business, and family values respectively distinctive of political, economic, and cultural liberalism.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Wodehouse only wrote ninety-six books.’ Black, gay, intensely charming, a connoisseur and an anglophile, Gomes is not what you expect of a Baptist minister, a Baptist minister furthermore who (though now a Democrat) was something of a chaplain to the Republican Party, having led prayers at the inaugurations of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr. ‘I was a Republican because my mother was a Republican and her mother before her. That nice President Lincoln who freed the slaves was a Republican and our family chose not to forget that fact.’ The downstairs lavatory in his beautifully furnished house is filled with portraits of Queen Victoria at various stages of her life, from young princess to elderly widow.

‘But sometimes not before journalists have embarrassed themselves by quoting from an erroneous entry,’ I point out. ‘If Wikipedia can add to its public service role by embarrassing journalists…why then…’ Jimmy downs his tea. ‘Gotta rush. Great talking to you.’ He leaves for the airport and I walk over to the Ronald Reagan Conference Center (there appear to be more institutions, streets and buildings named for that president than almost any other) to catch a performance by the Capitol Steps, a satirical revue troupe who use well-known songs with changed lyrics to poke fun at the political establishment, ‘How do you solve a problem like Korea?’

* * * ILLINOIS KEY FACTS Abbreviation: IL Nickname: Land of Lincoln, The Prairie State Capital: Springfield Flower: Illinois Native Violet Tree: White Oak Bird: Cardinal Snack food: Popcorn Motto: State sovereignty, national union Well-known residents and natives: Abraham Lincoln (16th President), Ulysses S. Grant (18th President), Ronald Reagan (40th President), Richard J. Daley, Adlai Stevenson, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Richard M. Daley, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Eliot Ness, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, David Foster Wallace, John Deere, Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Mies van de Rohe, Walt Disney, Gregg Toland, Michael Mann, Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Jack Benny, Burl Ives, Rock Hudson, Dick van Dyke, Gene Hackman, Richard Pryor, George Wendt, Vince Vaughn, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley, Herbie Hancock, Alison Krauss, Kanye West, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Hefner, Cindy Crawford


pages: 282 words: 92,998

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

To quote from a report from Internet Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing Internet-related standards and policies, “There are no mechanisms internal to BGP that protect against attacks that modify, delete, forge, or replay data, any of which has the potential to disrupt overall network routing behavior.” What that means is that when Level 3 said, “If you want to get to mycompany.com, come to me,” nobody checked to see if that was an authentic message. The BGP system works on trust, not, to borrow Ronald Reagan’s favorite phrase, on “trust but verify.” If a rogue insider working for one of the big ISPs wanted to cause the Internet to seize up, he could do it by hacking into the BGP tables. Or someone could hack in from outside. If you spoof enough BGP instructions, Internet traffic will get lost and not reach its destination.

It costs far less to modify one’s missile offense to deal with defensive measures than the huge costs necessary to achieve even minimally effective missile protection. Whatever the defense did, the offense won with little additional effort. In addition, no one thought for a moment that the Soviet Union or the United States could secretly develop and deploy an effective missile-defense system. Ronald Reagan hoped that by spending billions of dollars on research, the U.S. could change the equation and make strategic nuclear missile defense possible. Decades later it has not worked, and today the U.S. hopes, at best, to be able to stop a small missile attack launched by accident or a minor power’s attack with primitive missiles.

Often after an initial entry, a cyber criminal or cyber warrior leaves behind a trapdoor to permit future access to be faster and easier. Also referred to as a Trojan, or Trojan horse, after a ruse supposedly employed by Bronze Age Greek warriors to leave behind at Troy a commando team hidden inside a statue of a horse. About the Authors RICHARD A. CLARKE has served in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, who appointed him as National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. He teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, consults for ABC News, and is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting. He is also the author of the national bestseller Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters.


pages: 356 words: 95,647

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, John von Neumann, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Macrae, Project Plowshare, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, Yom Kippur War

Even the discovery of oil in Alaska in the late 1960s didn’t make his proposal of a bomb-carved harbor any more palatable. In his waning years, Teller turned away from peaceful nuclear explosions and back toward using fusion as a tool of war, dreaming up unworkable schemes to defend the United States from a Soviet missile attack. He was behind President Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” program, which, in its first incarnation, would have seeded the heavens with fusion bombs. If the Communists launched their missiles, Teller’s orbiting bombs would detonate, shooting out beams of x-rays that would destroy the incoming warheads. The project was abandoned as unworkable after just a few years, another example of Teller’s manic optimism.

All the scientists have to do is periodically inject some more deuterium and tritium fuel into the reactor and remove the helium “ash” from the plasma. Once you figure that out, you’ve got an unlimited source of power. Ignition and sustained burn are much better than mere breakeven: once you’ve got it, you’ve built a working reactor. And Carter’s plan called for developing just that. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office, the climate for fusion was already changing. The OPEC crisis was fading into memory, and energy research was not a high priority for the new president. He scuttled Carter’s plan, and as budget deficits rose, fusion energy money began to disappear, $50 million hunks at a time.

It can get confusing, but the terms are all trying to describe the same phenomenon in different ways. 45 Hence the name “laser,” which is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. 46 Thank Edward Teller for this last proposal. In the 1980s, he pushed hard to design a bomb-powered laser that could shoot down enemy missiles; the concept was a big part of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan. 47 In practice, this usually means the latter rather than the former. In most modern inertial confinement fusion experiments, light heats up the outermost layers of a target capsule, causing them to evaporate. This pushes the rest of the capsule inward and ignites the fuel. 48 Nuckolls had been involved in Project Plowshare.


pages: 336 words: 90,749

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Bush concluded he could do business with Vladimir Putin because, as he said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”4 The rest of us lack Mr. Bush’s apparently unique abilities, and even Ronald Reagan said about Putin’s predecessors, “trust, but verify.”5 You can’t verify without evidence. The obstacles to basing our laws on evidence are seen in a communication from the European Commission in May 2011 with this ambitious title: “A Single Market for Intellectual Property Rights: Boosting creativity and innovation to provide economic growth, high quality jobs and first class products and services in Europe.”

But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hand.”113 Trickle-down economics is based on an ideology that reducing taxes on the already wealthy will cause them to re-invest the saved amount in new productive endeavors, especially hiring new workers, leading in turn to long-term higher economic growth for everyone. The data are to the contrary. During Ronald Reagan’s first term, when large tax cuts were made (see below), job creation increased 1.5 percent.This should be contrasted with the 3.2 percent increase during his predecessor, Jimmy Carter’s four years. Carter’s increase was not only more than double Reagan’s, but occurred under much higher tax rates.

Figure 3.1 sets out (1) the actual 110 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT distribution of wealth in the United States; (2) what Americans think the actual distribution is; and (3) what Americans say they would like the distribution to be. top 20% second 20% third 20% fourth 20% bottom 20% ACTUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH WHAT AMERICANS THINK IT IS WHAT THEY WOULD LIKE IT TO BE 0 FIGURE 3.1 20 40 60 80 100 Actual Distribution of Wealth in the United States Source: Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School; Dan Ariely, Duke University Here are a few facts about how the income gap came about and how trickle-down economics is simply redistribution of wealth upwards.When Ronald Reagan began his Presidency in January 1981, the top marginal tax rate was dramatically reduced from 69.125 percent to 39.1 percent.115 The effective tax rate for a head of household earning the equivalent of $1 million on non-investment income in 2010 dollars is now 32.4 percent.116 Where did the money saved from lower taxes go?


pages: 328 words: 92,317

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

CHESTERTON—AN AUTHOR REVIEW PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Most of this book was written between 1967 and 1973, when the first edition was published. I have made only minor changes to the existing material, in the belief that the issues and arguments have not changed substantially over the past 15 years. In some cases the reader will find the examples dated; Chapter 17, for example, was written when Ronald Reagan was governor of California. Where this seemed to be a serious problem I have updated examples or added explanatory comments, but in most places I have left the original text unaltered. Most current examples will not remain current very long; hopefully this book will outlast the present governor of California as well.

What effect will certain fiscal policies have on the stock market, and thus the university's endowment? Should the university argue for them? These are issues of professional controversy within the academic community. A university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality as the left quite properly argues, is also a position. If one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy, and a tragedy in particular for the university, how can one justify letting the university, with its vast resources of wealth and influence, remain neutral? The best possible solution within the present university structure has been, not neutrality, but the ignorance or impotence of the university community.

His power would go from 100 percent down to, perhaps, 70 percent, and his opponents would be able to build their own power bases within the subcities he did not control. Decentralization, in addition to being desirable on its own merits, is also a means for stealing a big city out from under the feet of a Sam Yorty or John Lindsay. Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller, please note. This chapter was written in 1969; readers should feel free to substitute current examples. COUNTERATTACK Every day brings news of intrusions by government into the rapidly contracting area reserved to private enterprise. To fans of the Zeitgeist, surfers on the wave of the future, the future of capitalism looks as bright as the future of the dodo.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

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

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

It wasn’t much of a stretch to extend that association to liberal humanitarianism as a whole, which is what Nixon’s camp did when it called the Democrats the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Going after drugs was the easiest way for the establishment to defend itself against the counterculture, and it had decided to so with the full force of the law. More than thirty-five years later—and more than two decades after President Ronald Reagan’s call for a “nationwide crusade against drugs, a sustained, relentless effort to rid America of this scourge”—ro ughly five times as many drug offenders are sent to prison as are treated for addiction. Speed was the original impetus for the legislative charge that resulted in this situation. As the drug drifted from Mom’s medicine cabinet to hippie stash, it fueled hysteria about both drug use in general and the imminent collapse of America at the hands of the counterculture.

If it were not classified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television. As the DEA had noted, though, coke’s high price tag kept its use somewhat in check—at least until President Ronald Reagan revived the war on drugs in earnest. As the seventies closed out, the nation reacted against what came to be known as the “excesses” of that decade and the sixties. Drug use was certainly among them. As gas lines, stagflation, and a hostage crisis brought, as Carter famously put it, a “malaise” to the nation, news reports on pot turned negative.

In April 1989, when Senator John Kerry completed a two-year investigation finding that contractors connected to the Contras and the CIA were known at the time to be running drugs but were not prosecuted, the Post reacted with a 703-word piece by Michael Isikoff tucked away on page 20. When the Barger and Parry duo broke news of the Contras’ connection to cocaine in 1986, the Post declined even to run the wire story. It mentioned the allegations two days later, when Democrats demanded that President Ronald Reagan respond to the charges. His refusal to do so appeared in a 515-word story on page 38 written by Thomas Edsall, now of the Huffington Post. After “Dark Alliance” was published, the Post went after Webb only grudgingly. The paper’s preferred method of dealing with the series would have been to ignore it, according to veteran Post national security reporter Walter Pincus.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

- “Too good to be true”: Stephen Glass, associate editor at the New Republic, is fired after editors discover that at least twenty-seven of forty-one stories he wrote for the magazine contained fabrications. 1999 Personal blogging spreads widely with the introduction of LiveJournal, Pitas.com, and blogger.com. - Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan: the acclaimed biographer himself appears as a fictionalized character in the story. Defending his controversial technique on PBS’s NewsHour, Morris explains, “I am the projector of a documentary movie about Ronald Reagan, which is absolutely authentic and thoroughly documented.” - John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a four-part epic of North American geography centered on the 40th parallel, wins the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction 2000 First season of Survivor: America’s obsession with reality television begins

In all circumstances, when lawyers are involved, it is best to be super careful and check out the state statutes to cover your bases. INTERESTING BUT NOT SO AMUSING FUDGING In 1999 there was a national debate over the legitimacy of the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Edmund Morris. While working on the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, he wrote himself into the book as a fictional character to flesh out Reagan’s hidden and puzzling personality. To be fair, Morris wasn’t misleading his readers; he made clear that he was fictionalizing himself in the text of Dutch. This decision, however—to fictionalize an important aspect of an authorized biography—created an uproar that was covered in the New York Times, on 60 Minutes, and elsewhere.


pages: 259 words: 94,135

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

And they will. If we give them the tools—education, inspiration, and opportunity—if we pass the dream to them, this generation of Americans will take us farther than we have ever been, in space and here on Earth. This is not just about space. It’s about us. It’s about our nation. It’s about what President Ronald Reagan called the shining city on a hill that is a beacon of hope for all the people of the world. I have known Jerry Ross for many years, as an astronaut, a friend, and as a fellow alumnus of Purdue University. We’ve had many opportunities to share our experiences and our dreams for space exploration.

One was to deploy an experimental military satellite.The second was to conduct a series of observations using special telescopes and instruments mounted in the payload bay of the orbiter. The observations would gather infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light spectrum scientific data on natural and induced phenomena in the very upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. The information would be used in the development of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense systems. I started training in earnest for this flight in January 1986. On January 28, our crew was at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.We were being trained on the equipment the Laboratory’s scientists had built for our mission. We had a television on in the corner of the room with the sound turned down, and we periodically checked the progress of the launch countdown for STS-51L—Challenger—at the Kennedy Space Center.That flight was scheduled to deploy a NASA communications satellite, and it had a small payload on board to observe Halley’s Comet.

On July 4, 1982, I flew in a chase plane assisting the landing of STS-4 at Edwards Air Force Base. A large crowd had come to Edwards to celebrate Independence Day in a very patriotic way. Roy Rogers was among them, standing along the taxiway, and I was excited to meet my childhood cowboy hero.We exchanged autographs, and he signed mine “Many Happy Trails.” President Ronald Reagan was there, too. In a speech after the landing President Reagan stated that he thought the United States should build a space station, and I was there to hear his words. The space station would be a place where astronauts would live and where vital research would be conducted. It would be a place where we could test and validate important capabilities that would eventually permit us to permanently live on the Moon and fly to Mars.


pages: 306 words: 92,704

After the Berlin Wall by Christopher Hilton

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

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

It is so stark it does not require a caption and, like emerging from sunlight, your eyes need time to adjust. At first it seems to be a lunarscape with houses – the apartments – but as your eyes adjust it transforms itself into the Leuschnerdamm which was somewhere else altogether: depending on which side chance had placed you, a frontier community confronting Ronald Reagan’s evil empire or a frontier community confronting the imperialist-fascist-capitalist running dogs. The Wall ran where the dark tarmac holes are – they were supports for an earlier version of it – so the terraced houses and the unkempt pavement were in the West, the cobbled road in the East. The pavement became a gully; the 12ft Wall to one side of it, the apartments and their little gardens to the other.

Hildebrandt became a propagandist for non-violent resistance all over the world and published extensively on that as well as The Wall. He loomed as a father figure, slightly eccentric, slightly innocent but right. 8. Interview in July 2008. 9. Lieutenant Oliver North, a U.S. marine, was involved in the Iran-Contra Affair when, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he sold weapons clandestinely to Iran. He subsequently became a right-wing commentator, appeared on Fox TV and wrote best-selling books. 10. Ulbricht’s words were used on tall posters on the Western side of The Wall pointing East so the population there could read them: NOBODY HAS ANY INTENTION OF BUILDING A WALL.


pages: 304 words: 88,495

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine

colonial rule, Elon Musk, energy security, Higgs boson, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Yom Kippur War

But such collaboration had to be cautious, as Goodenough would discover. 7 Batteries Are a Treacherous World After oil prices slid back down from their spike in the energy crises of the 1970s, the urgency went out of battery research. Exxon abandoned electric storage and licensed out Stan Whittingham’s lithium battery. Ronald Reagan canceled government-funded energy projects of the prior decade, as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Japan was different. Though Exxon had distributed Whittingham’s lithium batteries in watches in 1977, researchers struggled to build them bigger. Whittingham’s work kept igniting, a result of the presence of pure lithium metal as the anode.

Its scientists conceived the first cellular phones in 1947 and, a quarter century later, the system of transmission towers through which they work, but others pioneered the mobile phone business. AT&T had a landline monopoly and gave away its other inventions as a price of peace with regulators. It worked as a business strategy, until Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department aggressively pursued AT&T’s breakup. That left it in pieces, absent the patents and side businesses that could have fueled its survival. Littlewood said Bell was commercially flat-footed. Unless efforts were fully deliberated, he continued, long-term achievements would be limited.

Although legend drew a straight line from Bell Labs to Silicon Valley to the iPhone, by the middle 1980s the American semiconductor industry was in fact dying. It was part of the narrative of industrial decline and the Japanese juggernaut that so consumed Americans. To fight back, American chipmakers proposed an experiment. They would band together along with the federal government and attempt to leapfrog the Japanese. In 1987, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that embraced the experiment. The law created Sematech, for Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology. Fourteen chipmakers and DARPA, a Pentagon research arm, went fifty-fifty on a five-year, $500 million effort to keep semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. American chip making surged back.


pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

After hard fighting, the U.S. forces captured their first foothold in the scattered Marshall Islands, opening the way to further assaults on larger targets like Guam. Following the war, the U.S. military used the islands to stage nuclear weapons tests, and in 1964 the Army established a base there. Later, the military built a missile range known as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. The entire facility fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, located in Huntsville, Alabama. There, a lieutenant colonel named Tim Mango had responsibility for Kwajalein. This tickled Musk. “What are the odds?” he asked.

It was a great irony: the imperative to fly fast pushed SpaceX from Vandenberg to Kwajalein, and once there, the employees had a grand view of missiles launched from Vandenberg. For the better part of half a century, the small atoll had served as ground zero for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and, later, President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative.” The Army’s facilities on Kwajalein still serve a number of purposes, but the most enduring one is acting as a giant target range. When the Air Force wants to test the accuracy of a Minuteman III missile, it will launch the three-stage, solid-fueled rocket from Vandenberg toward Kwaj.

See also Omelek site Redstone Arsenal, 56 Reduced-gravity flight, 141–42 Reingold, Jennifer, 86 Relativity Space, 248, 251 Rémy Martin, 27–29, 145 Renaissance Hotel, 12–13 Ressi, Adeo, 9–10, 12, 237 Reusable launch systems, 230–34 Richichi, Jeff, 168, 231–32, 262 Ride, Sally, 50, 99–100 Riley, Talulah, 216 “Risk tolerance,” 245 Rocket Boys (Hickam), 153 Rocketdyne, 32, 33, 126. See also Aerojet Rocketdyne Rocket Lab, 236, 245 Rocket reuse, 230–34 Role models, 99, 100 Romo, Eric, 155, 261 Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, 55, 58, 67, 169. See also Omelek site Rotary Rocket, 142 Roth, Ed, 184 Sales, 95–116 Scaled Composites, 39–40 Scorpius, 79–80 Sea Launch, 125, 126 Seal Beach, 53 Searles, Rachel, 21, 22 Sea salt spray and corrosion, 121–23, 233 Sensors, 124, 136 September 11 attacks (2001), 98–99 Sexism, 51, 62 Sheehan, Mike, 185, 190–91, 193, 195–96 Shotwell, Gwynne, 255–56 at Aerospace Corporation, 102 Air Force and, 61–62 background of, 99–101 at Chrysler, 101–2 Falcon 1’s Washington, D.C. debut, 105 Flight One failure, 120 Flight Four launch, 202–3 success, 210–11 hiring of, 95–98 Lockheed Martin and, 112–13 at Microcosm, 50, 95, 96, 102 Omelek site, 54–55 Quake parties, 17–18 sales, 17, 54–55, 96, 97–98, 103–4, 106–7, 112–14, 115, 116, 216, 220 222 Shotwell, Robert, 202–3, 210 Sloan, Chris, 262 Slosh baffles, 127–28, 138, 140 Society of Women Engineers, 100 Solar sails, 10, 164 Soyuz, 93 Space and Missile Defense Command, U.S.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

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

Culturally, politically, and economically, the previous decade had offered up a series of indignities that seemed to question the premise of American exceptionalism. The Vietnam War raged and Richard Nixon resigned. The stock market was flat and inflation was on the rise. Across the country, there was a sense of pervasive dissatisfaction, and an accompanying conviction that something had to change dramatically. In November, Ronald Reagan—who worked as a pitch man for GE before entering politics—beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide, becoming the fortieth president of the United States with the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” The new president’s economic policy, known as Reaganomics, prioritized lower taxes, decreased regulation, and a favorable posture toward Wall Street, a combination that would benefit corporations while marginalizing workers.

What was good for the corporation was good for the country, and vice versa. In 1960, the year Welch joined GE, the company’s slogan was “Progress Is Our Most Important Product.” It was a line repeated on every Sunday night installment of General Electric Theater, the mainstay television review hosted by Ronald Reagan, then merely an actor. In subsequent years, GE’s slogan became “Accent on Value.” And then in the 1970s, Jones introduced the phrase, “We Bring Good Things to Life.” It wasn’t just talk. Under Jones, the company invested 10 percent of its profits into research and development, spending heavily in a bid to invent more good things.

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. In theory, the changes were designed to protect everyday Americans. In practice, they set the stage for an era of unchecked consolidation, where big companies got bigger and bigger. It was just an idea at first, but before long the newly elected president—and former GE pitch man—Ronald Reagan helped make it a reality, installing an antitrust chief who loosened New Deal–era restrictions on mergers and acquisitions. And with Reagan in power, the Powell memo began to come alive. Reagan stacked his administration with corporate sympathizers. John Shad became the first Wall Street banker to head the Securities and Exchange Commission in a half century.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Broad and fertile plain: Noyce, “Competition and Cooperation—A Prescription for the Eighties,” Research Management, March 1982, 14, IA. Thanks, in part, to Noyce: Jacobson, Passing Farms, Enduring Values: California’s Santa Clara Valley, (Los Altos, Ca.: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1984), 237. Surely as America: Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union: January 25, 1983,” Papers of the Presidents: Administration of Ronald Reagan, 107. I wish I’d said: Noyce “High Technology Industries: Pulbic Policies for the 1980s,” 1–2 Feb. 1983, IA. Chapter 11: Political Entrepreneurship 1. Political entrepreneurship: Philip A. Mundo uses the term “political entrepreneurs” to describe executives working with the Semiconductor Industry Association.

He said that the government should “target entrepreneurs” in every field and not single out any particular industry for sup- Political Entrepreneurship 265 port. His voice was one of many engaged in the American debate over industrial policy. In one camp were those—generally supporters of President Ronald Reagan—who argued that the correct response to the Japanese threat was a redoubling of current supply-side efforts to revitalize the American economy: reduce regulatory burdens and capital gains taxes; create incentives for long-term investment; and increase government expenditures, generally through military spending.

Preserving the Vital Base: America’s Semiconductor Materials and Equipment Industry. Working Paper of the National Advisory Committee on Semiconductors. July 1990. Reagan, Ronald. “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union: 25 January 1983. Papers of the Presidents: Administration of Ronald Reagan. Sanders, W. J. III, “International Trade Policy.” Testimony before the International Trade Administration, Department of Commerce, April 1983. In High Technology Industries: Profiles and Outlooks—The Semiconductor Industry. Government Printing Office, 1983. Siegel, Lenny. Testimony Before Congress, Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology of the House Committee on Science and Technology and the Task Force on Education and Employment of the House Budget Committee. 16 June 1983, 1100–1101.


pages: 616 words: 189,609

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey by Richard Whittle

Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, digital map, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, helicopter parent, military-industrial complex, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, The Soul of a New Machine, VTOL

When he arrived in Egypt, he was told the White House had vetoed the strike for fear of harming Iranians in the area. The next day, a disheartened President Carter went on television and took full responsibility for the debacle. The disaster reinforced the post-Vietnam image of the U.S. military as a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It also contributed mightily to Carter’s defeat a few months later by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. Desert One would haunt America’s military for years and inspire profound changes. One was a restructuring Congress imposed on the armed services to foster “jointness”—cooperation among the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines—instead of the interservice rivalry and insularity that had characterized their relations forever.

In one fluid motion, Schaefer turned around, bent over, grabbed his gym shorts with both hands, and mooned Spivey. They nearly busted a gut laughing. Within a few weeks, Schaefer and other helicopter pilots were training up for a possible second try at rescuing the hostages. Operation Honey Badger, as this one was called, became moot on January 20, 1981, when Iran released the Americans precisely as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as president. Reagan had won the election partly by portraying Carter as weak-kneed. Reagan promised to get tough with America’s foes, not only the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran but also the Soviet Union. Moscow had grown bold with America’s demoralization after Vietnam and Watergate.

The New York Times wrote that “if ever there was a lovable plane, it is the Bell XV-15 . . . the hit of the show.” * * * A great piece of artistry, whether executed by a painter, a musician, a dancer, or a pilot flying an aerobatic routine, can affect the emotions of even the toughest men. John Lehman was a tough man. That was one reason newly elected President Ronald Reagan had chosen him as his first secretary of the Navy, the civilian who oversees the Navy and Marine Corps and holds sway over what they buy. When Lehman saw the XV-15 at the 1981 Paris Air Show, his pulse quickened. Lehman was a flyer himself, a bombardier-navigator in A-6 Intruder fighter-bombers as a Naval Reserve lieutenant commander.


pages: 162 words: 51,445

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

The Republicans made appeals to racism that were both unmistakable and deniable, playing on racially loaded signs, signifiers, symbols, and metaphors, and would continue to do so for decades to come. Buffoonish proponents of outright segregation such as Bull Connor and George Wallace were replaced by those whose defense of white privilege was more nuanced and ostensibly dignified. Ronald Reagan demonized “welfare queens,” a shorthand for Black women on welfare. George Bush Sr. made symbolic use of Willie Horton, the Black felon who committed assault, armed robbery, and rape while out of jail on a weekend furlough program approved by Bush’s electoral opponent. Bush Jr. gave an address at Bob Jones University, an evangelical college that prohibited interracial dating into the twenty-first century.

In 1983 North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms argued: “The conclusion must be that Martin Luther King Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own reputation and that of the civil rights movement for integrity and loyalty, or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile foreign power.” That same year, when asked if King was a Communist sympathizer, Ronald Reagan, who as president grudgingly signed the holiday into law in November 1983, said: “We’ll know in thirty-five years, won’t we,” referring to the eventual release of FBI surveillance tapes. This was more than simply a battle over a day: it served as a proxy for an ongoing national negotiation about how to understand the country’s racial narrative.


pages: 319 words: 95,854

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

There are many words for “sex,” and Irish, like some other languages, just repeats the verb in a question to reply with “yes”); that the Moken people of Thailand have no word for “when”; that the Inuit had to come up with a word for “twilight” because of global warming, and so on. The problem is that the harm of these myths goes beyond the reputations of those who pass them on. In 1985, Ronald Reagan, about to begin a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, mused about the differences between America and the Soviet Union, saying “I’m no linguist, but I’ve been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for ‘freedom.’ ” There is one, of course: svoboda. Reagan, like Bryson, was dabbling in Whorfianism—in this case, the notion that the Russians had lacked freedom for so long that they did not have a word for it and presumably couldn’t even talk about it.

Obama had addressed the Islamic world from Berlin in 2008, saying he was “a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.” Gingrich said a year later, “I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.” Never mind that every Republican’s favorite modern president, Ronald Reagan, had pronounced himself a “citizen of the world” in 1982. What was Gingrich thinking? That citizenship had an upper boundary in the levels of hierarchy? Or that citizenship had only one level to begin with? Would he have denied, while in Congress, that he was a citizen of the state of Georgia?

The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986) gives a somewhat different explanation for “musk,” saying that the Sanskrit muská, “scrotum,” may have come to cover for “musk” because of the similarity to a deer’s musk bag. 3 “X cannot be translated”: Ibid. 4 “I’m no linguist”: BBC interview of Ronald Reagan by Brian Widlake, October 29, 1985. Full text at the website of the Reagan Library, at www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/102985d.htm. 5 tongues of preliterate or indigenous societies: In fact, small languages seem to be systematically more complicated than ones spoken by large numbers; see the author’s article “Babelicious,” The Economist online, January 25, 2010, www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?


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

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

New environmental threats also figured prominently: a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara galvanized the environmental movement in 1969, and the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, which would sell millions of copies, warned that the world would quickly run out of natural THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ENERGY • 11 resources unless something changed. It would have been tough enough to cope with a rapidly shifting energy scene. Doing it amidst such sweeping change and uncertainty made the task far more difficult. The battle reached its peak in the 1980 presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Hans Landsberg, writing for the New York Times less than a month before the election, captured what was happening. “For the last few years,” he wrote, “this country ostensibly has debated energy policy but in reality has been engaged in a fierce, prolonged bout of soul-searching.” Energy was no longer being discussed on its own merits but was now symbolic: “It can be argued that energy was tailor-made to become the arena for the clash of opinions that, to be sure, are related to energy but for which energy is at best a proxy.”20 Landsberg, then an economist at a think tank named Resources for the Future, was trying to play the straight man in this debate.

Solar Energy Development (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 102–103. 19. Ibid., 102. 20. Hans H. Landsberg, “Battling on Energy,” New York Times, October 6, 1980. 21. David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 61. 22. Ibid., 38. 23. Ronald Reagan, “Whatever Happened to Free Enterprise?” Imprimis, January 1978. 24. Douglas E. Kneeland, “Reagan Charges Carter Misleads U.S. on Threat to Energy Security; Record on Blacks Cited Sees No Energy Shortage,” New York Times, September 11, 1980. 25. Steven Rattner, “Kennedy Urges Energy Plan Based on Liberal Ideas; Adviser Opposed to Controls Cost on Coal Conversion Based on Driver’s Licenses Controls Likely to Continue,” New York Times, February 3, 1980. 26.

Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). This page intentionally left blank INDEX A123 (battery company), 117 Advanced Resources International, 60 Ahn, Daniel, 74–75 Alaska climate change and, 84 North Slope of, 8, 53 oil production in, 8, 14, 53, 56, 58–59, 61, 82, 93 Ronald Reagan’s projections regarding, 12 Trans-Alaskan Pipeline and, 8 Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and, 58–59 Alcoa, 206 alternative energy. See renewable energy AltraBiofuels, 5–6 Amazon rainforest, 91 American Chemistry Council, 28 American Petroleum Institute (API), 73, 205, 207 American Shale Oil (AMSO), 51, 63–64 American Soda, 63 Angell, Norman, 183 Antarctica, 92 Arab-Israeli War (1973), 7, 76.


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

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

W, Bush· Bill Clinton· Bob Dole· POWs • Vietnamese· Black Panthers· Ed Rollins • FDR • Harry Levine· Ralph Nader· Hiroshima· AI Gore· Lewis Carroll • Tweedledee • Tweedledum • George W. Bush· Michael Moore· John McCain • Karl Rove· Mother Teresa· universal negatives· Tarek Milleron • Cadillac tail Iins • George McGovern· Gore Vidal· Ronald Reagan· the Iifty-Iive-mile-anhour speed limit· Mother Jones· James Carville· "That Bastard" • the devil • Pat Buchanan· Harry Browne· Harry Reid· defective consumer products 4. The Most Evil Man in America 92 Marcus Hanna· William McKinley· Yiddish· JFK • Richard Nixon· Joseph Napolitan· Lee Atwater· cannibalism· ladies' corsets· Martin Van Buren· the ten commandments· syphilis· slavery· mother murder· Lyndon Johnson • farm animals· television· Rush Limbaugh· Arthur Finkelstein· the $12 Man • Jesus· Jews· push-polling· electroshock· NAACP· George W.

Even the latter switch was good for Campbell because Heller was the candidate he had to beat, Political consultants always have to worry about money. The coverage of Sprouse's attack on Heller was free publicity. When the candidates made more edifying speeches, the media couldn't care less. Atwater's most notorious invention is "push-polling." This came about in another South Carolina race, two years later. Atwater was managing Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign in the South and concurrently working as a pollster for South Carolina congressman Floyd Spence, Spence's opponent was attorney Tom Turnipseed, a Democrat with an unusually checkered history. Turnipseed had been a conservative working for George Wallace's 1968 presidential run until Wallace fired him for drinking.

From youth, Rove was chubby, bespectacled, and studious, his hair going thin. Atwater's first post-college job was managing Rove's unusually bitter campaign for national chairman of the College Republicans. Rove won, but thereafter it was Atwater's career that eclipsed Rove's. By age thirty, Atwater was a celebrity working for Ronald Reagan and living the Washington high life. Meanwhile, Rove plugged away in Austin, Texas, working in political direct mail. This was the plain sister of political consulting, a side of the business that many were ready to write off. By the 1990s, the buzz was all about the Internet. In the brave new digi- GAMING THE VOTE tal world, Bill Clinton pollster Dick Morris predicted, direct-mail consultants "would be the first to go:' He was wrong.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Opponents of tallying the costs and benefits of government interventions focus on the inherent uncertainty involved in putting a price tag on an ecosystem, or estimating the benefit in dollars of a decline in the risk of contracting cancer. In the United States, critics remember how cost-benefit analysis was deployed in the 1980s during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, a strong-willed free marketeer who flat out opposed government meddling in the economy. During his first inaugural address in 1981, Reagan stated: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Shortly thereafter he determined by executive order that all federal regulations would have to be submitted to cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they were providing value for money, and used these evaluations in a systematic campaign to dismantle regulations across the board.

If a set of unusual expectations led a group of investors to push prices away from this rational path, the other investors in the market would make money by betting against them and bring prices back to reason. Economists called this the hypothesis of “efficient markets.” These views reached their zenith in the 1980s, after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rose to power in the United States and Britain amid the economic stagnation and high inflation produced by the oil crisis of the 1970s. They were on a mission to reduce the role of government in the economy. And the Chicago economists served them with a body of theory. TO THE EFFICIENT-MARKETS crowd, the financial zigzags that often look like crazy booms and busts are the natural outcomes of the actions of rational investors who face an uncertain future and have to constantly update their expectations in response to new information about the potential profitability of investments.

Sparked by a combination of skyrocketing oil prices and bad economic management by overconfident governments willing to print money at will to meet their spending requirements, a combination of high inflation and high unemployment that the world had never seen before fatally undermined people’s trust in the state. This laid the stage for a three-decade-long period of government withdrawal. Starting with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and of Ronald Reagan in the United States a year later, governments around the world cut taxes, privatized state enterprises, and deregulated economies. Even in France, where President François Mitterrand nationalized the banking system, increased government employment, and raised public-sector pay, soon after being elected in 1981, the new orthodoxy ultimately prevailed.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”2 For the next decade, he published articles in Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, and when he was named by Gerald Ford to chair the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, Rand stood beside him at his swearing in. She was dead by the time Ronald Reagan named Greenspan to chair the Federal Reserve, but thanks to people like Greenspan, her influence lived on—the Thatcher-Reagan years were, in the words of one writer, “the second age of Rand … when the laissez-faire philosophy went from the crankish obsession of right-wing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism.”3 And it was precisely America, in precisely those decades, that may have decided the planet’s geological and technological future.

She’d of course kept smoking, despite the medical warnings, lecturing audiences on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence” linking tobacco and disease.29 And when she contracted lung cancer, she of course refused to admit that she had been wrong. (After some initial balking on philosophical grounds, she did allow herself to be enrolled for Medicare and Social Security.) She died in 1982, with a six-foot-tall floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign standing by her grave. By that time, Ronald Reagan was running the United States, and Margaret Thatcher had Britain in her iron grip, and the two embodied Rand’s basic ideas with melodramatic power of their own. Reagan’s most famous line was “The government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Thatcher at her most strident sounded as if she were John Galt.

Perhaps, actually, it’s best not to dwell on them, Jesus being literally a tough act to follow and Thoreau not the kind of guy you can imagine with a family to care for. Let’s even tone down the language: maturity is perhaps a little stern and parental. Instead, let’s add another word to our lexicon: balance. After forty years of libertarian dominance in our politics, ever since Ronald Reagan won by insisting that government was the problem and Thatcher by declaring that there was in fact no such thing as society, it’s hard for us to see quite how lopsided our politics has become. The percentage of Americans who remember the New Deal grows tinier each day, and even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society seems from a different age.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

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

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

Similarly, Christian pre-Millennialists, who believe that Jesus will return without human intervention, do not try to improve the world. If anything, they want conditions to deteriorate precisely to quicken Jesus’ return. This was the case with James Watt, the controversial Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan, regarding the fate of so much of the American environment under his control. By comparison, post-Millennialists believe that Jesus will return only after humans improve their world and themselves, though they do not believe in the perfectibility of either, given original sin. Utopias differ from science fiction in their basic concern for changing rather than abandoning or ignoring non-utopian communities and societies.

The specific causes differed, but in both cases prior warnings about possible catastrophes were largely ignored by NASA. The 1986 tragedy reflected NASA’s efforts to have a non-professional (a “teacher in space”) on board the “Challenger” in order both to demonstrate the vehicle’s alleged safety and to enhance NASA’s (and, no less importantly, President Ronald Reagan’s) often negative relationships with educators at all levels.2 True, the George W. Bush Administration revived the mission to Mars project, but it didn’t go much beyond a rhetorical commitment. Some cynics dismissed this as a public relations stunt to deflect growing opposition to the Iraq War. And that same administration ended the space shuttle mission.

Fulton, of course, helped to invent the steamboat but also contributed to early versions of both submarines and “torpedoes” (really mines). As Franklin shows, the road from poison gas to atomic bombs to lasers in outer space is fairly straight, with Thomas Edison’s envisioned atomic ray beams and General Billy Mitchell’s envisioned fleet of airplanes to bomb civilians coming in-between. As Franklin discovered, the one-time actor Ronald Reagan had starred in a 1940 movie in which his character, a Secret Service agent, used a ray machine to destroy a spy’s airplane. This role may well have generated his passion for the formally entitled Strategic Defense Initiative.6 In 2008, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the speech by President Reagan that announced that Strategic Defense Initiative was also noted with restrained celebrations.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

That’s not always obvious. Although the first Boomer wasn’t elected president until 1992, and Boomers didn’t account for a majority of members of the House of Representatives until the 1998 midterm election, Boomers have played a decisive role in American life and our political process since they were much younger.34 Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and 1984 with the support of large numbers of young voters—he effectively tied with Jimmy Carter for voters ages eighteen to thirty in 1980, and thumped Walter Mondale in that age bracket in 1984.35 Those voters were Boomers, and their role in shaping what would prove to be such consequential election outcomes is evidence of the Boomer generation’s political clout.

It’s the type of Republican neoconservatism that teaches one can use the insights of the markets to deliver better government services such as education or entitlements, and the Democratic “third way” espoused by Bill Clinton that would use the government to try to guide the market toward specific outcomes such as better wages or more investment in productive high-tech industries. Neither party has always been entirely comfortable with it, and some politicians—Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, for example—have pulled further away from the center than others. But the Boomers in this sense mostly thought they could have it all: the security of a government looking out for them and the prosperity only a free market can provide. This idea is embedded in a lot of the bad Boomer decisions this book will highlight.

There was a widespread understanding starting at least in the 1970s that the United States needed to gin up more investment. Fixed investment in the 1970s would grow an average of 5.4 percent per year, with a distinctly downward trend over the course of the decade.12 Why, and what to do about it, would become a political preoccupation for the Boomers for the next thirty years. Ronald Reagan’s presidency, although he wasn’t a Boomer himself, would represent the Boomers’ first big shot as adult voters at grappling with the problems of the economy they had inherited—and notably, younger Boomer voters supported Reagan in numbers that proved important to his victories. It became the era of the supply-side revolution, which held that suffocating regulation, high taxes, and rampant inflation were stifling investment, and with it productivity and opportunities for good jobs and rising standards of living.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In the 1980s, his life took an academic turn—a 1983 master’s in national security studies from Georgetown University, a 1985 M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. After a tour in investment banking, Bannon moved on to making films in Hollywood as an executive producer, director, and writer. He worked on more than thirty films, including a documentary about Ronald Reagan. In 2005, Bannon joined the Hong Kong–based Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), and a year later he brought in a $60 million investment, half of which came from his former employer Goldman Sachs. The company eventually rebranded as Affinity Media Holdings, and Bannon continued to help run it until 2012, when he joined Breitbart.

When it comes to what’s happening in other places, Americans will talk about “tribes,” “regimes,” “radicalization,” “religious extremists,” “ethnic conflicts,” “local superstitions,” or “rituals.” Anthropology is for other people, not Americans. America is supposedly this “shining city upon a hill,” a term Ronald Reagan famously popularized, adapting it from the biblical story of the Sermon on the Mount. But when I would see evangelists prophesying the end times and woe unto the nonbelievers, when I watched a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, when I saw a gun show with bikini-clad ladies carrying semi-automatics, when I heard white people talk about “black thugs” and “welfare queens,” I saw a country deep in the throes of ethnic conflict, religious radicalization, and a bubbling militant insurgency.

In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” fueled racial fear and tensions in order to shift white voters’ allegiance from the Democrats to the GOP. Nixon ran his 1968 presidential campaign on the twin pillars of “states’ rights” and “law and order”—both of which were obvious, racially coded dog whistles. In his 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly invoked the “welfare queen”—a black woman who supposedly was able to buy a Cadillac on government assistance. In 1988, George H. W. Bush’s campaign ran the infamous Willie Horton ad, terrifying white voters with visions of wild-haired black criminals running amok. Steve Bannon aimed to affirm the ugliest biases in the American psyche and convince those who possessed them that they were the victims, that they had been forced to suppress their true feelings for too long.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

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

The same is true, of course, for Republicans peering at the modern Democratic Party. This isn’t just a quirky finding of the pollsters. It’s visible in even the most cursory look at the parties’ governing agendas—indeed, it’s arguably been caused by the sharp divergence in the parties’ agendas.IV Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes, for instance. That would be unthinkable in today’s Republican Party, where almost every elected official has signed a pledge promising to never raise taxes under any circumstances. Bush also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law and oversaw a cap-and-trade program to reduce the pollutants behind acid rain.

In the 1991 term, for instance, Byron White, a Democratic appointee, “voted more conservatively than all but two of the Republican appointees, Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist.” But that’s changed. Over the past decade, “justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them,” Epstein and Posner find. “Only Justice Kennedy, named to the court by Ronald Reagan, did so with any regularity.” Their chart is striking: The Supreme Court is a powerful institution in American life, and it has often been a controversial institution in American life, but it has not always been a politically polarized institution in American life. As the parties have become more ideological, however, their expectations for Supreme Court justices followed suit.

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, as was Robert F. Kennedy. In 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, standing about arm’s length from President Gerald Ford, aimed her gun and fired; the bullet failed to discharge. Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay San Francisco city supervisor, was killed in 1978. President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981; the bullet shattered a rib and punctured a lung. For much of the twentieth century, the right to vote was, for African Americans, no right at all. Lynchings were common. Freedom Riders were brutally beaten across the American South. Police had to escort young African American children into schools as jeering crowds shouted racial epithets and threatened to attack.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

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

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

Figure 3.1 The US Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial over Time SOURCE: “Beyond Antitrust: The Role of Competition Policy in Promoting Inclusive Growth,” Jason Furman, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers. The collapse of startups should be no surprise. Ever since antitrust enforcement was changed under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, small was bad and big was considered beautiful. Murray Weidenbaum, the first chair of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, argued that economic growth, not competition, should be policymakers' primary goal. In his words, “It is not the small businesses that created the jobs,' he concluded, ‘but the economic growth.”

In his view, antitrust policy only served to protect small firms from competition, keeping industries fragmented at the expense of cost efficiencies.56 For decades lawmakers protected Americans as businessmen, entrepreneurs, and workers, but Bork led an intellectual revolution that sacrificed citizens at the altar of efficiency and cheap goods. The Antitrust Paradox reduced people to mere consumers. Bork's views were extraordinarily influential among economists and lawyers, and when President Ronald Reagan came to office, he appointed men to the Department of Justice who put the Chicago School's ideas into practice. Professor William F. Baxter headed the Antitrust Division, and he immediately changed all the Merger Guidelines. Former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust J. Paul McGrath stated that the primary goal of the Division was “to reinforce the notion that the sole basis of antitrust enforcement should be that decisions should be based on economic efficiency notions”57 Attorney General William French Smith declared that “bigness is not necessarily badness.”58 If former Commerce Secretary Baldridge had had his way, the Administration would have sought complete repeal of the anti-merger law.59 The change in antitrust regulation was nothing short of a revolution by unelected bureaucrats.

When antitrust laws have been vigorously enforced, income inequality has been lower (Figure 10.7). Figure 10.7 Income Inequality in the United States versus Antitrust Enforcement SOURCE: Einer Elhauge, “Horizontal Shareholding,” Harvard Law Review 129, no. 5 (March 2016). The increase in inequality started after the antitrust revolution under President Ronald Reagan. Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago, found that that concentration, which had been unchanged over the previous decades, began rising at the same time that merger policy changed. Concentration has increased steadily over the entire period after antitrust policy changed. He noted that the increase has been especially pronounced in consumer goods industries.13 The role of high industrial concentration on inequality is now becoming clear from dozens recent academic studies.


pages: 479 words: 102,876

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

Different regulations applied to different types of oil producers, oil refiners, and resellers, as well as to oil produced from different types of wells according to the amount of oil these wells had produced in the past. It was a political farce that distorted the international and domestic crude oil markets. President Ronald Reagan abolished the act by executive order on his first day in office in January 1981. Although the regulations were complicated, the reality in the market was even more so. The system of price controls only applied to the first sale of regulated oil in the United States. Upon subsequent sales of the same oil, further regulations limited an increase in price by restricting the amount of profit that a reseller was allowed to make by trading in or speculating on crude oil.

He introduced a Russian who was interested in doing business with Rich involving a big oil deal. “It seemed very attractive,” Rich explains. Mikhail Gorbachev had just resigned from office in December 1991, and the Soviet Union was officially dissolved on December 25 of the same year. The Communist “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan once described it, had simply ceased to exist. Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian president, immediately introduced a program of economic reform. He put an end to the Soviet-era price controls, cut state spending, and introduced an open foreign trade regime early in 1992. Russia embarked on the largest privatization program that the world had ever seen.

and “Jamaica: Government Blamed for Alumina Plant Closure,” February 8, 1985. Associated Press, June 26, 1979. E. S. Reddy, “A Review of United Nations Action for an Oil Embargo Against South Africa,” United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, 1981, available at www.anc.org.za/un/reddy/oilembargo.html. HR 4868. President Ronald Reagan attempted to veto the bill but was overridden by Congress. The actual prices were staggered, as is usual in the industry. For comparison: The official OPEC price in 1979 was between 13.34 and 16.75. The international price, paid on the spot market, was 25. Quoted in “Oil Fuels Apartheid,” ANC Statement, March 1985, available at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pr/1980s/pr850300.html.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

“Feel that mother go,” said the pilot, Michael Smith. But seconds later a fire burned through one of the boosters, rapidly engulfing the rest of the craft. “Uh-oh,” said Smith, a split second before the Shuttle exploded into a hypergolic fireball, killing him and the other six astronauts on board. Ronald Reagan gave a somber televised address. “We mourn seven heroes,” he said. “They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths.” NASA grounded the program for more than two years while investigators searched for clues, and engineers looked for ways to prevent it from happening again. Stucky was undeterred.

“To have any chance of escaping the deep rut we have been struggling in for nearly 4 decades we will have to dramatically change how research is funded, managed, and regulated,” he wrote. “Success depends on draining the swamp.” I followed Rutan downstairs into his trophy room. He was showing me the Presidential Citizen’s Medal he received from Ronald Reagan (“Obama handed them out like popcorn, but before that it was really a prestigious thing”), his two Robert J. Collier trophies, and the solid gold medallion he got from Aero Club de France (“Identical to the one they handed Lindbergh in 1927”), when his guests began to arrive. Rutan introduced me, saying that I’d just flown in from Washington, DC.

“Unquestionably one of the most”: Mark Stucky personnel files, comments from Robert R. Zimmerman, December 1985. “It came to that, time after time, who could see the farthest”: James Salter, The Hunters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956). “Feel that mother go”: Michael Smith, transcript from the Challenger tape, January 28, 1986. “We mourn seven heroes”: Ronald Reagan, Space Shuttle Challenger Speech from the Oval Office, January 28, 1986. “We regretted having to inform you”: Letter to Mark Stucky from Duane L. Ross, manager, NASA Astronaut Selection Office, January 19, 1990. tenth out of seventeen: Letter to Mark Stucky from Duane L. Ross, manager, NASA Astronaut Selection Office, May 27, 1992.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

But all I heard on the bus was a debate between reporters about whether or not Thompson was the next Reagan or a hapless lazybones, as if the two things were incompatible. At the time, I had no idea that most of these takes had come from an early Halperin piece in Time called “A New Role for Fred Thompson.” Halperin noted, “Thompson is most often compared to Ronald Reagan, and the comparison is apt,” but added, “critics question his endurance: he has a reputation for resisting a demanding schedule.” That summer was flooded with “lazy or not?” stories. “Lazy Fred,” wrote Slate a week after Halperin, adding: “Is Fred Thompson too lazy to get nominated?” Mother Jones followed with, “Fred Thompson: Not Conservative Enough?

The other 96 percent blamed social or political conditions for their plight…” In sum, Goldberg’s gripe was that reporters didn’t interview enough people who thought homelessness was a personal failing. He’s right. I would argue he’s also an asshole. But, technically, not incorrect. Homelessness, generally speaking, has always been a serious problem. Current levels are about three times what they were when Ronald Reagan became president. Goldberg was in the ballpark of the right question: why were the networks freaking out about it back then, and not before or after? Among other reasons, reporting on homelessness in the Reagan years was a popular means of decrying the “Greed is good” era. Talking about the issue became a way of showing you cared.

At which point we learn from homespun Rhodes that the original Americans only needed an axe and a gun, not no derned pension insurance. The concept of wedding low-information voters to self-defeating initiatives has been a terror of progressive commentators for years. This is why Rhodes was invariably cited as having predicted the rise of types like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump. A Face in the Crowd should have been a warning that any kind of superficial cultural identifiers could be used to sell political lines. It isn’t just rubes who can be taken in. The college-and-coffee crowd is just as susceptible to brand-over-thought come-ons, and can even fall for appeals to fear and patriotism.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

“You could draw but one conclusion from the vote on 14 and that is that the white is just afraid of the Negro,” Brown wrote in a letter to his daughter. Proposition 14 was eventually nullified by the California Supreme Court, which reawakened fair housing as a campaign issue in 1966, when Brown ran for a third term against an actor and political novice named Ronald Reagan. Reagan would end up defeating Brown by carrying many of the same white Democratic voters who had passed Proposition 14, and during the campaign he said the right to rent or sell property to anyone was one of Americans’ “most basic and cherished rights.” It would be way beyond a stretch to say that Reagan won by opposing fair housing.

During the first Earth Day in 1970, some of the highest rates of participation were at high schools in low-density suburbs with high home values, and one of the more common environmental activities was group trash pickups. Think globally, act locally. The good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything. In 1970, Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a landmark law that paralleled the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act and subsequent creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. CEQA (“see-qua”) required cities to analyze and adopt measures to mitigate all environmental impacts identified in their reviews of local land-use decisions.

Now there were multiplying panhandlers and men sleeping on park benches and “shopping bag ladies” pushing grocery carts through the night. The initial explanation was the deep 1981 recession. When the subsequent recovery failed to dent the problem, new theories multiplied and tended to fall along partisan lines. The right blamed social isolation, falling marriage rates, and drugs. The left blamed President Ronald Reagan, whose deep cuts to the safety net prompted housing advocates to refer to the first half of the 1980s as “starving time.” The explosion of street homelessness was accompanied by a simultaneous explosion of street homeless research, and the collective tone of social scientists and books like Over the Edge and The Homeless was that it was hard to blame one thing when the real answer seemed to be everything.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

While Schleicher’s father believed that the human nature of education made it impossible to measure, Postlethwaite believed that it was only by comparing the statistics across countries that one could decide what worked and what didn’t.2 In 1988, Postlethwaite asked Schleicher to help him with the first international study on reading and writing.3 By 1994, Schleicher had joined the OECD in Paris. By the late 1980s the OECD had started to take the idea of comparing the performance of the world’s schools systems seriously. In 1981, the administration of the new President Ronald Reagan ordered the creation of a National Commission on Excellence in 38 Revenge of the Geeks 39 Education. The Commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, released two years later, shocked America. It found that 23 million adults and 17 per cent of American minors were illiterate.4 Scores on the country’s SAT (Standard Assessment Tasks) tests had dropped throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Cato Institute, Economic Freedom of the World (2011). 94. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf Chapter 3 1. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-world-8217-sschoolmaster/8532/2/ 2. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-world-8217-sschoolmaster/8532/2/ 3. http://www.goethe.de/wis/fut/dos/gdw/sla/en2528036.htm 4. http://www.aicgs.org/publication/why-is-there-no-pisa-shock-in-the-u-s-acomparison-of-german-and-american-education-policy/ 5. http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html 6. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/ how-ronald-reagan-affected-tod.html 7. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-world-8217-sschoolmaster/8532/2/ 8. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-world-8217-sschoolmaster/8532/2/ 9. http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_ 38262901_1_1_1_1,00.html 10. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-world-8217-sschoolmaster/8532/2/ 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/news/07iht-schools_ed3_. html?


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

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

Actually, public sector unionization has stayed pretty steady, which illustrates the fact, as we know from other sources, that workers would join unions if they could.6 In the public sector, there are rules that make it difficult to employ illegal measures to block unionization. In the private sector, since Ronald Reagan, the government has made it explicit that employers can use illegal measures to undermine union organizing, and it’s done constantly.7 There have been other changes in the international economy that affect unionization. Can this be reversed? It certainly can. But it’s going to mean overcoming a lot of pressures.

Has Iran ever threatened anyone? Has it attacked anyone? It wouldn’t have the military force to do it. You can say what you like about Iran: it has a horrible government. We obviously don’t want them to have nuclear weapons. But to consider them a threat comparable to Hitler kind of reminds me of when Ronald Reagan put on his cowboy boots and declared that we have to have a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army is “just two days’ drive from Harlingen, Texas.”21 No one wants Iran to have nuclear weapons. If you’re serious about this, though, there are ways of dealing with the problem sensibly. To regard Iran as a serious threat, let alone a threat comparable to Hitler, that’s to move into outer space.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Right off the bat, they managed to kill the creation of a new consumer advocacy organization, the banner proposal of Jimmy Carter’s first year as president. A year later, they blocked new labor protections and cut taxes on the investment income of the wealthy, while increasing payroll tax rates that ordinary working Americans pay. They were just getting warmed up. Over the following decades, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s administrations oversaw the deregulation of major industries, reductions in tariffs that allowed for rapid increases in globalized trade, and deep tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. The top tax rate of 75 percent in 1968 dropped to 28 percent by 1988.

In the periods of life when they don’t have a job, they will have no access to affordable health insurance. In Arkansas, “work requirements” is code for a strategy to make the lives of poor people more difficult. Enforcement of these work requirements plays into dangerous racial stereotypes about who is benefiting from government assistance. The infamous “welfare queens” invoked by Ronald Reagan are a mythological figure in American consciousness with deep roots in racist stereotypes. The dignity of work is often used to invoke imagery of white men on assembly lines, demonstrating determination and resilience to provide for their families, in implied contrast to images of black women who passively rely on government handouts.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

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

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

Markets crash, unemployment spikes, editorial writers declare that the American people have had it with policies that favor the rich—oh, and that the trend toward ever bigger houses is over. The first time this happened was in the early 1990s. The economy was in recession and it looked as if the conservative era represented by Ronald Reagan was coming to a close. In his bestselling 1990 book The Politics of Rich and Poor, Kevin Phillips declared that inequality had gone so far that it would trigger an inevitable explosion of middle-class rage. The eruption came right on schedule in 1992, when everything was supposed to be about “the economy, stupid” and the superficially populist Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president.

Now, on to the important stuff, which is to say the big decisions and uplifting remarks that our subject made while he sat in the Oval Office. In the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, you will find nothing in the collections on display about “voodoo economics,” the cruelly apt label that Bush applied to Ronald Reagan’s doctrines while on the campaign trail in 1980. You will search his museum in vain for a reference to either his infamous Willie Horton TV commercial or the flag-veneration fury stoked by Bush and his adviser Lee Atwater, even though both episodes from the 1988 election are regarded by historians as milestones on the road to the culture-war bottom.


pages: 193 words: 55,721

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden

disinformation, Ronald Reagan

As the manhunt intensified in 1993, two high-level Pentagon officials began to express concerns about potential violations of Presidential Executive Order 12333, which originated during the Nixon administration after congressional hearings exposed excesses in the intelligence community. It has been updated under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The order states: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." It adds: "No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order."

While a radio or phone signal could be encrypted, there was no way to disguise its origin. And the system worked in any kind of weather or terrain. The presence of such sophisticated military spying equipment targeted at foreign citizens was legal. A National Security Decision Directive signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 declared the flow of drugs across U.S. borders a national security threat and authorized the use of American military forces against foreign drug traffickers. A similar classified directive signed by President George Bush in 1988 authorized the U.S. military to arrest foreign nationals and bring them to the United States for trial.


pages: 161 words: 52,058

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger by Ken Auletta

Albert Einstein, Bretton Woods, data science, George Gilder, job satisfaction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, union organizing

The French are traditionally more relaxed about big government than Americans are. As early as the 16th century, Louis XIV sponsored the formation of state-owned industries. After World War II, the conservative de Gaulle government nationalized much of French banking. As an example of a prevalent American attitude, Riboud cites Ronald Reagan, who declared in his inaugural address that “government is the problem.” Riboud says that the American view that all nationalized companies are badly run and all private industries are well run is a vast oversimplification. He notes that the Renault automobile company was nationalized years ago, and it remains one of the better-run companies, and that the same can be said of Air France and Électricité de France, both of which are nationalized.

Riboud, however, views himself as a man seeking fresh approaches that blend a conservative’s fiscal caution and belief in strong management with a liberal’s compassion and commitment to change. In his lengthy memorandums to Mitterrand, Riboud has urged a “third way”—between a completely state-dominated economy and the austerity put forward by such leaders as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In March, when Finance Minister Jacques Delors argued successfully that the Mitterrand government should try to bolster the sagging franc and close the nation’s trade deficit through fresh austerity measures, Riboud was one of those leading the internal opposition. While he supported the program, he did not think it was comprehensive enough, and he urged the adoption of temporary protectionist policies to keep foreign goods out, and an incomes policy to guarantee employment and government-backed credit to businesses; in exchange, he proposed wage concessions from labor and price ceilings from business.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

First, he appealed to legitimate moral grievance in the Rust Belt, citing the neglect of manufacturing industries, infrastructure, and Midwest communities by coastal elites, and then without missing a beat he shifted to tribal anger with images of walls to keep out marauding criminalized immigrants, in districts where racial tensions were elevated or nascent. MARK: This is far less novel than it appears – there are direct parallels in Ronald Reagan’s campaign strategies and Trump’s. In Reagan’s case the tribal focus was in Southern states and the nod was to racial violence, which he picked up in turn from Richard Nixon. Likewise, Trump’s “Tariff everyone” trade policy seems new, but people have forgotten the stealth trade war that Reagan fought in the 1980s against Japan, other Asian economies, and even the European car industry.

He said, and it’s worth quoting him here, that because of this crisis of profitability, a powerful block is likely to be formed between big business and the rentier [financial] interests, and they would probably find more than one economist to declare that the situation was manifestly unsound. The pressure of all these forces, and in particular of big business, would most probably induce the Government to return to the orthodox policy of cutting down the budget deficit. (Kalecki 1943: 330) Yes, he had just predicted Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the liberation of finance, and the beginnings of Capitalism v.3.0. ERIC: So, if the problem with Capitalism v.2.0 was a wage-price spiral damaging investment and ultimately scoring an own-goal against the objective of full employment, then v.3.0 was specifically designed to restore the power of capital, deregulate markets, and destroy inflation.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

He served as a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation, helped shape the program of the Bradley Foundation, and joined the boards of several right-wing think tanks funded by the Olin Foundation, including the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute. In 1972, the CEOs of a number of America’s largest corporations formed the Business Roundtable to lobby the Congress on behalf of U.S. corporations and their top executives. The Roundtable played a major role in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, the passage of tax breaks for corporations, and the Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994. The Roundtable also had a leading role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade agreements written by and for corporate interests. Before 1970, few Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington, D.C.

Those who had previously enjoyed a comparatively relaxed middleclass life were forced to work harder to support a declining standard of living, even as those at the top enjoyed gourmet restaurants, exotic vacations, private jets, and ever larger and more numerous homes. PLUTOCRACY AS A BIPARTISAN CAUSE The New Right’s first major political triumph was the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The Reagan administration (1981–89) took the lead in implementing the neoliberal economic agenda in the United States, as the administration of Margaret Thatcher advanced the cause in the United Kingdom. In addition to the measures noted above, military expenditures were increased, and the abandonment of antitrust enforcement allowed for ever larger corporate mergers.

Through their structural-adjustment programs, the IMF and World Bank stripped governments, some democratically elected, of their ability to set and enforce social, environmental, and workplace standards or even to give preference to firms that hired locally or employed union workers. After the Republican Ronald Reagan, the presidency passed to the Republican George H. W. Bush (1989–93) and then to the Democrat Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Each administration differed in style and priorities, but America’s plutocracy remained fully in charge and its pro-corporate agenda moved seamlessly forward, irrespective of which party was in power.


pages: 570 words: 151,609

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

., the Shuttle stack emerged from inside the sanctuary of the high bay, rolling slowly on top of the crawler toward the pad along a track laid deep with crushed rock and river gravel—a three-mile journey on the back of a 5,500-horsepower machine as big as a baseball diamond that took ten hours to complete. By 6:30 that evening, as the sun went down behind the VAB, Columbia took her place on Pad 39A, casting shadows that reached out toward the Atlantic. • • • It was a bittersweet moment for Hans Mark. Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the November election, and Ronald Reagan was due to be inaugurated as president in January 1981. Mark knew that as eager as he was to cement the Shuttle’s future with the Air Force and ensure the completion of the Vandenberg launch site, his days in the Pentagon were numbered, his influence within the Air Force already gone. He could only hope that the new administration would push on with STS-1, the Shuttle program and the military’s West Coast spaceport without delay.

As if to underline the difference between their bird and the tiny falling capsules that launched the space race, while they waited to climb back aboard Columbia for their second launch attempt, Young and Crippen spent a couple of hours shooting approaches into the long Kennedy runway in the Gulfstream training jet. FORTY-SIX Kennedy Space Center, 1981 “That’s a mighty fine piece of speech” was John Young’s succinct, appreciative reaction to words read out on President Ronald Reagan’s behalf by Launch Director George Page. Page then added a few more words of his own: “John, we can’t do more from the launch team than say, we sure wish you an awful lot of luck. We are with you one thousand percent and we are awful proud to have been a part of it. Good luck, gentlemen.” Two minutes later, after a planned ten-minute hold built in by Page to make sure his team was calm and focused, he restarted the count.

Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield blasted off from Kennedy on the Space Shuttle’s fourth mission and the last of the series of two-man orbital test flights. On July 4, after their seven-day mission, Mattingly brought Columbia in to land at Edwards AFB. On the ground the president was waiting to welcome them. In his speech, delivered in front of Enterprise, the leading edge of her wing draped in blue cloth, Ronald Reagan declared that the Shuttle was now “operational.” Nor were Columbia and Enterprise the only orbiters at Edwards for the Independence Day celebrations. The dramatic climax to the president’s speech was provided by the departure for Kennedy of the recently completed third orbiter. “Challenger,” the president declared, “you’re cleared for takeoff.”


pages: 519 words: 155,332

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

There was little reporting about it at the time in the general press or on broadcast news. Yet to see how America got where it is today, it is important to understand the pivotal decision to allow what Wall Street called stock buybacks. As part of a broader deregulatory agenda, President Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, John Shad, pushed through a rule setting out liberal guidelines for corporations to repurchase their stock on the open market. Such stock buybacks had long been frowned on by regulators, who feared that companies could profit unfairly at the expense of their own shareholders by buying stock just before they knew good news about the company was to become public.

He passed what became known as Section 8 housing grants, providing rent vouchers so that people would not have to pay rents exceeding 30 percent of their incomes. He expanded and standardized a New Deal–era school lunch program that had already been upgraded by President Johnson. For millions of needy children it often provided their only solid meal of the day. Beginning in about 1976, momentum began to shift. Ronald Reagan caused a stir that year attacking “welfare queens” in his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination—an issue that seemed to resonate with a middle class that had become increasingly restive over wage stagnation and frustrated by much of the Democratic Party’s continuing focus on civil rights, including affirmative action and forced integration through school busing.

The alternative, Carter warned, “is a path…that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” Sixteen months later, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. The former California governor’s most compelling message in an October 2, 1980, debate with Carter, offered in the form of a question, was, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush was urged by some of his aides to tap the unity and sense of purpose that had swept the country in the fall of 2001 and call for a program of national service that all Americans would participate in, perhaps following high school.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

As American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed it, “… however unpleasantly they [the junta] act, this government [i.e., Pinochet’s] is better for us than Allende was.” That American government support of Pinochet, and that blind eye to his abuses, continued through the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and initially Ronald Reagan. But from the mid-1980’s onwards, two things turned the U.S. government against Pinochet. One was the accumulated evidence of abuses, including abuses against American citizens—evidence that became increasingly hard to ignore. A turning point was the horrifying killing in Santiago of Rodrigo Rojas, a Chilean teen-ager who was a U.S. legal resident, and who died after being doused with gasoline and set on fire by Chilean soldiers.

Naturally, fierce political struggles have been frequent, and majority tyranny or minority paralysis occasional, in American history. But, with the conspicuous exception of the breakdown of compromise that led to our 1861–1865 Civil War, compromises have usually been reached. A modern example is the relationship between Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas (Tip) O’Neill between 1981 and 1986 (Plate 9.9). Both men were skilled politicians, strong personalities, and opposite to each other in their political philosophies and in many or most questions of policy. They disagreed and fought politically on major issues.

Individual states can adopt laws that initially seem crazy to other states, but that eventually prove sensible and become adopted by all of the states—such as California’s becoming the first state to permit right turns on a red light after a full stop. PLATE 9.7. Thomas Edison, the best known of the U.S.’s inventors and innovators. PLATE 9.8. Members of a Harvard College graduating class, many of them recent immigrants. PLATE 9.9. When political compromise still functioned in the U.S.: Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (1981–1986), who often disagreed but nevertheless compromised and collaborated productively to pass much major legislation. PLATE 9.10. U.S. Senator J. Strom Thurmond, who set a record for length of a filibuster speech used by a political minority to force a political majority to compromise.


pages: 566 words: 144,072

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

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

The youngest of seven children, he had a thick black beard and penetrating eyes. Hekmatyar, who spoke excellent English, was renowned for his staunch Islamic views and a disdain for the United States that was surpassed only by his hatred of the Soviets. In 1985, on a visit to the United States, he had refused to meet with President Ronald Reagan—despite repeated requests from Pakistan’s leaders—out of concern that he would be viewed as a U.S. puppet. During the Afghan War, the KGB established a special disinformation team to split apart the seven mujahideen leaders, and Hekmatyar was one of its prime targets. Milton Bearden, who served as the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 and worked with the mujahideen, described Hekmatyar as “the darkest of the Afghan leaders, the most Stalinist of the Peshawar Seven, insofar as he thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline.”

But we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones.”59 Beginning in 1985, the United States increased its support to the Afghans to $250 million per year, thanks to Wilson, CIA Director William Casey, and growing public support. This shift culminated in National Security Directive 166, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan and set a clear U.S. objective in Afghanistan: to push out the Soviets.60 The CIA was deeply involved in the distribution of wealth, providing money, arms (including heavy machine guns, SA-7s, and Oerlikon antiaircraft cannons), technical advice on weapons and explosives, strategic advice, intelligence, and sophisticated technology such as wireless interception equipment.

This allowed the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other governments to exploit the resentment by providing military and financial assistance to the mujahideen.79 In short, the problem with the Soviet approach was not a heavy footprint. Rather, the Soviets were unprepared to fight a counterinsurgency that required them to focus on garnering the support of the local population. The Soviet footprint was, in reality, light. In January 1984, for instance, CIA Director William Casey informed President Ronald Reagan that the Afghan mujahideen, with backing from the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi intelligence services, controlled two-thirds of the countryside. He argued that the Soviets would have to triple or quadruple their deployments in Afghanistan to put down the rebellion. Rather than being overcommitted, they were underresourced.80 Was the light-footprint approach a wise one?


pages: 339 words: 57,031

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

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

By the end of the decade, even urban Americans tried to conserve energy and to recycle their waste.49 Even as many of the movement’s conservationist ideals persisted, though, the hope that small-scale technologies might lead their users into utopian communion with one another vanished from public view. Software, Hackers, and the Return of the Counterculture In the early 1980s, former communards found themselves confronting both middle age and a changed political landscape. The buttoned-down, squarejawed former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, had assumed the presidency and promised to restore America to what he saw as its former military and economic greatness. A new era was coming into being, and in the pages of CQ, the shift was palpable. The magazine continued to run articles on ecology and reviews of books on topics such as voluntary simplicity and home remedies.

Together, these developments suggested to many at the time, and particularly to politicians and pundits on the right, that a “new economy” had appeared, one in which digital technologies and networked forms of economic organization combined to liberate the individual entrepreneur. In a 1988 speech at Moscow State University, President Ronald Reagan became one of the first to make the case. “In the new economy,” he explained, “human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We’re breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny.”1 Such a vision was very congenial to many members of the Whole Earth network, and as the economic and technological whirlwinds of the late 1980s gathered speed, Brand and, later, Kevin Kelly, drew heavily on the intellectual and social resources of the group.

At Wired, Gilder and Dyson served variously as sources, subjects, and authors of stories, and in August 1995 Dyson interviewed Gingrich for a Wired cover story. These appearances in Wired took place, however, against a background of other collaborations. In August 1994 Gilder invited Dyson to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference sponsored by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank closely linked to Newt Gingrich. There, along with Ronald Reagan’s former science adviser, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, Gilder and Dyson lent their names to a document featuring what was arguably the decade’s most potent rhetorical welding of deregulationist politics to digital technologies, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Wired [ 223 ] Knowledge Age.”32 A year later, while Gingrich’s portrait graced the cover of Wired, Dyson and Gilder returned to the Aspen conference, taking with them John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, and Stewart Brand, as well as bionomist Michael Rothschild and representatives from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems.


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When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Seventy years on, the grandchildren of the first group were to be found in law practices, corporate management, doctors’ offices across the United States; the stokers’ grandchildren were still living in terraced houses on the back streets of Southampton and Liverpool – only now there are no ships left to stoke. Britain was still a nation of village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons. I was, of course, aware of the harsh realities at the bottom of American society. Under Ronald Reagan, as under Mrs Thatcher, poverty and genuine destitution have grown sharply. As a child I had often wondered what it would have been like to be a Victorian, when the gap between rich and poor was so great. By the time I left America, in some part at least I knew. Other American ‘immigrants’ – those brought in slave ships from Africa – had not fared as well as the Titantic survivors.

In part, economic Thatcherism has been essential, but it has been preached by a flawed apostle. Workers may have been cowed by the miners’ strike and Wapping, but industrial antagonisms, ‘them’ and ‘us’, seemed to me on my return to be barely suppressed. Mrs Thatcher has often been compared to Ronald Reagan, but their political strengths are poles apart. Reagan was elected, not because – even at his finest hour – anyone thought he was competent to run anything, but because people liked him. If Mrs Thatcher had depended on that sort of popularity, she would not have become even the mayor of Grantham.

Which country, America or Britain, I wondered, would the notional visitor from outer space prefer? I have twice visited Vietnamese boat people awaiting resettlement in Hong Kong camps, and heard in no uncertain terms which destination they would choose. We, the children of Kipling and Rhodes, find the nationalism of Ronald Reagan – ‘America, the last best hope of man’ – nauseous; we, the besotted celebrants of royal births and weddings, sneer at such beanfeasts as the centenary of the Statue of Liberty; we, who have almost no Afro-Caribbean middle class, castigate Americans for their racism. The list of such contradictions would be a long one, and there are many aspects of life in Britain that the judicious space traveller would embrace.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

I was happy to see Margaret Thatcher seek to defeat inflation, restrict the unnecessary extensions of state intervention in the economy, curb the unbridled power of the trades unions, and liberalize markets. These were, I thought, essential reforms. Similarly, it seemed to me that the US needed at least some of what Ronald Reagan offered. In the context of the ongoing Cold War, a restored and reinvigorated West appeared necessary and right. I believed that the moves away from what was then an overstretched and unaccountable state towards a more limited and accountable one were in the right direction if the right balance between society and the state was to be restored.

LIBERALIZATION The most important single reason for the end of what Gorton calls the ‘quiet period’ was simply financial liberalization, itself an element in the general move towards free markets discussed briefly in the Preface. This movement was one of the dominant – arguably, the dominant – social, economic, political and philosophical shift of the past four decades. Though challenged by the post-2007 crisis, it has not reversed. Politically, this shift is associated with the names of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, president of the US and prime minister of the UK in the 1980s, though our progeny might associate it more closely with the name of Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China after 1978 and progenitor of the programme of ‘reform and opening up’ that brought such a profound transformation to China and the world.

Ideas and associated events transformed this world of closed and highly regulated economies into the globalized and liberalized economy of the early 2000s. Arguably the most important change was the embrace of ‘reform and opening up’ by China after 1978, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in 1979 and of Ronald Reagan as American president in 1980 began a revolution in the high-income countries, including privatization of what previously had been publicly owned companies. The European Union’s Single European Act – triggered partly by the desire to inject economic vigour and partly by the desire to relaunch the project of European integration – was agreed in 1986 and started a move towards a single market.


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Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

SELF-INFLICTED DAMAGE By the 1980s, not only were the United States and the United Kingdom experiencing lower growth than they were accustomed to, but they also felt continental Europe and Japan catching up. Growth became a matter of national pride. It was important not just to grow but to win the “race” with the other rich countries. After decades of fast growth, national pride was defined by the size of GDP, and its continuous expansion. For both Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, what was to blame for the slump in the late-1970s was clear (though we now know they really had no idea). The countries had drifted too far to the left—unions were too strong, the minimum wage was too high, taxes were too onerous, regulation was too overbearing. Restoring growth required treating business owners better through lower tax rates, deregulation, and deunionization, and getting the rest of the country to be less reliant on the government.

Roosevelt’s New Deal marked the beginning of an era where poverty was seen as something society could fight, and beat, with government intervention. This continued until the 1960s, culminating in Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” But when growth slowed and resources were tight, the war on poverty turned into war on the poor. Ronald Reagan would return time and again to the image of the so-called welfare queen, who was black, lazy, female, and fraudulent. The model for this was Linda Taylor, a woman from Chicago who had four aliases and was convicted of $8,000 in fraud, for which she spent several years in prison. This was one and a half years longer than onetime billionaire capitalist hero Charles Keating, the central figure in the most famous corruption scandal of the Reagan era (the Keating Five scandal), and the related savings and loans crisis that was to cost taxpayers over $500 billion in bailout money.

Giertz, “The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates: A Critical Review,” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 1 (2012): 3–50. 9 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Me and Everyone Else: Do People Think Like Economists?,” MIMEO, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019. 10 Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, Washington, DC, 1981. 11 Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso, “Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution,” American Economic Review 108, no. 2 (2018): 521–54. 12 Anju Agnihotri Chaba, “Sustainable Agriculture: Punjab Has a New Plan to Move Farmers Away from Water-Guzzling Paddy,” Indian Express, March 28 2018, accessed March 4, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/sustainable-agriculture-punjab-has-a-new-plan-to-move-farmers-away-from-water-guzzling-paddy-5064481/. 13 “Which States Rely Most on Federal Aid?


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Many liberals have always vehemently opposed such intellectual straitjacketing, and indeed ‘political correctness’ was originally a pejorative and satirical term used by people on the Left ‘as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts’, in academic Debra Schultz’s words.10 Although American politics became less radical in the 1970s and 1980s, with election victories for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, academia became more so, especially when the students of 1968 returned as professors; and this radicalism fanned out into the wider culture of media and politics. One interpretation of PC is that it is the ‘paradox of tolerance’, promoting tolerance of historically disadvantaged or persecuted groups to such an extreme that it becomes itself another form of intolerance.11 The Left would argue that PC is used to fight injustices or hate speech, although what defines hate speech is the big question.

And, generally speaking, people don’t want to be compared to Nazis, who even the most ardent Right-winger will admit rather overstepped some moral boundaries. During the Clinton era liberal values continued to gain strength in the US, while there was simultaneously ‘the backlash’, the radicalisation of some Republicans on moral issues, particularly abortion and evolution. In Thomas Frank’s words, ‘Unlike Ronald Reagan, they became absolutists on tax cuts, gun control, and abortion, and purged from their ranks any who dared dissent.’4 Yet issues such as anti-abortion and even the anti-evolution movement gained strength just as, or perhaps because, popular culture and wider social attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic were becoming far more liberal, irreligious and sexualised.

Institutional religions also carry a body of work and wisdom, sort of the equivalent of a Common Law which can be used as a reference but also a constraint. Without that, people just come out with ever crazier ideas, and crackpot ideas also became status markers. Humans have a tendency towards unifying belief systems, and many things have a vaguely religious bent. American conservatives arguably treat the constitution like a sacred text, and Ronald Reagan as a prophet. The environmental movement is often accused of resembling a religion, with its initial paradise and its warning of apocalypse, although in fairness to the greens if we do push the global temperature above 2 degrees then it will start to feel a bit Old Testament. As Émile Durkheim wrote, it is ‘a universal fact that, when a conviction of any strength is held by the same community of men, it inevitably takes on a religious character.


pages: 31 words: 7,670

Why America Must Not Follow Europe by Daniel Hannan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, carbon tax, mass immigration, obamacare, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Upton Sinclair

., of course, prides itself on its success in integrating newcomers. The country was, in a sense, designed for that purpose, and American nationality has always been a civic rather than an ethnic or religious concept. It’s a heartening creed and one to which immigrants from every continent have subscribed. As Ronald Reagan put it in a characteristically upbeat phrase, “Each immigrant makes America more American.” The U.S., in short, gives all its citizens, including its Muslim citizens, something to believe in. There is no need to cast around for an alternative identity when you are perfectly satisfied with the one on your passport.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

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

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

Originally offered in conjunction with Harvard’s School of Public Administration and the Department of Economics, the initiative, which provided selected labor leaders the chance to spend nine months at Harvard, is the only meaningful acknowledgment in the history of HBS that there might be a point of view other than that of “management” that might be worth considering. Even more remarkable is the fact that said acknowledgment lasted forty years, at which point the election of Ronald Reagan drove a stake through its heart, and the Business School ceased participating in the program. But that’s getting ahead of the story. On September 23, 1942, the New York Times expressed the novelty in just seven words: “Union Men to Take a Harvard Course.”1 Described as “part of a program to bring about an improved relationship between labor and industry, both during the present day and in dealing with the problems that will confront the nation after the war,” the “experimental” course drew thirteen labor leaders representing unions of railway clerks, hatters, electricians, and women’s garment workers in its inaugural year.

Following Jensen’s logic, takeovers and LBOs were just what the doctor ordered to cure the nation’s economic woes.12 Twenty-two percent of the 150 largest public companies in the United States as of 1980 had merged or been acquired by 1988, with another 5 percent taken private.13 The highly public spectacle of the takeover of RJR Nabisco served as an object lesson for any and all CEOs who weren’t used to looking over their shoulders. Downsizing became the hymn song of the managerial church. Thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts and deficit spending, the U.S. economy found its footing again after 1982, but, as Walter Kiechel points out, unlike in the 1950s, “[the] rising tide didn’t lift all boats. In the name of beating foreign competition, completing (or avoiding) takeovers, and serving the interests of shareholders, it became acceptable to sell off businesses that didn’t fit the new corporate strategy and to lay off battalions of workers.”

Seeing themselves as embattled, “they mounted a counteroffensive, a full-scale mobilization in which corporations, large and small, found an increasingly unified voice.”5 They attacked government regulation, in particular the recently created Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. They accused unions of hobbling American business’s ability to compete, and set out to destroy them, once and for all. And they succeeded. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 only solidified their victory, both in terms of unions (Reagan’s firing of the nation’s striking air traffic controllers in August 1981 is widely viewed as signaling the end of the American labor movement) and regulations (instead of the dangerous political move of trying to throw out regulations entirely, Reagan simply appointed critics of regulation to head the major agencies).


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Instead of prep school graduates came men like Gary Schroen, working-class midwesterners who had enlisted in the army when others their age were protesting the Vietnam War. They acquired their language skills in CIA classrooms, not on Sorbonne sabbaticals. Many were Republicans or independents. Ronald Reagan was their president. A few of this group inside the Directorate of Operations saw themselves as profane insurgents waging culture and class war against the old CIA elite. Yet as Hart arrived in Islamabad the CIA was still led by the generation of elite clandestine officers, many of them Democrats from the northeast, whose outlook had been shaped by the idealism of the early Cold War and the cultural styles of the Kennedys.

He dabbled in Republican politics and accepted a tour under President Nixon as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. There he cut secret deals, obfuscated about his investments, and barely escaped Washington with his reputation. As he aged, he hankered again for high office and respectability. He was invited into Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign as its manager and helped pull out a famous 1980 primary victory over George H. W. Bush in New Hampshire. After the triumph over Jimmy Carter, he moved to Washington to join the Cabinet. His first choice was the State Department, but when the offer to run the CIA came through, Casey’s history with Donovan and the OSS made it impossible to resist.

The satellite had transmitted a clear photo of the Jalalabad airport showing three charred balls of steel scrap, formerly helicopters, lying side by side across an active runway. The incoming cable from Langley was triumphant: SATELLITE IMAGERY CONFIRMS THREE KILLS AT JALALABAD AS REPORTED. PLEASE PASS OUR CONGRATULATIONS FOR A JOB WELL DONE. The CIA had learned years before that Ronald Reagan was not much of a reader. Dense, detailed briefings about global affairs rarely reached his desk. But Reagan loved movies. Casey encouraged his colleagues to distill important intelligence so the president could watch it on a movie screen. Before Reagan met visiting heads of state, he would sometimes screen a short CIA-produced classified bio movie about his visitor.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

And, in the years since, a long line of Dust Bowl farmers, land speculators, Haight-Ashbury hippies, migrant workers, dot-commers, real estate speculators, and would-be actors has come chasing their own dreams. The result is a population that leans toward idealism—without necessarily being as liberal as you might think. (Remember, this is Ronald Reagan’s old stomping ground.) And despite the stereotype of the blue-eyed, blond surfer, California’s population is not homogeneous either. Ten million people who live here (more than 28% of Californians) are foreign born—including former Governor Schwarzenegger. Almost half hail from Latin American countries; another third emigrated from Asia, following the waves of Chinese workers who arrived in the 1860s to build the railroads and subsequent waves of Indochinese refugees from the Vietnam War.

Oakland may have Berkeley beat when it comes to cutting-edge arts, and the city may have forfeited some of its renegade 1960s’ spirit over the years, but unless a guy in a hot-pink satin body suit, skullcap, and cape rides a unicycle around your town, you’ll likely find Berkeley offbeat indeed. * * * Berkeley’s Political History Those looking for traces of Berkeley’s politically charged past need go no further than Sather Gate. Both the Free Speech Movement and the fledgling political life of actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan have their roots here. It was next to Sather Gate, on September 30, 1964, that a group of students defied the University of California–Berkeley chancellor’s order that all organizations advocating “off-campus issues” (such as civil rights and nuclear disarmament) keep their information tables off campus.

They stayed until 3 am, setting a precedent of protest that would be repeated in the coming months, with students jamming Sproul Hall in greater numbers each time. Conservative U.C. president Clark Kerr eventually backed down and allowed student groups to pass out information on campus. By then, the Free Speech Movement had gathered momentum, and the conflict had made a national hero of student leader Mario Savio. Political newcomer Ronald Reagan played on Californians’ unease about the unruly Berkeley students in his successful 1966 bid for governor, promising to rein in the “unwashed kooks.” By the end of the 1960s, the cohesion of the groups making up the Free Speech Movement had begun to fray. Some members began questioning the efficacy of sit-ins and other nonviolent tactics that had, until then, been the hallmark of Berkeley student protests.


pages: 248 words: 57,419

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

Where are the visionaries with brilliant ideas that will postpone that day of reckoning, push it back for a few more years, for a decade or—dare we hope—actually generate a plan that cheats fate by devising a strategy to allow us to use the resources at our disposal to invest our way back to solvency? The business community has put forward no bold initiatives. The Republicans—after having expanded the national debt by 188 percent under President Ronald Reagan and 77 percent more under President George W. Bush—have recently found their old-time religion and are determined to cut government spending now—at a time when only government spending is keeping the economy afloat. The Democrats have no discernible ideas at all. President Barack Obama relied too heavily on the advice of many of those responsible for causing the crisis and has no contingency plan to implement now that the second down leg of the collapse has begun.

It followed the heavy government deficit spending of the 1960s, which had forced the abandonment of gold backing for the dollar in 1968 and resulted in the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker crushed that round of inflation with very high interest rates in 1981. A sixth round of high inflation should have occurred a few years later as the result of President Ronald Reagan’s deficit-funded spending spree. That did not happen, however, because the United States began incurring very large trade deficits with other countries. In all the previous inflationary periods, excessive government spending had created domestic bottlenecks in industrial production and labor shortages; and those factors combined to generate wage-push inflation.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

I want to know that when I make claims, I’m not speaking out of political distortion but out of honest truth. And I want to be able to evaluate the claims of others too. So how would such a system work? First, large claims (“Gore is a serial liar,” “Ronald Reagan was a great president”) would be broken down into smaller component parts (“Gore claimed to have invented the Internet,” “Ronald Reagan’s economic plan created jobs”). On each small claim, we’d run The Process. Let’s take “Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet.” First, some ground rules. Everything is open. Anyone can submit anything, and all the records are put on a public website.

(Another FAIR study finds the Heritage Foundation’s political orientation—let alone its funding—was only identified in 24% of news citations.) As the conservative message machine grew stronger, political debate and electoral results began to shift further and further to the right, eventually allowing extreme conservatives to be elected, first with Ronald Reagan and now with George W. Bush. More recently, conservatives have managed to finally win not only the White House but both houses of Congress. While their policy proposals, when understood, are just as unpopular as ever, conservatives are able to use their media power to twist the debate. Hurting Seniors: The Attack on Social Security http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting6 June 11, 2006 Age 19 Recent events provide a compelling case study of how this process works.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

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

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

But, according to the dominant national story at that time, government could be of service in many different ways.5 New Story Legitimated But then an alternative story achieved currency: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” With these words—usually quoted without the phrase “in this present crisis”—in his First Inaugural Address Ronald Reagan gave his imprimatur to a new national story.6 It is easy to believe that government is the problem (no qualification): if one thinks that markets work perfectly as long as people are free to choose. But with externalities, with an unfair distribution of income, and with phishing for phools, markets do not work perfectly.

Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 162. Perhaps our favorite quotation on this theme comes from a press conference in 1986: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” There are many other versions. Ray Hennessey, “The 15 Ronald Reagan Quotes Every Business Leader Must Know,” accessed January 16, 2015, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234547. 7. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 26. 8. Stephen Miller, “Income Subject to FICA Payroll Tax Increases in 2015,” Society for Human Resource Management, October 23, 2014, accessed January 16, 2015, http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/compensation/articles/pages/fica-social-security-tax-2015.aspx. 9.

Website now closed. “Harry Reid.” Wikipedia. Accessed December 1, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid. Healey, James R. “Government Sells Last of Its GM Shares.” USA Today, December 10, 2013. Healy, David. Pharmageddon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Hennessey, Ray. “The 15 Ronald Reagan Quotes Every Business Leader Must Know.” Accessed January 16, 2015. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234547. Hickman, W. Braddock. Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience. Princeton: National Bureau of Economic Research and Princeton University Press, 1958. Hindo, Brian, and Moira Herbst.


pages: 403 words: 105,431

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

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

When Democratic think tanks say their party should support accountability and school choice, while rebuffing the teachers’ unions, you can bet that something has fundamentally changed in the political scene. In 2008, these issues, which had been the exclusive property of the conservative wing of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, had somehow managed to captivate education thinkers in the Democratic Party as well. WHERE DID EDUCATION REFORM GO WRONG? Ask the question, and you’ll get different answers, depending on whom you ask. But all roads eventually lead back to a major report released in 1983 called A Nation at Risk.

Dressed in a long evening gown, I was escorted inside by a stiff-backed Marine in full dress uniform. Nearly a decade later, I was invited to discuss education issues at a small luncheon with President Gerald Ford, along with sociologists Nathan Glazer and James Coleman. In 1984, I was one of about forty educators invited to meet with President Ronald Reagan in the Cabinet Room. A couple of times, when I was an assistant secretary of education, I met President George H. W. Bush (at our first meeting, in an irreverent mood, I pulled up a chair next to him behind his desk in the Oval Office so I could get a great picture, and he cheerfully obliged me).

As the federal government kept up the pressure for desegregation and as resistance to mandatory busing increased, some school districts attempted to encourage voluntary desegregation through choice. They opened magnet schools—schools with specialized offerings in the arts or sciences or other fields—to encourage white students to attend urban schools that would otherwise be heavily nonwhite. But until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the issue of school choice remained far outside the mainstream, mainly because it was viewed by the media and elected officials as a means to permit white students to escape court-ordered racial desegregation. After Reagan was elected, he advocated school choice, specifically vouchers.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

But by the mid-twentieth century, most people agreed that some regulation was necessary, that governments must protect people as well as property. Even in that heyday of liberalism there were those who argued that any regulation of trade and commerce, any government programs to diminish economic inequality, constrained and weakened individual freedoms. Ronald Reagan popularized that view in his critical 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” a clarion call to cut “big government.” But that argument did not become dominant until the 1980s, with the elections of Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in China.

Two million Mexicans lost their farms. Millions more lost farm jobs. Half a million Mexicans a year were soon fleeing to the US. This was double the number who had left each year before NAFTA.3 Fortunately for the Lopez family, Abelardo was one of 2.7 million undocumented workers granted amnesty and a green card under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). That enabled him to bring his family to the US. One by one he brought his sons. Arcenio waited for word from US authorities that it was his turn. It took ten years. A long backlog makes legal entry into the US painfully slow. A decade-long wait is not unusual.

But she continued, earning a master’s degree. When Marcos fell, Garcia was a twenty-four-year-old social worker, helping street children in Manila. The commute from Cavite took hours on hot, crowded buses. She listened to “people talk about Marcos, his secret ties to the CIA, to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I realized our government was the puppet of the Americans. In college, you study history, but here it was before my eyes. I felt I had to do something.” The People Power revolution that brought Marcos down in 1986 sucked Garcia in. “This was my chance to be there in the streets. My friends came with me because of my physical disability.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

He gave the bean counters what they wanted: some essential minor criticisms but, far more importantly, the conclusion that providing other services to an audit client didn’t impair independence. The report allowed the SEC to fudge the issue. It rejected the ban proposed by Metcalf in favour of a requirement merely to disclose consultancy fees from audit clients (which would be rescinded four years later under the new Ronald Reagan administration). Even with its reputation at such a low ebb and with the consequences of failure growing more serious, the profession was making the rules of its own game. With this reprieve, the major accountancy firms accelerated their transformation. Between 1977 and 1984, the proportion of their income accounted for by consultancy – excluding tax advice – roughly doubled to between 11% in the case of Price Waterhouse and 28% for Arthur Andersen & Co.

It needed its financial watchdogs alert, not distractedly chewing on juicier consultancy bones. 5 FREE FOR ALL THE BEAN COUNTERS EXPLOIT A NEW ECONOMIC AGE AND CONNIVE IN FALSE ACCOUNTING Chicago, the city that did so much to shape American accountancy, also gave the world an economic model that presented the profession with both its sternest test and its biggest commercial opportunity. The bean counters’ special genius was to cash in prolifically on the latter even as they badly flunked the former. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, early 1980s Anglo-Saxon capitalism was in the grip of ‘Chicago School’ economics. First came the tough medicine of monetarism, restricting the money supply to cure the inflation of the post-oil-crisis 1970s in line with the theories of economists such as Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

By 1975, they were generating around a fifth of the Big Eight’s US income.2 The cost of their efforts to federal and state funds went largely unnoticed until the Washington government discovered in the mid 1980s that dozens of the top US companies were paying no tax at all. ‘I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,’ said President Ronald Reagan, shocked that his all-American one-time employer General Electric was among the non-payers.3 The tax code was once again rewritten through a 1986 Tax Reform Act that closed many of the shelters and tightened up the loophole-riddled laws. No legal draughtsman, however, could be a long-term match for the creativity of the modern tax accountant.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Businesses are happy to accept the extra money, often in the form of debt – extending credit to customers, for example. Then something happens to shatter confidence and the definition of acceptable money narrows, which means that the willingness to extend credit declines. In the twentieth century, each successive economic cycle tended to end with more debt being added. In 1981, Ronald Reagan managed to persuade some Republican Congressmen, rather against their will, to vote in favour of an increase in the government debt ceiling beyond $1 trillion, or one with twelve zeroes after it. It was assumed that a conservative President, who referred to government as the problem, would bring the deficit down.

Fiscal policy would have no effect on unemployment, according to the monetarists. The answer, instead, was to improve the workings of the economy by making it easier for employers to hire and fire labour. These so-called ‘supply side’ reforms would improve productivity. By the early 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher in power in Britain and Ronald Reagan in America, Friedman’s influence was at its peak. The government role in the economy was to control inflation and to ensure the rule of law and property rights. Otherwise, markets should be given free rein to allocate resources, which they would inevitably do in a more efficient way than bureaucrats.

This was not true in the developing world, which still attempted to manage exchange rates, or in those countries in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. But it was true in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economies of the US and the UK. Both nations had leaders in the early 1980s who had an ideological preference for free markets (Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, respectively). The financial sector was generally set free. Britain unleashed the Big Bang reforms on its stock exchange in 1986, bringing foreign capital into the market. America gradually allowed commercial banks to move into the investment-banking market, reversing the strict separation that had been put in place in the 1930s.


pages: 389 words: 108,344

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

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

Under the tutelage of Perry and Defense Secretary Harold Brown (a former nuclear weapons lab director who had also had Perry’s job directing defense research and development), billions of dollars poured into variants of precision guidance, some focused on directing the missile via a little TV camera in its nose or by tracking hot shapes with a heat-seeking infrared camera. Others followed the reflection of an infrared laser beam shone at the target by a pilot or a soldier on the ground. Once Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in 1981, defense spending, already inflated, went into a steeper climb, with the costs of all the revolutionary new weapons systems predictably following suit. Among these were various subsystems of Assault Breaker that took on independent but nonetheless prosperous lives after the program was officially ended.

Profitable though mining toxic materials might be (the Blues had another uranium operation in Australia), the mother lodes of government contracts could be at least as rich. Among the brothers’ goals in buying General Atomics was the prospect of lucrative business from the Star Wars missile defense initiative launched by Ronald Reagan three years before. To that end they set up a defense programs group within the company with an advisory board decorated with Washington door openers, including former secretary of state Alexander Haig and former Joint Chiefs chairman John Vessey. In 1987 the Blues turned to a recently retired navy admiral, Thomas Cassidy, to helm a newly created “advanced technology projects division.”

Yet, as we shall see, the same factors that had undermined the kingpin strategy would apply in the world of counterterrorism, a lesson that was driven home at a very, very high cost in lives. Counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency had lowly beginnings, born as it was out of William Casey’s quest to exercise greater control over the agency he directed. Casey, an ideologically driven lawyer who had managed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, was inclined to weaken the power of established bailiwicks such as the Directorate of Intelligence, which had an irritating habit of (occasionally) serving up politically unpalatable assessments. To run the new Counterterrorism Center he selected one of his favorite operations officers, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a flamboyantly irresponsible cold warrior who liked to demonstrate his disdain for authority routinely by showing up for work in a flight suit.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

You can drive down the price of oil – a constant foreign policy objective of the United States – which makes the costs of production cheaper. Or you can release new labour into the market or make existing labour cheaper, such as with the entry of women into the workforce in the latter half of the 20th century and the successful attempts by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to weaken the power of trade unions. Another option is to create new markets in sectors that are normally protected from market forces, such as with the privatisation of the railways in Britain and ongoing attempts to dismantle the country’s National Health Service. Yet another option is to create new markets for investing in debt, such as the student loan industry in the United States, or to encourage consumers to spend beyond their means with credit cards.

The Coolidge administration cut taxes with the Revenue Acts of 1924, 1926 and 1928, reducing inheritance taxes and bringing the top marginal tax rate down to 25 per cent. These tax cuts were conducted according to the policy of Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, one of America’s richest men, who claimed (as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s) that reducing taxes on the rich would yield higher tax revenues. Of course, some context is necessary. When the income tax was first established in 1913, the top marginal rate was only 7 per cent. It was raised to 77 per cent in 1916 to finance the war. The Coolidge tax cuts were dramatic, but only against the backdrop of wartime rates. 3  ‘Once Europe withdrew from Africa …’ Latin America was decolonised during the early 19th century, long before the rest of the global South, after a struggle for national independence led by figures such as Símon Bolívar.

This idea was first hatched by World Bank president Robert McNamara (formerly president of Ford Motor Company, and then Secretary of Defense) in 1979. The goal was to begin to dismantle developmentalism and get indebted countries to focus on exports again. In 1980 the World Bank’s first Structural Adjustment Loan was approved for Turkey – Loan 1818, for $200 million. The idea was picked up and supported strongly by Ronald Reagan. 15 ‘This was a big blow …’ As the Phillips Curve states, higher inflation correlates (in the short term) with higher employment. 16 ‘These “innovative debt products” …’ See World Bank Treasury, List of Selected Recent Bonds, http://treasury.worldbank.org/cmd/htm/World_Bank_Bond_Issuances.html. 17 ‘And yet such invasive conditions …’ I am indebted to Ha-Joon Chang for this illuminating comparison. 18 ‘During the 1960s and 1970s, global South …’ These figures exclude China.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Democrat Thomas Eagleton would briefly be his party’s vice presidential nominee, until the news he’d undergone electroshock treatment for depression got him pushed off the ticket. Bob Dole, on the Republican side, would make his own run for the Oval Office. Howard Baker, like Dole a future Senate majority leader, actually made it to the White House, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. His most enduring fame would come from the piercing questions he asked—about the leader of his own party—at the Watergate hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” That was all in the future, though, and despite the outsized ambitions on the subcommittee—and the members’ awareness that Muskie, their chairman, would likely soon be his party’s presidential nominee—the men worked together with remarkable comity.

He’s clearly mellowed since retiring from politics. “I eat lunch every day now that I’m in the private sector,” he laughs. In 1977, not long after Waxman arrived in Washington, Congress tweaked the Clean Air Act with a set of amendments. But the atmosphere in the capital would soon change, with Ronald Reagan’s election at the start of the new decade. The popular new president’s political philosophy differed profoundly from Waxman’s. Government, in Reagan’s view, was an obstacle that stood in the way of American progress, not a tool for making progress possible. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” Reagan famously said, were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

When dramatic air quality improvements left regulators with little to do, Katz argues, they grasped for a justification to push further. “That’s what led to the emphasis on climate change, because it was almost as if they were looking for a new cause to coalesce around,” she says. “That’s where I think things really started going downhill.” Diane Katz’s take is the twenty-first-century update of the philosophy Ronald Reagan ensconced in Washington, the view of government as an overweening bureaucracy more likely to make trouble than solve it. For one of the nation’s two major political parties, the EPA—flawed, to be sure, but doing its best to protect Americans’ health, carrying out the mission a Republican president entrusted to it—now stood as a dangerous enemy, an out-of-control job killer needing nothing more than to be cut down to size


Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly by Evy Poumpouras

British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, fear of failure, Lyft, Ronald Reagan, uber lyft, Y2K

About twelve months later, my supervisor called me into his office to say that the Secret Service was awarding me and the other agents who had stayed to help on September 11 the Valor Award—a medal of the highest honor within the Service. He told me the day of the ceremony and that Jerry Parr, the agent who had saved Ronald Reagan’s life after he had been shot, had been given that same honor. But as he spoke, a knot formed in my stomach. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I will be overseas, visiting family. Can someone else accept it on my behalf?” He agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and I left his office. That night, I went home and booked my flight to Greece for the date of the ceremony.

As an Advance agent, I always wanted to know where the nearest Trauma 1 hospital was—the place where the medical team is trained to handle gunshot wounds and other complex traumatic injuries. Being that I protected some of the most threatened people in the world, this was an important factor for me. When President Ronald Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981, during an attempted assassination, he was rushed to George Washington University Hospital—a Trauma 1. Just knowing which hospital was rated highest or closest wasn’t enough. I’d actually drive there, figure out how to get to the emergency room entrance, walk in, meet the staff, and get the layout of where everything was.

Arrivals and Departures We are often most vulnerable when we are in transit between locations. In the Service, we’d call those the Arrival and Departure movements of a protectee. That would be any movement from the White House to the motorcade or the motorcade to another location. It was within these few minutes where our protectee was most exposed. President Ronald Reagan, for example, was shot while walking to his armored limo after an event. Today the Service goes to great lengths to secure and even conceal those kinds of movements. Similarly, when you are in motion, you are often at your most vulnerable. Take, for example, walking to your car—from the moment you step out of your home or leave the store to the moment you get into your vehicle, you are exposed.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

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

How did the biggest car-maker in the world morph from the modest, cautious manufacturer of a single model into a corporation which carefully plotted a cynical, large-scale deception of its customers? At least part of the answer must surely reflect the change in corporate culture encouraged by a Chicago economist named Milton Friedman. In 1970 Friedman – who would later advise US President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK – wrote a landmark article in The New York Times entitled ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’. In case of doubt, Friedman explained that profit was the only responsibility of business. The influence of recent economic ideas has not been limited to the corporate and financial worlds.

In 1947, though, the Mont Pèlerin crowd were far outside the political and economic mainstream – not quite seen as cranks, perhaps, but not far off. It would take another three decades for their ideas to break through. With the benefit of hindsight, the turning point is easy to identify. Today no one doubts that the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and Ronald Reagan soon afterwards in the US, marked a fundamental shift in politics and economics. With the arrival of Thatcher and Reagan, the post-war Keynesian consensus was swept away. Thatcher had been elected leader of the British Conservative Party in February 1975. The Conservatives were hungry for power and, at a strategy meeting that summer, it was proposed that future party policy should explicitly follow a ‘middle way’, avoiding extremes of Left and Right.

If voters are consistently fooled by public spending promises, then there would be no point in asking voters to support a government committed to spending cuts and fiscal austerity. But that is what many public choice theorists did: Buchanan was involved directly or indirectly in all the American ‘tax revolt’ campaigns of the 1970s, and the administration of Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, contained many of Buchanan’s students, including one of Reagan’s economic advisers. And again, if electoral competition forces selfish politicians to outbid each other in their public spending commitments, then there is little hope of electing governments committed to breaking the cycle.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

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

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

The Editor of Planetary and Space Science recalled how as a favour Maxwell had once agreed to publish a book by his sister Margaret called Talking About Cakes. Apparently this had done so well that it had spawned a successor, Talking About Puddings. Among the congratulatory telegrams was one from the US President, Ronald Reagan: ‘As the Happy Birthdays ring out, Nancy and I are delighted to join in the chorus of appreciation.’ The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, offered a – somewhat solipsistic – contribution of her own: ‘Robert Maxwell has never made any secret of the fact that officially he is politically opposed to me.

Among the lots at the second Sotheby’s sale was ‘a coloured photograph of President George Bush with Robert Maxwell, inscribed by the President to “Sir Robert Maxwell”’ (£60–£80); a black lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlaid desk sign reading, “Robert Maxwell. Chairman”’ (£40–£60); a collection of commemorative clips, brooches and buttons, including a ‘Ronald Reagan’ tie clip (£60–£80); ‘a collection of hats comprising three baseball caps one inscribed MCC, another GUVNOR together with three Trilby hats, a tweed hat and a small quantity of wooden coathangers’ (£10–£20), and a Panasonic ‘cinemavision’ TV (£500–£800). And there too, jumbled together with various other medals and awards, was Maxwell’s Military Cross (£1500–£2000), along with ‘a framed black and white photograph of Maxwell being decorated with his MC by Field-Marshal Montgomery, signed at the bottom “Montgomery.

‘I was puzzled by Maxwell saying he’d been in hospital with President Reagan, so I went to the library, where I confirmed my belief that Reagan had never left America during his war service. Still thinking about Maxwell’s claim, I walked to my own office. Then I remembered a film I had seen in my childhood. It was called The Hasty Heart, and was set in a military hospital during World War Two. It starred Ronald Reagan and Richard Todd.’ In The Hasty Heart Reagan plays a wounded American soldier recuperating in a Burmese field hospital. One day there is a new arrival: an aloof, bad-tempered Scotsman called Lachie MacLachlan (Todd), who turns out to be dying of kidney failure. At first, MacLachlan alienates all the other patients with his standoffish manner, but towards the end he confesses that he has been so deeply scarred by his childhood that he’s never been able to get close to anyone.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

It was here that US President John F. Kennedy in 1963 said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” signaling his support to all Berliners.1 It was here that West Berlin mayor Richard von Weiszacker in 1985 said that “the German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.” And it was here that US President Ronald Reagan in 1987 asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall2.” But for almost three decades, it was to no avail. Wessies, the inhabitants of West Berlin, could only see the Brandenburg Gate in the distance, and those who had Ossie friends or family in the East-German state of Brandenburg would not see them for decades.

If we want to rebuild that kind of unified society, we'll first have to agree on the causes of our societal and economic ills and then take joint action to address them. It is what we'll do in the next chapters of this book. Notes 1 “Rede von US-Präsident John F. Kennedy vor dem Rathaus Schöneberg am 26. Juni 1963”, City of Berlin, https://www.berlin.de/berlin-im-ueberblick/geschichte/artikel.453085.php. 2 “Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Brandenburg Gate, 1987”, University of Bochum, https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gna/Quellensammlung/11/11_reaganbrandenburggate_1987.htm. 3 “A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years,” The World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 4 “A Partner in Shaping History, German Reunification and the New Europe,” World Economic Forum, p. 108, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Partner_in_Shaping_History.pdf. 5 “Reality Check: Are Migrants Driving Crime in Germany?”

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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

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

It was here that US President John F. Kennedy in 1963 said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” signaling his support to all Berliners.1 It was here that West Berlin mayor Richard von Weiszacker in 1985 said that “the German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.” And it was here that US President Ronald Reagan in 1987 asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall2.” But for almost three decades, it was to no avail. Wessies, the inhabitants of West Berlin, could only see the Brandenburg Gate in the distance, and those who had Ossie friends or family in the East-German state of Brandenburg would not see them for decades.

If we want to rebuild that kind of unified society, we'll first have to agree on the causes of our societal and economic ills and then take joint action to address them. It is what we'll do in the next chapters of this book. Notes 1 “Rede von US-Präsident John F. Kennedy vor dem Rathaus Schöneberg am 26. Juni 1963”, City of Berlin, https://www.berlin.de/berlin-im-ueberblick/geschichte/artikel.453085.php. 2 “Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Brandenburg Gate, 1987”, University of Bochum, https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gna/Quellensammlung/11/11_reaganbrandenburggate_1987.htm. 3 “A Partner in Shaping History, The First 40 Years,” The World Economic Forum, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf. 4 “A Partner in Shaping History, German Reunification and the New Europe,” World Economic Forum, p. 108, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Partner_in_Shaping_History.pdf. 5 “Reality Check: Are Migrants Driving Crime in Germany?”

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

A few months later, Dillon Read found itself defending the petroleum exporter Unocal Corporation in a takeover bid from T. Boone Pickens, the corporate raider. Brady called Powell down to Washington to accompany him on meetings with top officials at the Treasury, White House, and Congress. President Ronald Reagan tapped Brady to chair a task force that reviewed the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, then named him Treasury secretary a few months before Brady’s friend, George H. W. Bush, became president. It seemed like a plum opportunity for Powell, but to his disappointment, Brady had agreed not to bring anyone from his firm down to DC.

Home builders mailed two-by-fours bearing the message LOWER INTEREST RATES, and realtors and car dealers sent in keys to represent unsold homes and autos. After an armed man broke into the Fed’s headquarters in December 1980 and threatened to take hostages, Volcker was forced to accept a personal security detail.70 Economic misery was again poison for the incumbent; Carter lost the 1980 election in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Following Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, someone from the White House asked Volcker if he’d like to host the president at the Fed. Volcker was concerned about the optics. “I’m glad to meet with the president and I’m at his beck and call, but if he comes to the Federal Reserve, a lot of questions will be raised about why the hell you have this new president meeting at the Federal Reserve,” Volcker said.71 Volcker didn’t know what to expect when they agreed to meet for lunch at the Treasury Department on January 23, 1981.

They are instead chosen by the private-sector directors of each bank—a hallmark of the federated system produced by the 1913 compromise that created the Fed. That meant Powell might have another opportunity for John Williams in his inner circle after the White House had passed on him as vice chair. Williams grew up in Sacramento, California, the son of an attorney who worked for four consecutive governors in the state capital, including Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown. Williams was drawn to public policy more than politics, so he studied economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent four years after college as the general manager of Blondie’s, a popular local pizza joint, before getting a PhD at Stanford, where John Taylor was his dissertation adviser.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

It also seems likely that children’s increased immersion in commercialism is a factor in their decreased creativity. The decline began in 1990, ten years after the Federal Trade Commission lost most of its power to regulate marketing to children and six years after the Federal Communications Commission, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, deregulated children’s television,30 legalizing creating programs for the sole purpose of selling toys.* As a result, whether a program could move merchandise became more important to its survival than the program’s content or its messages. By 1985, for the first time, the ten bestselling toys were linked to children’s media.31 Media and toy companies that profit hugely from licensed characters have a vested interest in preventing children’s creative play—and stifling their creativity.

In such a society, even when children are not targeted directly by marketers, they absorb the cynical message that everything is for sale, including government, religion, education—and themselves. I’ve come to think of the phenomenon as “trickle-down branding.” Presidents of the United States, for instance, have been working with marketers and advertising agencies for over fifty years. From Lyndon Johnson through Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and Bill Clinton, presidential candidates upended the tradition of campaign advertising that at least metaphorically addressed issue and policy differences between candidates by focusing instead on evoking emotion.44 It was in 2008, however, that the demarcations between U.S. presidents, brands, and marketers got really blurry.

They wanted to “persuade students to accept advertising and corporate values as part of their educational experience.”11 By tainting consumer activists as anti-American and by co-opting the more moderate consumer groups, business industry groups were able to discourage efforts to keep teaching materials free of commercial interests.12 By the end of that decade, one in five corporations was sponsoring classroom materials.13 In-school advertising began escalating in earnest in the 1990s, but the groundwork for its escalation was laid in the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In 1983, the Reagan administration’s Department of Education issued a report on the state of schools in the United States. Among other suggestions, A Nation at Risk urged corporations to get involved in schools.14 At the same time, the federal government began cutting back on money for state programs and privatizing public services, including schools, was gaining traction.15 In fact, federal funding has never accounted for the bulk of school funding, most of which comes from states and local cities, towns, and counties.16 It’s an inherently unfair system for funding public education, which favors wealthy communities.


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

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

Within natural limitations a community can determine its own death-rate…. No duty of society, acting through its governmental agencies, is paramount to this obligation to attack the removable causes of disease. —Dr. Hermann Biggs, New York State Commissioner of Health, 1913 Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. —Ronald Reagan, presidential inaugural speech, January 20, 1981 As the scientific case for public health becomes stronger, politics and popular support has not kept pace. Public health programs in the United States—and the situation is similar in many other countries—are either not being improved or, in many cases, are being allowed to wither….

Though tobacco use and its public health consequences became increasingly politically partisan issues, there never was a good reason why. Surgeons general ranging from left-liberal to ultraconservative consistently followed Luther Terry’s precedent in striking out against the tobacco industry. Indeed, the loudest voice would prove to be that of Ronald Reagan’s appointee to that post, Dr. C. Everett Koop, a notorious social conservative who was considered the darling of the 1980s American far right. But he had a powerful public health conscience and was the cigarette industry’s arch-nemesis. “How,” he asked, “could the tobacco industry dare to dismiss as unfounded and unproven the absolutely clear connection between smoking … and a dozen or more serious, debilitating, exhausting, expensive, and humiliating diseases?

That was the legacy of an aggressive war on poverty and expansion of health services for the poor. It occurred in a period that was denounced by the AMA and American Hospital Association as “regulated,” a code word meaning “very bad” or even “socialistic” in the New Right circles of rising political superstar California governor Ronald Reagan. The nation’s new mood was characterized by strong regional differences in both the structure and financing of health care. And many parts of the country would see tremendous diminutions in care for the poor, the uninsured, rural residents, and those living in inner-city slums. President Nixon’s general health plans may have gone awry, but he had a striking and lasting impact on one critical area of public health: use of illegal drugs.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

Having held the property vacant for a decade (at an opportunity cost calculated by GSA at $13 million to $19 million, plus the loss of $1.9 million to $2.5 million in property taxes to San Francisco were it privately developed),21 GSA still was unsure what it wanted to do. The new GSA administrator under the Reagan administration, Gerald Carmen, a former tire dealer who directed Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 campaign in the key New Hampshire primary, was committed to privatizing much of the federal government’s unused real estate. He therefore responded favorably to the Marriott request—solicited by Mayor Feinstein when it became obvious the Redevelopment Agency wasn’t moving effectively on the South of Market Conquered / 167 matter—that GSA sell the site to the agency, which in turn would sell or lease it to Marriott.

“For Los Angeles lawyer Manatt, 46, getting the convention for California has been a goal since he became chairman in 1981,” reported the San Jose Mercury News.72 With Los Angeles preparing for the 1984 Olympics, beginning just a week after the July 16–20 convention, San Francisco was the obvious California location. It was also felt that this decision might help the Democrats take California, Ronald Reagan’s home state, which they had not done since 1964. The fact that there were no statewide races in California in 1984 meant the party could put all its energy and resources into the convention and its aftermath. Also, the Democrats had not held a convention in California since 1960 (the Los Angeles convention that nominated John F.

Detroit was attractive largely in symbolic terms—the on-the-ropes Midwest industrial city that had sunk even deeper into despondency during the Republican administration. As one veteran Democrat captured the image: “A growing number of people are wondering whether the party should pass up the chance to stand on the spot where Ronald Reagan was nominated and say to the voters, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ ” (John Fogarty, “S.F. Said to Have the Votes in Race for Demo Convention,” San Francisco Chronicle, 19 April 1983). Detroit tried hard in the final few weeks of the selection process and was mighty annoyed at losing.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

‘Never has so much been read for so long by so few,’ quipped another editor, riffing on Winston Churchill.18 In the second half of the twentieth century, the Economist reached across the Atlantic: the role it once played in the British Empire, it now undertook in the American. A literal bridge between them, star reporters now passed apprenticeships on Wall Street and in Washington, where they enjoyed special access from the start – collared by John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson in the marble corridors of Congress, enjoying personal lines to Ronald Reagan’s White House via George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the foreign-policy establishment. The intimacy of its advocacy of US hegemony, all the more powerful for coming from a global rather than merely national point of view within the US, is one reason why a new history of the Economist is needed, and American readers have cause to be interested in it.

Disputes between interwar editor Walter Layton and John Maynard Keynes over the gold standard and how to respond to the Depression presage Britain’s global decline and the passing of the imperial sceptre to the United States. After the paper’s turn to America during the Second World War came an all-out commitment to Washington as the Cold War escalated, a fealty consummated in the eras of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Moving into the present, the story ends with what is now – rightly or wrongly – widely perceived as the contemporary crisis of liberalism, and looks at the ways the Economist has contributed to and tried to surmount it. In doing so, it pulls back to survey the long history of liberalism according to the Economist, and lays out a counter-narrative to which its actual record points.

‘If Cuban silhouettes do emerge through the murk in Nicaragua, the Americans will have to act.’80 Nor did it apply to the leftwing revolts sparked in neighbouring El Salvador and Guatemala, where ‘American arms will be required to uphold democracy’, as bodies piled up from the rightwing death squads in each.81 Soon it did not apply to Nicaragua either. Ronald Reagan had begun to orchestrate a covert war against the Sandinistas there in 1981, eventually arming more than 15,000 Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica to harry the new regime. Five years later, the Iran-Contra scandal exposed the money-laundering operation, violating American law itself, that was used to finance this – tragic news for the Economist, less because it implicated the president and his advisors in a criminal conspiracy, than for endangering congressional funding for counter-insurgency efforts.82 In the meantime, the Economist had backed an outright invasion of tiny Grenada in 1983, and the toppling of its revolutionary government.


pages: 162 words: 61,105

Eyewitness Top 10 Los Angeles by Catherine Gerber

Berlin Wall, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, East Village, Frank Gehry, haute couture, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, transcontinental railway

Boat excursions to the islands leave from Ventura Harbor yearround. d On Hwy 101, about 65 miles (105 km) north of LA Beach * Laguna The picturesque setting of this friendly seaside resort has captivated artists for over a century. In summer, Laguna hosts three major art festivals, including the Pageant of the Recreated Oval Office, Ronald Reagan Library Masters, which recreates well-known paintings as living tableaux using a cast of costumed locals. The Laguna Art Museum showcases vintage and contemporary California landscapes. d On Hwy 1, about Los Angeles Top 10 This graceful “Mediterranean” town with its Spanish-style architecture and villa-studded hillsides is imbued with an unpretentious charm.

Sophia Cathedral 80, 83 The Standard Downtown 147 The Standard Hollywood 105, 147 Staples Center 46, 65 Starline Tours 138 Sterling, Christine 21 Steve’s Steakhouse 36 Stieglitz, Alfred 17 Stillman carousel 29 Stillwell Hotel 148 Storyopolis 51 Sunset Limited 136 Sunset Marquis Hotel & Villas 147 Sunset Plaza 9 Sunset Ranch Stables 28 Sunset Strip 6, 8–9, 102, 104,105 Sunset Strip Bars & Clubs 106 Sunset Strip Tattoo 8 Sunset Tower 9 Sunset Tower Hotel 9, 146 Super Bowl 46 Superman: The Escape 48 Sur La Table 92 Surfrider Beach 44, 119, 124 Sushi of Naples 131 Sushi Roku 93 Swingers 109, 148 Index R Raffles L’Ermitage 144 Rainbow Bar & Grill 9 Ranchos Los Alamitos 129 The Ranney House 91 Raphael 90 Ray, Man 14 The Raymond 89, 93 Red Line Tours 138 Redondo Beach 119 The Reef 131 Regen Projects 107 Rembrandt 13, 87, 90 Renaissance Hollywood Hotel 150 Rendezvous Court 144 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 13, 87 The Restaurant 12 restaurants 66–7, 79, 85, 93, 101, 109, 115, 125, 131 Restoration Hardware 92 Revenge of The Mummy – The Ride 26 Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace 49 Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey 145 Rivera, Diego 17, 18 Roast-to-Go 73 The Robinson Dining Room 25 Rodeo Drive 52, 111, 114 Rodin, Auguste 43 Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin 31 Ronald Reagan Library 49 Rooftop Bar at The Standard Downtown 61, 147 Rose Bowl 46, 86, 88 Rose Parade 88 Ross, A.W. 19 Rousseau, Henri 90 The Roxy 106 Royce Hall 55, 112 Rubens, Peter Paul The Calydonian Boar Hunt 12 Runyon Canyon Park 43 Santa Monica Bay 43, 116–125 Santa Monica 116, 119 Santa Monica Art Museum 117 Santa Monica Pier Aquarium 117 boutiques 123 map 116 outdoor pursuits 124 restaurants 125 Venice Boardwalk 122 Santa Monica Beach 44 Santa Monica Boulevard 102 Santa Monica Mountains 124 Santa Monica Pier 44, 51, 116, 117, 119 Santa Monica Place 53 Santee Alley 53 Santo Cambianica 83 Sargent, John Singer 18 Schindler House 40 Schwab’s Pharmacy 8 Scorpion 130 Sea Shore Motel 148 Sea Sprite Motel & Apartments 145 Seal Beach 45 The Secret Garden 151 security & health 142 Self-realization Fellowship Lake Shrine 43 Sepulveda, Eloisa 20 Sepulveda House 20 Serra, Junípero 39 Shangri-la Hotel 146 Sheraton Universal Hotel 149 Shoop’s Delicatessen 123 shopping tips 140 Shoreline Village 124 Shrek 4-D 26 Shrine Auditorium 84 Shutters on the Beach 144 shuttles 136 Sidewalk Café 122 Silent Movie Theatre 56 The Simpsons Ride 26 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 20 Sir Winston’s 130, 131 Six Flags Magic Mountain 48 Skeletons in the Closet 62 Skirball Cultural Center 113 Skirball, Jack 113 Sky Bar 104, 106, 147 The Sky Room 131 Sleeping Beauty’s Castle 30 SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills 150 Soarin’ over California 32 Sona Restaurant 101 Sony Pictures Studio Tour 58 Soot Bull Jeep 85 South & Southeast Asian Art (LACMA) 16 South Bay 118 South Coast Botanic Garden 119 T Taix 85 Take My Mother Please 138 Tasende Gallery 107 Taylor’s Steakhouse 85 Tequila Jack’s 131 Terminator 2: 3D 27 Terranea Resort 144 Theatre LA 55, 140 Theater Tickets 140 Theatricum Botanicum 55 Third Street Promenade 52, 117 Throop, Amos G. 88 Tiffany & Co 114 Tom Bradley International Terminal 136 Tomkat Theater 62 Tomorrowland 31, 35 Toontown 31 Topanga Canyon 125 Topanga State Park 124 Torrance Beach 116, 124 tourist offices 135 Tournament of Roses 86, 88 157 Index The Tower Bar at Sunset Hotel 61 Travel Town Museum 29 Trocadero 8 The Tuna Club 36 Turner, J.M.W 24 Turner, Lana 59, 113 Two Harbors 37 Two Rodeo 114 U Uncle Bill’s Pancake House 125 Union Station 71, 73, 136 Universal City Walk 27, 54 Universal Studios Hollywood 7, 26–7, 50, 54 Studio Tour 7, 26 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 43, 55, 110, 112 UCLA Hammer Museum 112 University of Southern California 83, 84 UPN 135 Urban Outfitters 92 Urth Caffè 64 US Bank Tower 77 US State Department 134 USA Hostel 148 USS Los Angeles 127 V Valdés, José Bedia 17 Valentino 67 van Bruggen, Coosje 41 Van Gogh, Vincent 12, 151 The Van Rossem-Neill House 91 Venice Beach 45 Venice Beach House 151 Venice Boardwalk 63, 118, 119, 122, 125 Venice Boulevard 122 Venice canals 118 158 Venice Pier 122 Ventura & Channel Islands National Park 49 Vibrato 61 Viceroy 147 Villa Nova restaurant 9 Viper Room 9, 64, 104, 106 Virgin Megastore 8 Virginia Robinson Gardens 42 visitors centers 135 Vista del Arroyo Hotel 89 W W Bar 61 W Los Angeles 147 Walk of Fame 10, 94, 95 Walt Disney Concert Hall 41, 54, 70, 72 Wanna Buy a Watch?


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

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

The purpose of this monstrosity, constructed with U.S. support and European complicity, is to allow Israel to take over valuable Palestinian land and significant water resources of the region, thus denying any viable national existence for the indigenous population of the former Palestine. Another perspective on 1989 comes from Thomas Carothers, a scholar who served in “democracy enhancement” programs in the administration of former President Ronald Reagan. After reviewing the record, Carothers concludes that all U.S. leaders have been “schizophrenic”—supporting democracy if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic objectives, thus in Soviet satellites but not in U.S. client states. This perspective is dramatically confirmed by the recent commemoration of the events of November 1989.

It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like organizing the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). Now Tea Party sympathizers are hearing that every institution—government, corporations and the professions—is rotten, and that nothing works. Amid the joblessness and foreclosures, the Democrats can’t complain about the policies that led to the disaster. President Ronald Reagan and his Republican successors may have been the worst culprits, but the policies began with President Jimmy Carter and accelerated under President Bill Clinton. During the presidential election [2008], Barack Obama’s primary constituency was financial institutions, which have gained remarkable dominance over the economy in the past generation.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Most analyses point to two major structural developments in the U.S. economy as the main causes of the shifting employment pattern in the late twentieth century: deregulation and deindustrialization. Deregulation of major sectors of the economy and cutbacks in federal social spending under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and his successors went hand in hand with a rise in plant closures and outsourcing. Not only did jobs disappear in this period, but the nature of jobs in this country underwent a shift. High-paying manufacturing and government jobs evaporated, and many of the new jobs that were created were low-paying jobs in the service sector, at places like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart.

In other words, the role of governments in the Third World should be to create optimum conditions for foreign investors, in hopes that investment will bring economic development that will eventually benefit the poor. In the United States these kinds of policies are often called “Reaganomics,” after Ronald Reagan, or “trickle-down economics”: by offering the rich greater ability to increase their wealth, benefits will eventually trickle down to the poor. Prior to the 1970s, most Latin American countries had followed a very different economic path, one that looked a bit more like the New Deal. The mid-century policies were different from the New Deal because Latin American countries in general had a low level of industrialization, and a lot of emphasis was placed on state-sponsored industrialization.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

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

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

In fact, over time, she picked up Callaghan's mantle, pursued a deeper and more ideological vision of Anglo-American alliance, and positioned the UK as guide and supporter for the USA in its role as leader of the Western alliance against the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. This approach took some while to emerge and was aided considerably by the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. When it did become prominent, it created some notable political risks as well as generating various opportunities and advantages for Thatcher's government. It was also widely assumed that her election would result in a closer relationship with the countries of the ‘Old Commonwealth’ with which the Conservative Party had maintained close relations.

Notes 1  David Cannadine, Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2  Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today, January 1979, http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/79_01_hall.pdf. 3  Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (London: Allison & Busby, 1992); and Ian Gilmore, ‘Hauteur: review of Hugo Young's The Blessed Plot’, London Review of Books, 10 December 1998, pp. 8–10. 4  David Sanders, Hugh Ward and David Marsh, ‘Government popularity and the Falklands War: a reassessment’, British Journal of Political Science, 17/3 (1987), pp. 281–313. 5  Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood: Sovereignty, Britishness and Conservative Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999). 6  Margaret Thatcher, ‘Reason and religion: the moral foundations of freedom’, James Bryce Lecture, 24 September 1996, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108364. 7  Nicholas Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (London: Sentinel, 2008). 8  John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). 9  Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 10  John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11  Paul Sharp, Thatcher's Diplomacy: The Revival of British Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 12  Ibid. 13  Cannadine, Margaret Thatcher, p. 34. 14  Young, This Blessed Plot. 15  Ibid. 16  Stephen George, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17  Stephen Wall, A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 18  Ibid. 19  Helen Thompson, The British Conservative Government and the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (London: Pinter, 1996). 20  Peter Katzenstein, ‘United Germany in an integrating Europe’, Current History, 96 (1997), pp. 116–23. 21  Wall, A Stranger in Europe. 22  Thompson, The British Conservative Government and the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. 23  Richard G.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Hayek’s Riposte Such defeatism alarmed another Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek, who, following in the footsteps of Mises, was determined to prove Lange wrong. Hayek is better known today as the godfather of neoliberalism, the pro-market ideology that has come to dominate government policy around much of the world, the first incarnation of which is best exemplified by the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the United States during the 1980s. Hayek was explicit about wanting ideological regime change. The postwar welfare state truce between capital and labor had barely been installed when Hayek joined a small group of right-wing radicals to found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1944—a free market think tank before its time.

By 1975, in addition to murdering, disappearing and torturing thousands, forcing thousands of others to flee as political refugees to places such as Canada, the junta had also implemented the world’s first experiment in what would come to be known as neoliberalism, prescribed by economists, most of whom had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, who would go on to advise Republican US President Ronald Reagan and Conservative UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The junta followed the recommendations of these “Chicago Boys” to the letter: shock privatization of much of the public sector, slashed public spending, mass civil servant layoffs, wage freezes and economy-wide deregulation. Variations on this neoliberal theme have since been adopted, with varying degrees of zeal or reluctance, by almost all governments the world over, producing a yawning inequality across much of the West—admittedly not always accompanied by CIA-trained death squads shoving trade unionists out of helicopters mid-flight or cutting off fingers and tongues of left-wing guitar-playing folk singers.


pages: 219 words: 61,720

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

But the greatest of those is to keep the country together, able to work for mutual prosperity and the public good. Forging a successful public-private partnership requires sound leadership—the type of leadership Eisenhower and Kennedy displayed in the face of Soviet advances, and the type Ronald Reagan would later bring to the negotiating table not only with the Russians, but also the Germans and the Japanese when America’s balance of trade depended on it. We’re missing that kind of leadership right now. We shouldn’t be electing leaders to divide and conquer. That’s the opposite of a good public-private partnership.

U.S. exports fell, hitting manufacturers hard. U.S. companies, including General Electric and Caterpillar, lobbied hard for an agreement that would revalue the U.S. currency against the Japanese yen, German mark, and British pound sterling. The bloodletting went on for 15 years longer than it should have. President Ronald Reagan finally stopped it, at least for a little while, and he did so in a truly bipartisan way. In 1985, he persuaded Congress to pass legislation outlawing foreign currency manipulation. Reagan worked with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, and the CEOs of Caterpillar and General Electric to get it done.


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

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

Recognizing that he had been shunted aside, Mayo resigned in July to become the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Selected as OMB deputy director with primary responsibility for budget issues was Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, who was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, a regulatory agency. Weinberger had served as California governor Ronald Reagan’s budget director before coming to Washington, and his budget-cutting fervor there had earned him the sobriquet “Cap the Knife.” The OMB assistant director for energy, natural resources, and science, one of the new political appointees, was Donald Rice. He came to OMB from the Department of Defense, where he had been responsible for cost analysis, manpower and logistics requirements, and budget planning.

There is no evidence that this shuttle-station link was considered by the president and his senior advisers as the final shuttle decision was made, but the choice of the NASA shuttle design carried with it the virtual certainty that a future president would be asked to approve a shuttle-launched station. That is precisely what happened. The shuttle’s first flight was in April 1981; soon after that flight, President Ronald Reagan’s nominees for NASA administrator and deputy administrator, James Beggs and Hans Mark, agreed that they “would try to persuade the new administration to adopt the construction of a permanently manned space station as the next major goal in space.” The two announced their intent at their Congressional confirmation hearing in June 1981, in essence repeating Tom Paine’s 1969 argument that the space station was “the next major evolutionary step in man’s experimentation, conquest, and use of space.”

The two announced their intent at their Congressional confirmation hearing in June 1981, in essence repeating Tom Paine’s 1969 argument that the space station was “the next major evolutionary step in man’s experimentation, conquest, and use of space.” Beggs and Mark characterized the station as “the next logical step.” It took almost three years for NASA to gain presidential approval; during his State of the Union address on January N i xo n an d t h e A m e r i c an S pa c e P r o g r a m 295 25, 1984, Ronald Reagan announced that “I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.”27 Discussing the long and troubled history of the space station project is beyond the scope of this study; the point here is that from its 1968 origin as the logistics vehicle for a Saturn V-launched space station, through the 1970 decision to switch to a shuttle-launched station and then to defer station development until the shuttle was flying, to the final July 2011 outfitting mission to what had become the International Space Station, there was an unbreakable link between the shuttle and the station.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

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.

Although the memorandum was not discovered until a year after Powell’s confirmation, once revealed it became a rallying cry for business leaders across the country. Indeed, the Powell Memorandum became an influential strategic planning document of the emerging New Right—a coalition of free market advocates and religious conservatives that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980, pushed for deregulation of industry, and reasserted the influence of business in American politics.4 At the luncheon, Joe Cullman teased Lewis F. Powell for his strong ties to one corporation in particular. An early skit featured Powell’s elementary school teacher asking him, “What does the ‘F’ stand for in your name?”

A divided Supreme Court upheld most of the law, including the restrictions on corporate financing of electioneering communications. The court’s opinion was jointly authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, a Gerald Ford appointee who had voted with Powell in Bellotti but had become steadily more liberal over his tenure, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was chosen by Ronald Reagan to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Stevens and O’Connor pointed to the long history of special restrictions on corporations in campaign finance, dating back to the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905 and “President Theodore Roosevelt’s call for legislation forbidding all contributions by corporations.”


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

The board issued its decision on October 1, 1980, stating: “The evidence suggested aspartame ‘should not be approved for marketing until further animal testing is conducted to resolve the brain tumor issue.’” Rumsfeld, undaunted by this setback, stood up at a national sales meeting in 1981 and told the Searle representatives that he would “call in his markers” to get aspartame approved. Twenty days later, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. Rumsfeld immediately sought payment for the markers he believed Reagan owed him for reneging on his promise to nominate him for vice president, nominating George H.W. Bush instead. Reagan named Rumsfeld to his transition team that nominated Hayes to the position of FDA Commissioner.

The FDA and the FBI were firmly aligned with Johnson & Johnson. Even the president of the United States was in Johnson & Johnson’s corner. On February 20, 1986, ten days after the nation learned about the Tylenol poisoning in New York, Burke attended an economic affairs meeting of business leaders at the White House. President Ronald Reagan stopped by to give his support to Burke and Johnson & Johnson. President Reagan stood before the group of corporate leaders and praised Burke for his handling of the Tylenol incidents. Mr. Burke “has lived up to the highest ideals of corporate responsibility and grace under pressure,” said President Reagan, adding: “Jim Burke of Johnson & Johnson, you have our deepest appreciation.”

Davis called Reagan’s Deputy Chief, Michael Deaver, to find out if maybe someone could check the status of that application. A White House official promptly made two phone calls to the FDA - one on May 5th, and a second on May 7th - about the Ethicon suture under review. Arthur Hayes, the recently appointed FDA commissioner, was inclined to give James Burke and Ronald Reagan whatever they wanted. Ethicon’s new PDS (polydioxanone) suture was approved on November 13, 1981. Shortly after the FDA approved Ethicon’s application to market its new suture, someone from inside the White House told a reporter about the White House calls that had been made to the FDA on behalf of Ethicon.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

During her first prime ministerial campaign, she was known to cite the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Scandinavians who had already started comparable reforms in their own countries. And Ronald Reagan, of course, later lent the considerable authority of his office to similar arguments about the moral and practical superiority of free markets. Nonetheless, it is hard to overplay the significance of her achievements. Thatcher was certainly not an intellectual in the conventional sense of the word, but she was an extremely intelligent woman with an intense appreciation of the power of ideas. The comparison with Ronald Reagan is illuminating. Reagan was not a man who participated in think-tank discussions or engaged in polemics about texts.

For most Americans, the sorry tale of helicopters humiliated by a swirl of desert sand served merely to heighten the worst foreign-policy humiliation since the defeat in Vietnam. For Iranians, the whole story offered yet more proof of America’s perfidy and conspiratorial intentions. (The hostages were finally released, after long and arduous negotiations between the Carter Administration and the government in Tehran, on January 20, 1981, as newly elected President Ronald Reagan was giving his inauguration speech.) 1979 was, overall, a low point in the history of US diplomacy. It was also the year in which, in February, the US ambassador of Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by leftist militants. He was killed when Afghan government forces tried to free him—the last US ambassador to die on the job until the killing of J.

Yet the simple fact that it was able to make that promise to begin with has been remarkably influential. On October 23, 1983, a man drove a truck packed with explosives into a military barracks in Beirut and blew himself up. The explosion killed 241 members of the United States Marine Corps who had been dispatched to the Middle East by US president Ronald Reagan as part of an international intervention in the Lebanese Civil War. It was the greatest loss of life suffered by the Marine Corps in a single day since the Battle of Iwo Jima in the spring of 1945. Another near-simultaneous attack took the lives of 58 French paratroopers—the biggest single-day loss for a French force since the 1950s war in Algeria.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

Moving in such privileged circles, playing on the Yale golf team, and touring Asia as a twenty-one-year-old at the outset of World War II, Verity developed a folksy worldliness that later would win him acceptance in drawing rooms and boardrooms alike. In 1940, Verity returned to Middletown to work his way up from Armco’s factory floor and eventually run the company; years later, he would become Ronald Reagan’s secretary of commerce. In June 1973, Richard Nixon put the much-traveled Armco chairman on a list of three dozen American businessmen invited by the president to breakfast with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. It was a heady privilege in détente’s giddy years, for Verity would be shoulder to shoulder not only with Brezhnev but also with the cream of Soviet trade, including Ara Oztemel, Armand Hammer, and Pepsi chairman Don Kendall.

He even turned over Armco’s New York office and furnishings to Mercator. Verity described it as bestowing “our blessing” on the new venture. “It was odd,” Sekus recalled, everyone sitting at the same desks but suddenly working for a new company. Trade with the Soviet Union had become difficult, a victim of the invasion of Afghanistan and the Ronald Reagan–inspired chill in superpower relations. But Giffen stayed afloat. Even as he was launching Mercator, he ascended the ranks in USTEC. The council’s new chairman, Dwayne Andreas, head of agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland and a supremely influential figure in Washington, installed Giffen as president of USTEC, second in power only to the soybean king himself.

Keller was the undisputed boss at Chevron, but that did not mean that everyone “gripped this opportunity with enthusiasm,” as a dubious executive put it. Indeed, his subordinates were worried about the chairman’s speedy decision; one or two members of his board of directors were outright antagonistic to the idea. What if Gorbachev’s embrace of free enterprise was some kind of ploy? Years of superpower distrust—and Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviets as “the evil empire”—had made many American companies extra cautious. What if there was a repetition of the Soviets’ Afghanistan adventurism: If they “started throwing bombs around, it wouldn’t be good for the Chevron brand,” the same skeptical executive said. The concern about Chevron’s image was somewhat assuaged when members of a focus group said that they wouldn’t be bothered if Chevron oil came from the Soviet Union.


pages: 423 words: 118,002

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Mary Nichols, John’s wife and Larry’s mother, summed up the longtime working relationship that emerged between the two men. “John was always the dreamer. He could figure out new deals, and Larry, often taking a devil’s advocate position, could tell him if they would work. John was the accelerator. Larry was the brake,” she said. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed into law a simplified federal income tax. One change ended the investor-backed drilling funds that John Nichols had pioneered. Shutting this loophole could have been catastrophic for Devon, but Larry Nichols believed that it created a new opportunity. The end of the tax-advantaged drilling funds dried up a large source of funding for many of the four hundred publicly traded oil and gas companies in the United States, many of them small.

Worried about declining supplies of domestic natural gas, Congress outlawed all new gas-fired power plants. In the nine years that the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978 was law, the coal industry went on a building spree. One of every five coal power plants in the country was built during this window of time. Signing its repeal in 1987, President Ronald Reagan pointed out that burning gas emits fewer pollutants than burning coal. “As natural gas is a clean-burning fuel, restrictions inhibiting its use have not been in the best interests of the environment,” he said. As Marcellus gas flows east to the coastal cities, forecasters expect it to keep power prices from rising too quickly.

Especially helpful was the Environmental Assessment, filed in May 2011, and a PowerPoint presentation by Inergy, the company that built the pipeline, on June 28, 2010, and is titled “Project Introduction Meeting with FERC Staff on CNYOG’s MARC 1 Hub Line.” Information about coal plant retirements is from the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2012. MIT’s The Future of Natural Gas report presents a concise overview of the impact of the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978. Ronald Reagan’s quote can be found here: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=34320#axzz1W3ISgYEl. (Last accessed August 2013.) There have been numerous reports on the wealth generated by shale exploration. I recommend “Oil Boom in Eagle Ford Shale Brings New Wealth to South Texas” by Robert W. Gilmer, Raúl Hernandez, and Keith R.


Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall

active measures, air freight, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, union organizing

(Helms was an outspoken supporter o f both the Argentine and Bolivian military governments.)157 As early as July 1980, Hamrick was paving the wfay for a U.S.Argentine alliance behind the Nicaraguan counterrevolution by escorting an Argentine diplomat, who had served in both Guatemala and Bolivia, around the Republican convention that nominated Ronald Reagan. On the other end o f the continent, he was urging Argentina’s President Roberto Viola to step up his country’s support for a movement against the Sandinistas. And he took former Somoza National Guard Col. Enrique Bermiidez to Argentina in April 1981 to line up the military’s support for his cause.158 Bermudez brought back at least $50,000 in seed money, with promises o f more to come if he followed Argentina’s direction.

The Silencing of the Kerry Subcommittee’s Witnesses On April 17, 1986, Senator Kerry transmitted one memo summarizing the allegations to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Lugar, a Republican, requesting a formal investigation.21 On April 18, North’s personal diary revealed that he was being kept abreast, however inaccurately, o f developments both at the Christie Institute (which had not yet filed its suit) and the Foreign Relations Committee: “Sheehan [the Christie Institute Attorney] investigating La Penca in consort with Sen. Kerry trying to get evidence linking RR [Ronald Reagan] to La Penca.”22 In the next seven months North’s notebooks contain no less than seven separate references to the secret Kerry investigation, and one o f these makes it clear that material was being leaked to him, and to the State Department, the Justice Department, and the CIA, by Lugar’s aide Richard Messick: “ 13 May [1986] 19:30—Call from Rick Messick—Terrell told not to talk to FBI, Jonathan Winer [a Kerry staff aide].”23 Telling Terrell not to talk to Winer is understandable politics.

As ABC’s Sam Donaldson acknowledged in his autobiography: “The press, myself included, traditionally sides with authority and the establishment.” It is hard to see how it could do otherwise; the press was itself a central part o f the American establishment. According to Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, a mere fifty large corporations owned or controlled the majority o f media outlets in the United States . . . when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981. By the time Bagdikian published a new edition o f his book in 1987, mergers and acquisitions had shrunk the previous fifty down to twenty-nine. H alf o f these media moguls ranked among the Fortune 500—itself an elite club whose members, while numbering less than 1 percent o f all industrial corporations in the United States, nevertheless accounted for 87 percent o f total sales.45 Herman and Chomsky also focus on the wealth o f the mass media, and the ways in which they “are closely interlocked, and have important common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government.”46 This corporate analysis o f media oligopoly can easily be oversimplified.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

But by the summer of 1969 they had issued more than twenty-five thousand personalized and numbered First Moon Flights Club cards to interested customers. Pictured on the back of the card was the space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in the film displayed a prominent Pan Am logo on the outside of the passenger compartment. California governor Ronald Reagan, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Walter Cronkite were all reported to be among the card-carrying members of the First Moon Flights Club. For many Americans, there remained little doubt that the future depicted in Kubrick’s film would happen in their lifetime. Humanity had just put its foot on another world.

Air Force, Coast Guard, Military, and Naval academies. At the book’s conclusion, Wolfe specifically signifies the twilight of the age of right stuff with Ed Dwight’s experience at Edwards, presenting his story as a misguided early attempt at government-enforced affirmative action. Released a year before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, The Right Stuff appealed to readers eager to remember an America when a president could inspire the nation to take on daunting challenges—even beating the Soviet Union in a race to the Moon. It called to mind a time before the political assassinations of the sixties, urban riots, wars in Southeast Asia, and the erosion of confidence in national institutions, yet it viewed the past through a skeptical lens informed by the culture of the seventies.

He lived to be ninety-five. Following his departure from NASA in 1970, THOMAS PAINE returned to General Electric as a vice president and group manager and subsequently served as president and chief operating officer of the Northrop Corporation. In the 1980s he chaired the National Commission on Space for President Ronald Reagan, with an assignment to look ahead fifty years in order to establish space-program goals for the coming two decades. Paine had never been an enthusiast for the chosen design of America’s space shuttle, which he likened to a “space truck with a mission no more glamorous than carting a load of toothpicks to Topeka.”


pages: 523 words: 111,615

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

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

THE MERITS OF MARKETS The economic and financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 prompted in its turn a wider questioning of the role of markets in the organization of the economy and society. In fact, the questioning of the priority given to markets by the dominant policies in most countries had been under way for some time. The high tide of what some would see as the fetishizing of markets came in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the United States and Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the United Kingdom. The collapse of communism in 1989 cemented their ideological triumph. But successive governments in both countries (as well as international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank) continued to emphasize throughout the 1990s not just the practical merits of markets but their preeminence in society.

For all the nostalgia now in the Eastern bloc countries for aspects of communism, including the social solidarity of those times, it was proved to be an overwhelming failure. There is no doubt that the failure of communism and central planning gave enormous impetus to the West’s decisive move toward a dogmatic free market version of capitalism, spearheaded by the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. The political dynamics and intellectual trends in the economics profession at the time were mutually reinforcing. This was the heyday of “new classical economics,” which made much of the merits of markets and the failures of government intervention.

As the size of government relative to the economy grew in the West during the postwar years, so did dissatisfaction with how well the public sector served citizens. This was voiced in different ways across the political spectrum. John Kenneth Galbraith struck a chord with his liberal political constituency when he wrote of “private affluence and public squalor,” which was a call for better as well as more government services. By the time Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” his audiences were receptive.5 Why had government come to seem so ineffective by the 1980s? After all, the share of the economy accounted for by government had climbed from 24 percent in 1950 to 34 percent by 1980 in the United States, and to 43 percent on average in the OECD, so on the face of it, government should have been achieving more.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

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

Boone Pickens and Irwin Jacobs—Jensen was the provider of the accompanying public philosophy, the scholar who could explain why their techniques were good for America. Between 1981 and 1983 alone, there were more than two thousand corporate takeovers a year valued at more than $1 million, far more than the country had ever seen, enabled in part by Ronald Reagan’s new administration in Washington signaling that it was going to interpret the antitrust laws more loosely. The market for corporate control had come roaring to life. During the 1980s as a whole, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list of the country’s largest corporations were subject to takeover attempts.

The torrent rolled onward. In 1979 Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and Volcker took severe action to reduce inflation. 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.

During the same period, more than a thousand savings and loans—a third of the total number in the country—failed, substantially because the deregulation of a few years earlier had permitted them to make highly risky investments that had gone sour. Because the savings and loans had managed to keep their federal deposit insurance through deregulation, their failure became the government’s problem, and it wound up costing taxpayers well over $100 billion. Back in 1984, a former aide to Ronald Reagan named Edwin Gray, who was the head of the federal agency that regulated savings and loans, had begun warning publicly that deregulation had gone too far and was introducing too much risk into the system. This got him treated as an unreliable, misguided, disloyal eccentric, especially by members of his own party.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

And long before we rid America of racism, we can make American elections equally free. No doubt, not every American believes that all citizens should have an equal right to vote. The first director of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, told a gathering of evangelical Christians supporting Ronald Reagan: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”40 That same view was apparently behind Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s vitriolic attack on Democratic reforms proposed in 2019 that would enable more people to vote more easily.41 It was, he said, a “power grab”—a charge that only makes sense if you don’t believe that everyone should have an equal freedom to vote.

That shove then pushed both parties down an ideological sorting mountain, as the Democrats became more consistently committed to equal rights and the Republicans became more adept at appealing to the hidden racism of American whites. Race of course was not the only—and certainly not the edifying—dimension along which the parties sorted themselves. Inspired by Barry Goldwater, and realized by Ronald Reagan, the parties also developed clearly different positions on the role of government, and the inherent virtues of the market. Those differences crystallized when Reagan was elected president. And in response, not only were Republicans becoming more consistently ideological, but so too were Democrats.

But we should neither exaggerate the insignificance of losing presidential public funding nor, and more important for our purposes here, imagine that the economy of influence for funding presidential campaigns is anything like the economy of influence for funding campaigns for Congress. First, presidents may well be able to fund their own campaigns privately—but only by turning the office into a permanent fundraising operation. When Ronald Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, he attended eight fundraisers. When Barack Obama ran for reelection twenty-eight years later, he attended 228 fundraisers!108 How does the leader of the free world do his job while attending 228 fundraisers? But, second, and more important, we cannot confuse the business model of fundraising for (at least populist) presidential candidates with the business model of fundraising for the vast majority of members of Congress.


pages: 426 words: 117,722

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, MITM: man-in-the-middle, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, éminence grise

Nixon often turned mean when he had been drinking, but on this occasion he was a happy drunk, addressing White House staff and cabinet secretaries alike as “boy” and complimenting them on their choice of wives. “How did you ever get to marry such a pretty girl?” he asked the governor of California. “My God!” “Well, I’m lucky,” drawled Ronald Reagan. “Damned nice of you to call,” said Nixon, emulating the Gipper himself, with his folksy, aw-shucks courtesy. “This, too, shall pass,” said Reagan. At 10:34, Elliot Richardson called to congratulate Nixon on his “finest hour.” The attorney general designate had been attending a dinner party and sounded fairly well lubricated himself, or perhaps it was just his upper-class Brahmin manner.

Everything he gained, and subsequently lost, was the result of his own actions. Together with Harry Truman, he was one of the most ordinary of American presidents, a common man distinguished mainly by his restlessness and awkwardness. He lacked the pedigree of the Roosevelts, the glamour of the Kennedys, the privilege of the Bushes, the star power of Ronald Reagan, the eloquence of Barack Obama, the showmanship of Donald Trump. What he possessed instead were the virtues and defects of regular Americans, the difference being that he displayed these qualities in outsize quantities. He worked harder than anyone else, hated his enemies more intently, took bigger risks, and dreamed bigger dreams.

Among the joys of writing non-fiction books is the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of your subjects. As a longtime resident of Washington and reporter for The Washington Post, I was already familiar with many of the places featured in King Richard, including the Watergate complex itself. I visited the West Wing of the White House on numerous occasions from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan onward, as well as the hulking Executive Office Building next door. I would like to thank Lea Berman, White House social secretary under George W. Bush, for sharing historical details about the private residence. I am grateful to Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for arranging a memorable visit to the chambers and courtroom of Judge John Sirica, courtesy of the present occupant, Trevor N.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

“Oh, oh, I got a pen mark,” the president’s distinctive voice was saying. “Anybody got any white stuff?” he asked, presumably meaning correction fluid. When the camera finally rolled, it found the president at the Resolute Desk, which had been used in the Oval Office by John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. On the credenza behind him were the flags of the United States and the Presidency, along with photos of his parents and a display of tokens, called “challenge coins,” from the many federal agencies under his command, as well as commemorative coins that Trump had printed for his club, Mar-a-Lago, and his visit with the pope.

Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had been the bible of conservative economists since its publication in 1944, in the midst of the civilizational struggle between democracy and fascism. His thesis is that government control of the economy inevitably crushes individual freedom and leads to tyranny. Hayek’s political influence reached its peak with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberals. When Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he carved on the hearts of generations of conservative lawmakers a maxim that is the basis of Hayek’s economics. In Hubbard’s class at Columbia, the students discussed Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that central planning can never replace market forces, which reflect the sum total of the “decentralized knowledge” available to a society.

Cain had preached the virtue of social distancing and hand-washing on The Herman Cain Show, a web series that he hosted, and he regularly wore a mask in public. Gallo worked with her dad all week on his show. By Friday, they were both feeling ill, but Cain filmed another episode. Flanked by the American flag and a painting of Ronald Reagan, he looked wan, his eyes rheumy. He quoted a newspaper headline: “U.S. DEATH RATE FALLS FOR THIRD DAY IN A ROW.” Other newscasts had hyped rising case counts, he complained, adding, “They never get to the death rate is falling.” On Monday, both were sick enough to go to a clinic for a test.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

(By the way, Nancy Reagan habitually used prescribed sedatives, and Nixon reportedly did the same.) As an added bonus, “Just Say No” became the nail in the coffin of Lyndon Johnson’s and John F. Kennedy’s therapeutic approaches, which viewed addiction as a symptom of society’s failures—racism, alienation, inequality, and lack of opportunity. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who in 1961 tried to block the precursor to Medicare for elderly Americans, decrying it as socialism. He framed his outrage as an attack on doctors’ freedoms—while working as a spokesman for the American Medical Association, then run by Nancy Reagan’s dad. The AMA remains an opponent of single-payer health care, or Medicare for All, even as it enjoys widespread public support today.

The crisis was also presaged by Reagan-era changes to the Community and Mental Health Act, which had decommissioned most of the nation’s mental health hospitals, and aided by liberals’ over-reacting to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As Nikki put it memorably, “Drugs didn’t come outta nowhere. Drugs came outta Ronald Reagan’s ass!” Raised mostly by her grandparents, Nikki was schooled by her grandmother Sue King to believe that her safety and economic fortunes lay far away from Letcher County. She remembers the moment when people in her hometown went from sleeping with the screen door unlocked to buying new doors without glass panes that could be knocked out by burglars.

decommissioned most of: Michelle R. Smith, “50 years later, Kennedy’s vision for mental health not realized,” Associated Press, October 21, 2013. Ninety percent of state-hospital beds were cut during this time, leaving nowhere for the sickest people to turn, so they ended up homeless, abusing substances, or in jail. “Ronald Reagan’s ass”: Nikki King, author interview, May 24, 2021. 44 percent: US Census data, QuickFacts, July 1, 2019, estimate for 2015–2019 period: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/letchercountykentucky. one in four: Clary Estes, “One in 4 Rural Hospitals Are at Risk of Closures and the Problem Is Getting Worse,” Forbes, February 24, 2020.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The proponents of consumption taxation form an impressive list: David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Pigou, and Alfred Marshall were among the early luminaries who extolled the virtues of progressive consumption taxation.7 Contemporary economists of every political stripe have also voiced similar views. Thus conservatives like Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Ronald Reagan, are vocal advocates of consumption taxation;8 so are liberals Kenneth Arrow, also a Nobel laureate; Laurence Summers, a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration and winner of the economics profession’s prestigious Clark Medal; and Lester Thurow, the best-selling author and former dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Yet, for the most part, mainstream political discourse in the United States has taken the need for widespread budget slashing to be self-evident. Indeed, not even the most committed liberals disputed the fact that something had to be done to curb the recent explosive growth in our national debt. Whereas the total U.S. federal government debt stood at roughly $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, in the ensuing years annual deficits averaging more than $200 billion have increased that total to more than $5 trillion. The interest on this debt now comes to more than $300 billion each year, much of it paid out to the citizens of other nations. As commentators from both sides of the political aisle have rightly emphasized, this burden threatens to make our children the first generation in American history with a lower standard of living than their parents.

“The EITC is one of the most important tools we have to help parents build a better life for their children and prevent working families from slipping into poverty,” said former Senator Bill Bradley, a strong supporter of the program. “This money is not used for fancy dinners or limo rides. It’s rent money. It pays the electricity bills, or it buys clothing for the kids.”7 Even Ronald Reagan, no advocate of wasteful government spending, was a vocal proponent of the EITC. Yet budget proposals submitted in both the House and Senate in 1995 called for sharp reductions in EITC spending—$43 billion over seven years in the Senate version and $23 billion in the House version. Only the budget impasses of the ensuing years kept these large cuts from being implemented.


pages: 259 words: 67,261

Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad---And Surprising Good---About Feeling Special by Dr. Craig Malkin

Bernie Madoff, dark triade / dark tetrad, greed is good, helicopter parent, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, work culture

People on the high end of the spectrum tend to gravitate toward careers where there’s an opportunity for power, praise, and fame. US presidents are more narcissistic, on average, than most ordinary citizens, according to psychologist Ronald J. Deluga, of Bryant College, who used biographical information on every commander in chief from George Washington through Ronald Reagan to score them on the NPI. Predictably, high-ego presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ranked higher than more soft-spoken leaders like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, but almost all presidents scored high enough to be considered “narcissists.” Psychologists Robert Hill and Gregory Yousey, of Appalachian State University, also studied the narcissistic tendencies of politicians (excluding presidents), comparing them with librarians, university professors, and clergy.


pages: 218 words: 67,330

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Clarence L. Johnson

Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

When the Russians in 1960 exhibited to the public in Red Square the wreckage of the aircraft they billed as the U-2 in which they had downed Francis Gary Powers, Kelly’s response to press query when shown the photo was typically direct and dramatic: “Hell, no,” the aircraft designer barked. “That’s no U-2.” With wife Nancy Johnson, during 1983’s presentation by President Ronald Reagan of the National Security Medal. The Russians had downed the U-2, untouchable for years at its high altitude on reconnaissance flights over Russian territory; but Kelly blew their act. A designer who went into the factory and participated in every phase of design and development as well as production, he recognized immediately that the mangled parts the Russians had displayed were not from any U-2.

“Kelly” Johnson as a leader in aviation. The recipient must have devoted a major portion of his life to the pursuit of aviation as a science and as an art. Engraved on the medal, “His vision formed the concept, his courage forged the reality.” 1983 The National Security Medal was presented by President Ronald Reagan to Clarence L. Johnson for “outstanding contribution to the national intelligence effort.” 1984 Honorary Royal Designer for Industry (HonRDI), in recognition of achievements in aircraft design, conferred by The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures (sic) and Commerce, London.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.46 Futile, Dangerous, and Perverse “It Can Be Done! Conquering Poverty in America by 1976,” Nobel Prize winner James Tobin confidently wrote in 1967. At that time, almost 80% of Americans supported a guaranteed basic income.47 Years later, Ronald Reagan would famously sneer, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia).

For the rest of his life, Friedman never stopped emphasizing that his success would have been inconceivable without the groundwork laid since 1947. The rise of neoliberalism played out like a relay race, with think tanks passing the baton to journalists, who handed it off to politicians. Running the anchor leg were two of the most powerful leaders in the Western world, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. When asked what she considered to be her greatest victory, Thatcher’s reply was “New Labour”: Under the leadership of neoliberal Tony Blair, even her social democratic rivals in the Labour Party had come around to her worldview. In less than 50 years, an idea once dismissed as radical and marginal had come to rule the world.


pages: 196 words: 65,045

Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality by Lee Gutkind, Purba

Apollo 13, Columbine, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, friendly fire, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

Previously, most of the funds for experimental transplantation were generated from private foundations and government grants. But who will pay the price now that transplantation is beginning to receive wide acceptance? As the controversial Governor Lamm of Colorado recently asked: How much is too much to save a life? Over the past few years, Nancy and Ronald Reagan have made a number of radio and television appeals for donors to aid people, mostly children, in their quest for complicated transplant operations. President Reagan has also appointed a White House staff assistant, Michael E. Page 146 Appendix 1 Batten, as his personal liaison between hospitals and state and private insurance agencies battling over the issue of transplantation and coverage .

But many Democrats consider Reagan's interest in transplantation a "media scam" designed to stimulate a steady stream of heartrending publicity events for a president running for re-election. If Reagan were sincerely concerned, they say, he would sponsor legislation to help all the sick and the poor-not just the people requiring organ transplantation. Upon returning home from Presby, after Kimberly's evaluation, Sandy Fuller wrote Ronald Reagan and Michael Batten long letters, asking for help. "It isn't the ultimate solution to our problem," said Reverend Reimer, "but right now it's the only solution we've got." VI. Discharge Is Life After Transplantation Worth Living? As I follow a transplant patient through the stages of evaluation, surgery, and recovery, I will also be following discharged transplant recipients as they attempt to rebuild their lives.


pages: 208 words: 69,863

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

— might have died with him but for the impressive tenacity of his grandson Richard Mudd. Richard Mudd, who died in 2002 at the age of 101, was one of the greatest PR men of the twentieth century, doggedly lobbying to clear his grandfather’s name. Two presidents who didn’t agree on much concurred on Mudd. Though Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan concluded that the full presidential pardon Mudd received from Andrew Johnson in 1869 (for his heroic doctoring during a yellow fever outbreak at the prison) trumped all further presidential action, both Carter and Reagan wrote open letters to Richard Mudd expressing their faith in Dr. Mudd’s innocence in the conspiracy.

On the corner of Fifteenth and F, there are two plaques — one enumerating the many historical events that occurred on the site, and another one picturing the street as it looked in the early nineteenth century, with women in bonnets milling about next to a horse-drawn carriage in front of the Rhodes Tavern, a building erected here in 1799 that was torn down in 1984. According to the plaque’s long list, the tavern, among other things, hosted the first city election in 1802 and witnessed “every inaugural parade from Thomas Jefferson’s in 1805 until Ronald Reagan’s in 1981.” Then, in its wonderfully, obviously spiteful closer, the plaque’s list ends, “Ballot initiative to preserve the building approved by Washington citizens, 1983. Razed, 1984.” What’s not to admire about that kind of civic grudge? There is no mention of Guiteau and his gun, not that there should be.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

If we wish for our civilization to survive, however, we must be willing to teach our children. The only way to protect their children is to make warriors of our own children. We must make of our children messengers for the truths that matter. That comes with risk. And that is a risk we must be willing to take. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”2 My father is fond of saying that in life, there aren’t six directions (east, west, north, south, up, and down).

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 45. Yuval Noah Harari, “The Meaning of Life in a World without Work,” Guardian, May 8, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book. CONCLUSION: HOW TO BUILD 1.Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 275. 2.Ronald Reagan, Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, March 30, 1961, https://archive.org/details/RonaldReagan-EncroachingControl. 3.Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. 4.G. K. Chesterton, The Thing (London, 1929; Martin Ward’s Home Page, 2010), http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/The_Thing.txt.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

Kasarda’s thesis was instrumental to much of the thinking behind the city plans developed for King Abdullah Economic City, Knowledge City, Dholera, and other cities attempting to leap directly to the forefront of the twenty-first century urban experience. He recognizes that the aerotropolis itself has some curious antecedents, which may have settled too deeply into daily experience to be noticed, such as Dulles Airport and Northern Virginia. Ronald Reagan (formerly National) Airport, much closer to the center of Washington D.C., has never been able to land large, transcontinental aircraft, which hamstrung business leaders, military contractors, and others who made regular visits, often with cargo. By strict definition, Washington D.C. is not an aerotropolis; rather, the communities that surround Dulles Airport comprise an “invisible city” that is wealthy, expanding, and intricately tied to the freight and passengers traveling through its gates.

See also Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor N Nair, Chandran, 172–75, 186, 188 Nebot, Jaime, 157 New Cairo, Egypt, 45, 165, 166 New Songdo International City Development (NSIC), 75, 77 New York, 34, 110, 177, 179 Nicklaus, Jack, 84 Northeast Asia Trade Tower (NEATT), 83, 187 Nusajaya, Malaysia, 148–50 O Orwell, George, 205 P Palermo, Italy, 179 Pan Yunhe, 114 Peking University, 93 Population growth, 15–16, 20–21, 22, 33, 39, 175 POSCO E&C, 67, 71, 72, 73, 75, 82 Prince Abdulaziz bin Mousaed Economic City, Saudi Arabia, 46 Privacy, 205–6 Prodam, 156 R Resource scarcity, 20–21, 28 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 28, 45 Robots, 207–8 Ronald Reagan Airport, 184 S Salvador, Xavier, 156 San Francisco, 34, 177, 178 San Jose, California, 125, 128 Sao Paolo, Brazil, 23, 45, 156–57 Saudi Arabia. See also individual cities demographics of, 19, 41, 42–43 employment in, 43 multinational interest in, 41, 51–52 new cities in, 19, 23, 33, 44–47, 50, 57 oil and, 42 reform in, 43–44, 46 Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority (SAGIA), 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55–56, 57 Schneider Electric, 153 Security and Facilities Operating Center (SFOC), 129 Sentilo, 152, 153 Seshadri, Roger, 99, 100 Shanghai, China, 92–93 Singapore, 148, 149, 150, 178, 179, 184, 185 6th of October City, Egypt, 45, 165, 166 SK Telecom, 61–62 Slingshot, 197 Smart cities benefits of, 26–28, 37–39, 85, 160, 189 brownfields as, 34–35, 164 challenges of, 17, 25 criticism of, 176–82 data and, 32 fluid definition of, 17, 23, 31–39 future of, 27–28, 196–211, 213 Internet of Everything and, 32–35 map of key projects, 12–13 necessity of, 20, 188 planning and, 176–82 resource scarcity and, 20–21, 28 sustainability and, 174–75, 185, 199–200 Snowden, Edward, 116 Songdo, South Korea Cisco and, 67–87, 193–94 criticism of, 176 as early test bed, 17, 70, 87, 214 economics of, 79–81, 83 entrepreneurship in, 168 features of, 81–84, 193–96 as greenfield development, 33 LEED certification and, 78 lessons learned from, 85–88 Microsoft and, 66–67 success of, 25, 84–85, 91 vision for, 65–66, 76–78 South East Queensland, Australia, 153–55 South Korea.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The National Defense Education Act, passed on the heels of Russia’s launch of Sputnik, funded scientific research. The ACT test was created. The Elementary and Secondary School Act and Higher Education Act were passed in 1965. And then the ideas and programs implemented from the federal level began to slow. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan threatened to eliminate the Department of Education, which President Jimmy Carter had created. Though Reagan didn’t succeed, the message was out there: The federal government should have no role in education. Excessive partisanship eventually made Reagan’s dream a reality. And once again ideas and innovations in education have been left to our mayors and local governments

But a compromise was achieved, and subsequent Republican presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—ended up expanding the programs during their terms. (This prompted Nixon’s famous “I am now a Keynesian in economics” line.) There was the formation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the War on Poverty. All of them were worked on as compromises. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act was sponsored by Dan Rostenkowski, who was a Democratic representative. The art of compromise—really, the art of the executive branch of government working with the legislative one to conquer evil, fix problems, and respond to constituents—continued all the way into Bill Clinton’s second term.


pages: 252 words: 71,176

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris

affirmative action, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, data science, Donald Trump, Francisco Pizarro, green new deal, lockdown, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, random walk, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, statistical model, Works Progress Administration

Teeter also developed a system so CREEP could analyze voting data all the way to the precinct level, allowing campaign operatives to direct hyper-localized resources to boost Nixon’s chances. Teeter fully modernized the methods of polling analysis available to CREEP. He would go on to use the same tools for Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s campaigns for president.42 Nixon was reelected in 1972 with 61% of the popular vote, versus 38% for his opponent, George McGovern. The White House had seen the victory coming months back. So too did the public pollsters; George Gallup and Louis Harris (who had now suspended his private practice to focus on public polling) pegged the contest at 62–38 and 61–39 for Nixon and McGovern, respectively.43 The last decade of methodological improvements helped pollsters put errors on the scale of the 1948 misfire behind them.

The president’s decision to campaign for China’s admission to the United Nations was made in a similar fashion.44 Accordingly, the 1970s and 1980s saw the partial realization of George Gallup’s vision for a government that maintained a closer relationship with the people through the continuous monitoring of their collective will. For the first time, polls were officially institutionalized in the offices of the White House. Various case studies suggest that polls constrained the actions of Richard Nixon—and, to a lesser extent, presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan after him—when his image sank, and emboldened him when the public issued directions both on which issues to focus on and how to address them. To be sure, the example from Nixon’s White House—and the four elected twentieth-century presidents who followed him—also showed that politicians can use polls to manipulate the public.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

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

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

This would pose a fundamental challenge to the entire precepts that had underpinned the post-war consensus on the welfare state, which had presumed high levels of taxation and centralized government control of an economy resting on partly nationalized industry and a large public sector. In reality, governments would continue to mix parts of Keynesianism with monetarism. But the breakthrough of monetarism to official recognition as the new orthodoxy in two countries, Britain and the United States, was close. In January 1980 Ronald Reagan took up office as President of the United States, and his economic policy – what was soon dubbed ‘Reaganomics’ – incorporated an adaptation of monetarism (though neo-liberal dogma was ignored when it came to the stratospheric increase in military spending and a tripling of the national debt). Only Britain, among Western European leading economies, was an early and avid convert to neo-liberalism.

France and West Germany did not impose their own sanctions and indeed benefited from the trade gap left by the Americans. It was nonetheless plain: there was nothing left of détente. The ‘Second Cold War’ had begun. For the next five years superpower relations worsened. The new American President, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor whose folksy manner combined with firm conservative principles proved a winning formula in the election of 1980 after the widely viewed failure of the Carter presidency, set the tone. He was avidly backed by his most assertive ally, Margaret Thatcher. Part of restoring prestige after the Vietnam debacle was to demonstrate American strength through a readiness to confront the Soviet Union, which by 1983 Reagan was describing as ‘an evil empire’.

But overwhelmingly Gorbachev was popular because of the promise he held out for an end to the Cold War – for an end to the threat of nuclear annihilation that had hung like a sword of Damocles over the entire world for four decades. Gorbachev’s meetings with Western leaders – European leaders as well as Ronald Reagan – during his first years in power laid the ground for his growing popularity. His rapport with Margaret Thatcher, though they were ideologically polar opposites, continued to develop along the positive lines that had started when they had first met. The initial scepticism among Western European leaders about the genuine intentions of the new Kremlin chief was gradually assuaged.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

., the defeat of Bill Clinton’s health care reforms in the early 1990s). Nor have American executives undertaken major initiatives through grants of special emergency powers by Congress.35 Some of the most impressive legislative accomplishments by American presidents, like Harry Truman’s passage of the Marshall Plan, or Ronald Reagan’s passage of tax cuts during his first term, occurred when the other branch of government was under the control of the opposition political party. Successful American presidents have achieved their goals not by exploiting the formal powers accorded to them, but by using their office as a “bully pulpit” to rally broad public support across party lines.36 Indeed, some of the most effective American presidents—such as Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Reagan—have understood that their chief function was to communicate broad messages and build coalitions across party lines.

The decade that propelled the United States into its status as a world power was the starting point of a trend without major fiscal fluctuations for more than 50 years: tax revenues ranged from 17.1 to 19.9 percent of GDP with total spending ranging from 16.4 to 23.3 percent. It is true that during these times the federal government had to finance deficits of varying magnitudes (the highest was more than 4.2 percent, corresponding to the 1981–1985 period in which the policy of slashing taxes and the resulting fiscal deficit was pursued under President Ronald Reagan). It is no less true, however, that those levels of deficit, which, with a slight decline, were then drawn out over two five-year periods, are more the exception than the rule. In the seven decades covered in table 9.8, the United States has seen three five-year periods with fiscal surpluses and six five-year periods in which the deficit ranged from 0.4 to 2.2 percent.

It does not matter that these ideas are wrong if the reasons that they are wrong cannot be communicated clearly and effectively to the public. The days are long gone when small elites could make significant policy decisions out of public sight and scrutiny. Some of the most successful U.S. presidents of the twentieth century, like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, were shapers of ideas and great communicators rather than masters of technical details. Ideas do not emerge out of a vacuum. They need to be developed through public policy research, which in turn requires investments in human capital, institutions, and research. The United States is richly endowed with universities, think tanks, research organizations, and an infrastructure that generously supports the creation of new ideas on public policy issues.


pages: 454 words: 122,612

In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, British Empire, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Golden arches theory, Haight Ashbury, Maui Hawaii, McJob, McMansion, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

.” * Eaton commissioned hundreds of statues and artwork including reproductions of some of the world’s most famous works of religious art, such as thirteen mosaic scenes of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (as well as kitschy original renditions: a 172-by-35-foot mosaic depicting twenty-six famous scenes from the earthly life of Jesus) to decorate the Forest Lawn chain. Eaton introduced a “pre-need” program that allowed people to see to their own funeral arrangements before they died. Soon, Eaton lured couples to marry in the chapels on the cemetery grounds. It was at Forest Lawn’s Wee Kirk O’ the Heather Church that Ronald Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, on January 26, 1940. On a warm winter morning, Harry’s funeral mourners filed into the 120-seat church, a replica of St. George’s Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The chapel was too small to accommodate the hundreds of mourners who had come to pay their last respects to Harry Snyder, and many stood outside.

Construction crews broke ground in Baldwin Park in 1979, and by the time In-N-Out Burger’s sprawling nine-acre complex was finished almost two years later, the chain had expanded to twenty-four shops. On December 1, 1981, In-N-Out’s corporate office personnel moved in, signaling a new era for the small burger chain. It was a time of dynamic changes. Just eleven months earlier, former movie star and governor of California Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the fortieth president of the United States. The Republican administration marked a new era of conservative politics and economics. The national news was focused on the new president’s supply-side economic policy (called “Reaganomics”); the end of détente with the Soviet Union; and the start of a massive military buildup.

Wreaths of flowers filled the church’s lobby. One was fashioned out of red and yellow carnations forming the In-N-Out logo; another was in the shape of a cheeseburger. Enlarged photographs of the three men graced the pulpit on each side of the speaker’s podium. Numerous condolences were sent, including those from former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and California governor Pete Wilson. An In-N-Out cookout trailer was there to serve burgers to the guests following the service. Gracing the cover of the memorial service’s program was a photograph taken of the three men only eighteen months earlier at Rich’s wedding. Several years earlier, Rich was so upset after attending the funeral of a dear friend that he felt did not represent her in the least that he immediately outlined exactly the kind of memorial he wanted, down to the music to be played and Bible passages to be read; his memorial followed his instructions exactly.


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Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Academics will continue to dominate the scene, but now a few practitioners also begin to influence developments, and some of the characters move back and forth between both worlds. The path to joining gown and town is beginning to appear. aThe dean of the business school at the time was George Shultz. a member of Samuelson’s first doctoral group at MIT in 1941 and a future holder of three cabinet posts, including Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan. bSmith’s article won a favorable review from John Maynard Keynes in the Nation and Athenaeum of May 2, 1925. cMathematics was first introduced into economics in the nineteenth century, although it really took hold only after World War 11. The earliest mathematical economists were physicists who applied the terminology of that field to economic analysis.

35 But the ADL job was about to come to an end. After a six-month courtship, he went to work at Merrill Lynch as assistant to Donald Regan. Regan, who was then the strong-willed chief executive of Merrill Lynch, subsequently served as an equally strong-willed Secretary of the Treasury and then as chief of the White House staff under Ronald Reagan. History produces coincidences: the strongly conservative Regan was Jack Kennedy’s classmate at Harvard, and mine, too! Treynor refers to his time at Merrill Lynch as a “peculiar experience,” a case of Catch-22.36 Regan kept him out of the top-level meetings until he knew more about what was going on, but the only way he could find out what was going on was to attend the meetings.

But Leland was more concerned at the moment with personal finance than with market crashes. He and his French-born wife had recently returned from France to Berkeley, where he was teaching finance. Leland was in a less than happy mood. The rapidly weakening dollar had spoiled their trip to Europe, and Governor Ronald Reagan’s persistent attack on the purchasing power of academics in California posed a more serious threat. As he considered the situation, Leland concluded, “Lifestyles were in danger, and it was time for invention.”1 The idea that occurred to him that night brought him into theoretical territory that was largely foreign to him.


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The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

I didn’t exactly transform into Tiger Mom, but I did caution Alison that while helping other kids was nice, looking out for her own interests was smart. And she needed to be smart. I know I was wrong to let fear trump my daughter’s inclinations and my own values. But it’s easy to forget that back then, in the mid-1990s, the nation itself was afraid. A decade earlier President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education had sounded the alarm: “Our nation is at risk because our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” Pretty frightening. The perceived threat came mostly from Japan, then an economic and technological juggernaut.

Drug testing of employees has its roots in the experience of the world’s largest employer, the US Department of Defense. In 1980, 27 percent of surveyed military personnel admitted to illicit drug use in the previous month. This alarming finding prompted the military to start testing, and five years later illicit drug use by DOD employees dropped to 9 percent. This success moved President Ronald Reagan to sign the 1986 Drug-Free Workplace Act, requiring that all federal employees refrain from illicit drug use both on and off the job, and mandating testing to make sure they did. By the mid-1990s tests were routine at more than 80 percent of all US companies. When illicit drug use started to decline through the early 2000s, workplace testing declined with it—only to rise again in the early 2010s.

In the twentieth century, public support for worker cooperatives rose with the Great Depression, when hundreds of worker cooperatives were revived or created with the explicit purpose of job creation. The post–World War II boom years and the rise of unions contributed to a decline of enthusiasm for the form until the 1960s and ’70s, when worker cooperatives resurfaced as part of the larger social justice movement, only to get buried in the neoliberal policies of the Ronald Reagan administration. Throughout this checkered history, the appeal of worker ownership remained undeniable, even to its detractors. In a 1987 speech Reagan shared his thoughts: “I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership.


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Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

It was also imperative that the weekly report be something that intelligence managers wanted to read, something that helped senior people focus, not a scolding that they had missed something important. In theory, the Weekly Warning Report was distributed to the President and all senior intelligence managers, but no one actually deluded himself into thinking that President Ronald Reagan was an avid reader of the committee’s work. Charlie Allen did, however, have a way of getting directly to the President. As the NIO for warning, he had a special authority, one that he had never before used. If, in his assessment, major hostilities of importance to the United States were about to break out somewhere in the world, Charlie could unilaterally issue a formal “Warning of War.”

Sagan and Turco could well have written the book that you are now reading, for their observations still hold true for a wide range of possible Cassandras, like Alan Robock. ROBOCK’S WARNING It is hard to know precisely what the political effects of the nuclear-winter theory were, but those who were the leaders of the U.S. and USSR at the time later admitted that it had helped prompt them to act. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. President at the time and was widely thought to be eager for a fight with the Soviet Union. Yet after reading about the nuclear-winter theory, Reagan met with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Iceland and proposed the abolition of nuclear weapons. The Russian leader, who also had a growing concern about a nuclear winter, agreed in principle, but suggested that the two countries start by limiting the deployment of new weapons and then later reducing their stockpiles.

He is not a political scientist, foreign-policy expert, arms-control analyst, or national-security consultant. When it comes to figuring out how to reduce the danger of the risk he has reaffirmed, he thinks in terms of the bigger picture. “We should eliminate all nuclear weapons, all of them. They all have to go,” he said. It’s the same conclusion that Ronald Reagan came to decades ago. Robock doesn’t try to come up with some localized solution to minimize the risk of war in India and Pakistan. “All of them, all nuclear weapons. They all have to go.” Some national-security, foreign-policy, and arms-control experts agree. None other than former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger have also called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.


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

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

That is not what I mean when I talk about liberal democracy or use the word liberal. In this book, a liberal is somebody who is committed to basic values like freedom of speech, the separation of powers, or the protection of individual rights. In the sense in which I use the word, George W. Bush is as much of a liberal as Barack Obama, and Ronald Reagan was as much of a liberal as Bill Clinton. Second, because democracy has such prestige, we have fallen into the bad habit of expanding its definition to all kinds of things we like. As a result, virtually all existing definitions of democracy don’t bother to distinguish between three very different beasts: liberalism, democracy, and the historically contingent set of institutions to which we have become accustomed in North America and Western Europe.

Between 1986 and 2012, the average cost of a Senate race increased 62 percent; the average cost of a congressional seat increased a whopping 344 percent. So it makes sense that, according to anecdotal evidence, members of Congress now spend up to half of their working time on fundraising activities.113 The transformation is equally stark at the highest levels. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan went to a fundraiser about once every twenty days during their first terms in office. Unlike Reagan, Barack Obama reportedly hated fundraisers. Even so, he remained captive to the exigencies of his political age—and organized a presidential fundraiser about once every five days.114 The imperative to raise money is one reason why politicians spend much of their time in a peer group that is very unlike the people they are supposed to represent.

Only 1 percent of total wealth growth from 1986 to 2012 went to the bottom 90 percent of households. By contrast, 42 percent went to the top 0.1 percent.5 The most striking thing about this economic story is the degree to which American politicians conspired to accelerate, rather than to slow, the divide between the fates of the super-rich and those of ordinary citizens. Ronald Reagan slashed the top tax rate for high-income earners from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1981, and then again to 38.5 percent in 1986. George W. Bush cut the top income rate to 35 percent and the capital gains rate—which is almost exclusively paid by the wealthy—from 20 percent to 15 percent in 2003.6 Even as politicians changed the rules to allow the rich to keep a far greater share of their income, they hollowed out many of the provisions on which the most vulnerable members of society had long relied to stay afloat.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The consumption of some goods and services, for example, energy, water, and transportation, continued to receive explicit or implicit subsidies, and there were also implicit subsidies for the production of goods that created environmental costs but did not pay for those costs. In the 1980s and the 1990s, under the political influence of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and under the ideological influence of supply-side economics – an influence that, to some extent, could be interpreted as a return to the laissez-faire thinking of the past (but wearing new clothes) – several European governments and some governments from Latin America and other regions privatized their public enterprises, many of which had been nationalized during the Great Depression or during and after World War II.

In the 1950s and 1960s even a newly elected Republican president in the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, in his first State of the Union address, had thought desirable to mention the word “government” almost forty times, while the heads of big corporations would show interest in collaborating with the government to solve particular problems. These attitudes were different from those that would develop and prevail in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and the prime minister of the United Kingdom would refer to the government as the problem (see Hacker and Pierson, 2015). The increases in tax rates and tax revenue that had been necessary to finance the large military expenditures of fighting World War II, after the war ended, had given the governments that had fought the war large public resources and new tools learned by tax administrations and budget offices.

The increases in fiscal deficits had come in spite of the positive contributions to tax revenues that the so-called fiscal drag – the positive impact that a moderate rate of inflation has on tax revenue, in tax systems with progressive tax rates applied to unchanged nominal incomes – was having (see Tanzi, 1980b). What Ronald Reagan called the “misery index,” the summation of the unemployment and the inflation rates, became high, creating political difficulties for some governments and for the prevailing Keynesian ideology. These developments were seen as direct challenges to the original optimism and to a key postulate of the Keynesian framework, the Phillips curve.


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Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

The net result is an interlocking directorate of the self-defined “orthodoxy,” which has been able to recruit, sustain, and promote its members almost on a par with the neoliberal Russian doll itself. Indeed, the Fed and the doll have grown increasingly fond of each other. Since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was able to appoint all the Fed governors, the Fed has become an unapologetic openly neoliberal institution; and this has constituted one of the major channels through which the economics profession was shepherded in a more neoliberal direction. One Russian doll mated with another. The slavish genuflection to the financial sector within modern economics is therefore quite easily understood once a little effort has been devoted to exploring the sociology of the profession.

Feldstein has been a staunch neoliberal his whole life, starting out with a critique of the British National Health Service, and has been credited with transforming the Harvard undergraduate economics curriculum from its prior breadth to a narrow orthodox boot camp with strong neoliberal inclinations. Feldstein served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Ronald Reagan, and took with him as staffers Larry Summers, Gregory Mankiw, and Paul Krugman. His protégés are salted throughout the East Coast economic establishment. He is a master of navigating the interlocking directorates of finance and academia, arranging, for instance, to have the Starr Foundation (controlled by the former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg) to make numerous grants to Harvard and the NBER when he was head of that latter institution.102 None of this is mentioned at Feldstein’s official Harvard website.

It ignores the breakdown of Depression-era walls between depository and investment institutions, and neglects the spread of baroque securitization at the behest of finance economists. But more to the point, their supposedly left-liberal approach ends up backhandedly reproducing the conventional neoliberal story, as was pointed out by Gregory Mankiw in his published commentary: Although the two authors from Berkeley did not intend this paper to be a defense of Ronald Reagan and his view of government, one can easily interpret it in this way. The paper shows that the savings and loan crisis was not the result of unregulated markets, but of overregulated ones . . . The policy that led to the savings and loan crisis is, according to these authors, deposit insurance.46 Paul Romer, the other author of this paper, revealed his own neoliberal leanings when questioned concerning the crisis in 2011.


pages: 661 words: 187,613

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Keeping a forty-year-old in prison for a theft he committed as a teenager assumes that the forty-year-old John and the eighteen-year-old John are “the same person,” a cruel logical error that would be avoided if we referred to them not as John but as John1972 and John1994, respectively. The verb to be is a particular source of illogic, because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as in Mary is a woman, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like Ronald Reagan’s famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether. And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.

It dictates that if a phrase contains both a role-player and a modifier, the role-player has to be closer to the head than the modifier is—there’s no way the modifier could get between the head noun and the role-player without crossing branches in the tree (that is, sticking extraneous words in among the bits of the N-bar), which is illegal. Consider Ronald Reagan. He used to be the governor of California, but he was born in Tampico, Illinois. When he was in office, he could have been referred to as the governor of California from Illinois (role-player, then modifier). It would have sounded odd to refer to him as the governor from Illinois of California (modifier, then role-player).

But if it was Wayne Gretzky the announcer had been describing, he would say Gretzky is speared by Markwart!!!! Moreover, because a passive participle has the option of leaving the doer role, ordinarily the subject, unfilled in deep structure, it is useful when one wants to avoid mentioning that role altogether, as in Ronald Reagan’s evasive concession Mistakes were made. Hooking up players with different roles in different scenarios is something that grammar excels at. In a wh-question like What did he put [trace] in the garage? the noun phrase what gets to live a double life. Down in the who-did-what-to-whom realm of the verb phrase, the position of the trace indicates that the entity has the role of the thing being put; up in the what-is-being-asserted-of-what realm of the sentence, the word what indicates that the point of the sentence is to ask the listener to provide the identity of something.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

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

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

They first had to wait for him to defect. Finally, on 22 November 1985, Larry was arrested. This operation was far from straightforward for the CIA, which was understandably embarrassed by the public disclosure of this obvious failure by its own counterintelligence service. This was during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the CIA had an agreement with Deng Xiaoping’s intelligence services to jointly intercept Soviet communications, and both countries were involved in joint operations supporting the Mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviet military. Bill Casey, head of the CIA, nonetheless finally gave the green light for the arrest of the mole in his ranks.

These began with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in March 1985, leading a reform team focused on glasnost (political transparency), and perestroika (economic restructuring). Gorbachev became president in 1990, and soon talks between him and US President Ronald Reagan were cleansed of the bitter taste of discord, evolving into cordial agreement. Was the anti-Soviet alliance between China and the US about to fade, or even collapse? Every day senior Chinese leaders were given a bound file of materials assembled from special service reports, including: “reference materials” (cankao ziliao) from the Xinhua News Agency and its “confidential newsletters from abroad” (guoji necan); reports from the international section of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; dispatches from military attachés that were scrutinized by the 2nd Department (PLA2); analyzes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and “investigation documents” (Diaocha ziliao) from the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR).31 The political-legal commission that coordinated all of the Chinese secret services—led by two survivors of the Cultural Revolution, Peng Zhen and Chen Xidian—was unable to centralize and analyse all these sources.

In The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire, Louis predicted the implosion of the People’s Republic of China following uprisings by minorities like the Tajiks and the Uyghurs. Mao’s grandson, secret agent In October 1983, General Eugene F. Tighe of the US Defense Intelligence Agency was sent to Beijing by President Ronald Reagan for talks with General Huang Zhengji, then deputy director of the PLA2. On the agenda were the practical aspects of operations to supply weapons to Afghan partisans. Until 1984, the Chinese had been the Mujahedin’s main suppliers; after that, it was the CIA and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).


pages: 619 words: 177,548

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

Organizational changes or laws that are good for business must also be good for society at large because, with a similar reasoning, they will increase demand for workers and translate into shared prosperity. Take it one step further, and you get “trickle-down economics,” a term identified today with President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies in the 1980s, including the idea of cutting taxes on the very rich: when the rich face lower taxes, they will invest more, increasing productivity and benefiting everybody in society. Applying this perspective to regulation leads to conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the ideas that energized Ralph Nader and other consumer activists.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1964 election, failed to get the support of the broader business community in part because his antiregulation ideas appeared extreme at that time. By 1979, Goldwater was boasting, “Now that almost every one of the principles I advocated in nineteen sixty-four have become the gospel of the whole spread of the spectrum of politics, there really isn’t a heck of a lot left.” Ronald Reagan reaffirmed this conclusion shortly after his election, when he told a crowd of conservative activists, “Had there not been a Barry Goldwater willing to make that lonely walk, we would not be talking of a celebration tonight.” Big Is Beautiful Even if one bought into the view that the market mechanism works seamlessly, regulations are mostly unnecessary, and the business of business should be maximizing shareholder value, there was still a tricky issue from the viewpoint of large corporations.

This arrangement breeds more conflictual relations between business and labor. When managers think that a hard line against unions can reduce wages and create a cost advantage relative to competitors, they are less likely to accept union demands. Starting around 1980, the balance of power shifted further away from the labor movement. Particularly important was Ronald Reagan’s tough stance against the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. When the organization’s negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration stalled, it called a strike, even though industrial action by government employees was illegal. President Reagan was swift in firing striking workers, calling them a “peril to national safety.”


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

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

The administration was then rocked by scandal as first Agnew was forced to resign because of corruption and then Nixon because he was being impeached for dirty tricks during the 1972 campaign and an attempted cover-up. The accidental president Gerald Ford and his vice president Nelson Rockefeller, neither of whom had been on the ticket in 1972, lost in 1976. The conservative theme was then picked up with a vengeance by Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan After his Hollywood career came to an end, Ronald Reagan had made his political name as a right-wing speaker. In 1954, he was hired as official public spokesman for General Electric Corporation—which meant he spoke at GE plants around the country, lauding the virtues of free enterprise and warning of the dangers of big government and communism.

Nothing more came of this, but Atwater’s team took note, researched the issue, and saw how badly it could damage Dukakis. “Willie Horton has star quality,” exclaimed Atwater, “Willie’s going to be politically furloughed to terrorize again. It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”38 Ronald Reagan had established a similar plan in California, and the one in Massachusetts was set up by Dukakis’s Republican predecessor. Although Dukakis did not want to abandon the policy, he had agreed to tighten it when it involved first-degree murderers. Yet this was turned into a story about Dukakis as a weak liberal making a habit of releasing rapists and murders to commit crimes.

Aware that he needed to avoid the impression of political censorship, Breen accepted it as a “grand yarn” so long as most Senators were shown to be “fine, upstanding, citizens who labor long and tirelessly for the best interests of the nation.”32 Nonetheless, when first screened, senators (including Wheeler) and journalists were outraged. State Department officials feared that U.S. institutions were made to look ridiculous. The public—abroad as well as in the United States—was caught up in the brilliance of Capra’s storytelling and accepted his claim that the movie idealized American democracy.33 Ronald Reagan almost modeled himself on Jefferson Smith, even as president quoting the line about fighting for lost causes.34 For Capra’s purposes, Smith appeared as idealistic and a-strategic. His strategic advice came from Saunders, first mischievously and then lovingly. In a key scene, she finds Smith alone at the Lincoln Memorial, bemoaning the discrepancy between the “fancy words … carved in stone” and the lies he faced.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

I had thought, when I left Scotland, in the unconscious way certainties are stowed in one’s mind, that I knew Britain; that some essential way of being would be resilient to Margaret Thatcher’s rearrangements, which must, as transient policies, be superficial. I had to go home by way of Kiev and Moscow to see that I was wrong, to begin to see how, and how deeply, she and her followers altered Britain. With hindsight, 1991 was a pivotal year. When it began, the free market economic belief system, with its lead proselytisers Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had been pushing back for more than a decade against various attempts to impose levelling communitarianism around the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, as had communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The market belief system, which holds that government is incompetent by default, that state taxation is oppressive, that the desire for wealth is the right and principal motivator of achievement and that virtually all human wants can best be met by competing private firms, was becoming entrenched in the non-communist world, from Chile to New Zealand.

As the great shift from public to private ownership of Britain’s technological veins and sinews gathered pace through the 1980s – telephones in 1984, gas in 1986, airports in 1987, water in 1989, leading up to electricity and the railways in the 1990s – the public perception was that Britain was becoming more like the United States, where, it was popularly believed, everything, including electricity, was provided by competing private companies. No autobiography of a British free-market thinker was complete without an American epiphany, a journey across the Atlantic to where Ronald Reagan’s United States seemed to hum and sparkle in a virtuous free market circle of efficiency and prosperity. Apart from the reality that, for most Americans, it didn’t, the problem was that extreme pro-privatisation Brits like Littlechild thought the US hadn’t gone far enough. So radical were the Thatcherite free market evangelicals that they thought America’s electricity system all too similar to the neo-Soviet horrors, as they saw them, of the CEGB.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Certainly the economic expansion of the past several decades has been fueled in part by employment growth and technological innovation driven largely by entrepreneurial companies. Somewhere between these two scenarios is the trickle-down effect, a mildly derisive phrase used to describe the supply-side economic theories generally associated with Ronald Reagan. These theories postulate that the financial gains of the wealthy get spent largely on investments and services that, in turn, create jobs and support small businesses. In New York City, for example, it has been estimated that $200,000 spent on services—everything from drivers and decorators to personal trainers and psychologists—creates roughly five jobs, and that the top 1 percent of earners create over 150,000 service jobs by virtue of their spending.2 Assessing which of these scenarios best characterizes the current U.S. plutonomy is a complex economic task.

But even then, it was more of a tactical, self-focused concern about one’s own job security and mortgage rather than a broader, societal-level concern that ‘‘something must be done’’ to preserve fairness or democracy. For the most part, financial inequality has barely registered as an issue at the voting booth. The tax reforms of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which among other effects greatly reduced tax rates among the very wealthy, were called by some ‘‘class warfare from above,’’ but they were done largely with the blessing of the social classes with which they were supposedly at war. Similarly, George W. Bush’s two presidential victories occurred in part because so many people voted against their personal economic interests.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

The more energy supplied directly by the Sun, the less energy that had to be drawn from the local electric power grid, and so the less coal and oil that needed to be spent to generate elec- tricky for the electric power grid around the Potomac River. It didn't provide most of the energy needed, it didn't work much on cloudy days, but it was a hopeful sign of what was (and is) needed. One of the first acts of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan was to rip the solar-thermal converter off the White House roof. It was somehow ideologically offensive. Of course it costs something to renovate the White House roof, and it costs something to buy the additional electricity needed every day. But those 154 • Billions and Billions responsible evidently concluded that the cost was worth the benefit.

I was invited to write an article on the relationship between the United States and the then Soviet Union that would be published, more or less simultaneously, in the most widely circu- 180 • Billions and Billions lated publications of both countries. This was at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev was feeling his way on giving Soviet citizens the right to express their opinions freely. Some recall it as a time when the administration of Ronald Reagan was slowly modifying its pointed Cold War posture. I thought such an article might be able to do a little good. What's more, at a recent "summit" meeting, Mr. Reagan had commented that if only there were a peril of alien invasion of the Earth, it would be much easier for the United States and the Soviet Union to work together.


pages: 279 words: 76,796

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Cosell never said those words, but the phrase became a lasting descriptor of the borough during that era. President Carter’s 1977 appearance on a burned-out tract on Charlotte Street to “demonstrate a commitment to cities” was met with shouts of “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” During his presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan returned to the same site to make the point that Carter had not made good on his promise. President Clinton visited twice, in 1995 and again in 2007. By then, Charlotte Street had been transformed into a well-maintained strip of single-family homes. Politicians pointed to Charlotte Street as an urban-policy success even though the statistics for the South Bronx hadn’t changed all that much.

Thinking about her future while coping with a very large student debt load, one woman summed it up this way: “You either get to have a retirement account, or you can have a house. Or you can have kids. I feel like you have to pick one. There’s no ‘you can have all three.’” Making up more than a quarter of the total US population, the millennial generation, beginning with those born in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan began to strip away the public safety net, totals eighty-three million people and represents the largest generation ever. Coming of age in an era defined by economic uncertainty and financial insecurity has deeply affected how this generation thinks about money. When asked to describe what money means to them, 42 percent of millennials chose the word “security” and 22 percent chose “stress.”


pages: 246 words: 74,341

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

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

For this reason, ever since the United States introduced an income tax its government has been helping out its citizens by allowing them to deduct mortgageinterest payments from that tax-similarly to some other countries, including Sweden. This support for homeownership was reinforced by President Ronald Reagan and Congress in 1986, when the tax deduction for home mortgage interest was retained, while tax incentives favoring rental development and ownership were removed. In addition, the deduction for other consumer loans, such as car and credit card loans, was abolished, which had the effect of steering more and more lending toward the housing market.

Half the members did not show up for his presentation, and the other half obviously did not want to listen. On September 30, 2002, the Budget Enforcement Act was put to sleep by a large majority. Members of Congress were again free to promise voters anything. At that point, the country would have needed a president who could face down demands and veto irresponsible spending. Ronald Reagan used his veto 78 times during his presidency, often against spending bills. George H. W. Bush vetoed 44 bills during four years in the White House.35 His son, however, became the first president in 176 years to go a whole term without using his veto. After five years in power, George W. Bush still had not vetoed anything.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

Yet virtually all pop historiographers elevate the importance of the Sex Pistols above that of the Bee Gees. The same year the Sex Pistols finally sold the one millionth copy of their debut, SPIN placed them on a list of the seven greatest bands of all time. Never Mind the Bollocks is part of the White House record library, inserted by Amy Carter just before her dad lost to Ronald Reagan. The album’s reputation improves by simply existing: In 1985, the British publication NME classified it as the thirteenth-greatest album of all time; in 1993, NME made a new list and decided it now deserved to be ranked sixth. This has as much to do with its transgressive identity as its musical integrity.

Barring an unforeseeable academic reversal, one can infer that this fact-oriented slant will only gain momentum. It will eventually be the only way future historians consider the present era of America. And that will paint a much different portrait from the interpretive America we’re actually experiencing. Near the end of our phone conversation, Carlin and I start talking about Ronald Reagan. “I don’t know what your views are, Chuck, but I lived through that period,” says the fifty-year-old Carlin. “I don’t understand the hero worship at all. I can’t get my mind around it.” We then run through the various problems with Reagan’s presidential tenure, namely the lowering of the top marginal income tax on the super-rich from 70 percent to 28 percent and (what Carlin considers) the myth of Reagan’s destruction of the Soviet Union.


pages: 275 words: 77,955

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Corn Laws, Deng Xiaoping, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, liquidity trap, market friction, minimum wage unemployment, price discrimination, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing

Twenty-five years later, when the 1982 edition of this book was published, total spending had risen to 39 percent of national income and non-defense spending had more than doubled, amounting to 31 percent of national income. That change in the climate of opinion had its effect. It paved the way for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. They were able to curb Leviathan, though not to cut it down. Total government spending in the United States did decline slightly, from 39 percent of national income in 1982 to 36 percent in 2000, but that was almost all due to a reduction in spending for defense. Non-defense spending fluctuated around a roughly constant level: 31 percent in 1982, 30 percent in 2000.

As with the rest of the population, their pocketbooks were being hit with inflation and high taxes. These phenomena, not the persuasiveness of the ideas expressed in books dealing with principles, explain the transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980—two men with essentially the same program and the same message. What then is the role of books such as this? Twofold, in my opinion. First, to provide subject matter for bull sessions. As we wrote in the Preface to Free to Choose: “The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself.


pages: 280 words: 73,420

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino by Jim McTague

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, computerized trading, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, housing crisis, index arbitrage, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market bubble, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, naked short selling, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, technology bubble, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K

The association’s long-time president, John Damgard, had strong GOP connections. He had been an advance man in Richard Nixon’s successful presidential campaign in 1968 and later became an assistant to Vice President Spiro Agnew. In 1988, Damgard used his connections to get Schapiro, a registered independent and 33 years old at the time, appointed by President Ronald Reagan to one of two Democratic seats on the SEC. She was reappointed to the seat in 1989 by Reagan’s successor, President George Herbert Walker Bush. Schapiro served credibly. She wasn’t a visionary or an innovator, but she knew how to build consensus. Clinton named her acting chairman of the SEC in 1993.

In Alexandria, Virginia, a retired civil servant who had delved into naked puts lost the $54,000 in his brokerage account plus an additional $318,000. A retired engineer in Niagara Falls, New York lost $500,000, most of which had been set aside in trust for his grandkids.8 A presidential task force appointed by Ronald Reagan and nicknamed “The Brady Commission” by the press because it was chaired by Treasury Secretary Nicolas Brady, looked into the 1987 crash and found causes that, in retrospect, were eerily similar to the causes of the 2010 Flash Crash. Within 9 weeks, the Brady Commission performed a remarkable autopsy of the complicated chain of events responsible for the Black Monday 1987 crash and made recommendations to Congress that would have helped to prevent the 2010 event had they been followed.


pages: 249 words: 77,027

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

The subcommittee convened in the wake of a bitter and much broader clash in Congress over gun control that did not involve the Glock. The NRA and its allies got the best of that bigger fight, winning passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, which loosened restrictions on gun sales and reined in the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. President Ronald Reagan signed the law in May, the same month as the House hearings on “plastic pistols.” Anti-gun activists saw the Glock controversy as an opportunity to push back in a protracted war they weren’t prepared to surrender. Hughes, a stalwart of the gun-control movement, had led a successful drive for his side’s main amendment of the Firearm Owners Protection Act, the NRA’s one disappointment with the otherwise gun-friendly law.

And in July 1993, a client with a grudge against his former attorneys shot up their tony San Francisco firm, Pettit & Martin. These events, and the perception that ordinary violent gun crime continued to increase, helped seal the success of the federal Brady Bill, named for James Brady, the White House press secretary grievously injured by gunfire in the 1981 attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Signed by Clinton in November 1993, the law imposed a five-day waiting period and background check for all handgun purchases (thirty-two states until then lacked background check requirements). The Brady Bill obliged the federal government within five years to replace the waiting period with a computerized “instant check” system overseen by the FBI.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

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

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

Viewed from up close, whichever side you find yourself on, it rears up from the ground, overwhelming and dominating you. Faced by this blank expanse of steel and concrete, you are dwarfed not only by its size but by what it represents. You are on one side; ‘they’ are on the other. Thirty years ago a wall came down, ushering in what looked like a new era of openness and internationalism. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin and called out to his opposite number in the Soviet Union, ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’ Two years later it fell. Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. They were heady times in which some intellectuals predicted an end of history.

The issue was already in the national consciousness, but this incident helped to raise public awareness further – and it’s been rising ever since. The fence-building continued, albeit with less celebration of finger- and toe-severing, but levels of immigration did not noticeably decrease. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan did a deal: around 3 million unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the USA since before 1982 were given ‘amnesty’. In return, Congress approved more stringent regulations to prevent companies from hiring illegal immigrants, as well as tightened border security. Over the following years, additional barriers were built, but on a limited budget and on occasion using leftover materials from the Vietnam War, such as metal sheets known as perforated steel planking, which had been used as temporary aircraft landing strips.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

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

“One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.” With bipartisan support, his administration expanded Social Security, and also created the food stamp program, Medicare, and Medicaid. Later advances sought to boost the earnings of the working poor, with Gerald Ford passing the EITC and Ronald Reagan expanding it. Bill Clinton reformed the New Deal–era welfare program, once aimed at widows and their children, but by the 1990s primarily used by unmarried mothers. He campaigned on “ending welfare as we know it,” twice vetoing Republican reform proposals for being too punitive but eventually signing a 1996 law that put a lifetime cap on benefits and required recipients to find a job.

Republicans, in particular, became obsessed with the notion that these women were gaming the system. There was a woman in Chicago with “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers” used “to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” Ronald Reagan famously warned about a mythical Welfare Queen, who ended up being a highly charismatic criminal not particularly representative of any social trends. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” Such stigmatization paved the way for the Clinton-era reform that capped the program’s overall spending at a sum where it has remained since 1996, helping fewer and fewer and fewer children escape extreme poverty—and disproportionately penalizing black babies and black mothers, though the program remains majority-white to this day.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Really anything with a “tion” on the end of it would do. Banks were allowed to get on with the business of “wealth creation”—which mostly meant shuffling bits of paper among themselves, lending recklessly, and paying themselves fat bonuses. The global cheerleaders for these policies were the US and the UK, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had set the deregulation agenda in motion and where Wall Street and the City of London were rampant. Not only was it obvious how much money bankers were making—you only had to look at the cars they were driving to see that—but they also spent formidable amounts of money lobbying governments to make life yet easier for them.

By 2016 India was vying with China as the fastest-growing large economy on earth.7 In a 2010 speech to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent and rambunctious Indian economist with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, praised the impact of growth on the life of ordinary Indians, some 200 million of whom he said had been lifted out of poverty. The architects of liberal reform, he said, had never intended to create growth for growth’s sake. Rather growth was viewed as an enabler, a means of attacking poverty. He denied that such policies had anything to do with the discredited trickle-down economics popularized by Ronald Reagan with his aggressive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, he told parliament, growth was “a strategy for pulling the poor out of poverty through gainful employment, not as an end in itself.” Bhagwati’s position was different from that of another prominent Indian economist, Amartya Sen, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics and a contemporary of Bhagwati’s at Cambridge back in the 1950s.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

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

As a result, private insurers are more selective about the type and extent of insurance coverage they provide and about the clientele to whom they provide it. The period since the 1970s also has witnessed commitments by prominent American policy makers to ensure that, in Bill Clinton’s expression, “the era of big government is over.” From Ronald Reagan to Clinton to George W. Bush and even Barack Obama, recent presidents have expressed a preference for scaling back government expenditures. The 1996 welfare reform, which devolved decision-making authority for America’s chief social assistance program to the states and set a time limit on receipt of benefits, embodies this commitment.

FIGURE 5.4 Voting by Democrats in the House and Senate Average “dimension 1 DW-nominate” scores for Democratic legislators. The range shown here is –1 to +1 (left to right). Data source: Keith Poole and Christopher Hare, “An Update on Political Polarization through the 112th Congress,” Voteview, January 16, 2013. The Left Can Continue to Get Elected Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, a significant portion of the American left has been in a near-constant state of despair about the electoral future of the Democratic Party. The party had drifted too far to the left, according to some. It had moved too far to the right, said others. It was incapable of nominating effective candidates.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

In the early 1980s, most home owners used their home equity lines like traditional home improvement loans—to fix the roof, to build an addition, and so on. In 1984, as President Ronald Reagan began his second term in office, this traditional use of home equity began to change. Unintentionally Reagan set the wheels into motion to transform our houses from homes into ATMs. This transformation began, unexpectedly enough, on a television show in 1954. In the mid-1950s, Ronald Reagan was a popular, if undistinguished, actor, except perhaps for the die-hard fans of Knute Rockne—All American. Though not a box-office leader on the screen, he was a leader behind the scenes, having been elected the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in the 1940s.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

When people are optimistic about the future prospects of the economy, fear takes a back seat. Stock markets become convinced that the prices of almost all shares can only go higher. In such bull markets—and we are just coming off the longest bull market for corporate equities in history, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s first term, with only a few brief interruptions— everyone believes that they can always make more money in stocks than in bonds. As a result, the demand for bonds and their prices is depressed. This can actually be good for yields. Bear markets in stocks, especially sudden panics, send investors stampeding out of equities and into bonds, especially risk-free government bonds, bidding up bond prices and driving down yields.

In addition, liberal principles in economics—the ‘‘free market’’—have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that have been part of the impoverished third world.’’ The great debate of modern history between state socialism and liberty had been settled in favor of democracy and the free market economy, argued Fukuyama. How societies and economies should be governed was from now on a closed book. The triumph of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States during the 1980s had started the pendulum of history swinging back to the classical liberalism of Bagehot’s Britain. The triumph of the AngloAmerican model of business and finance appeared complete and final. Conclusion REAL HISTORY DOES NOT END Of course, real history as we have seen is always a series of accidents.


pages: 223 words: 77,566

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

Most important, they filled the gap when my mom was unwilling or unable to be the type of parent that they wished they’d been to her. Mamaw and Papaw may have failed Bev in her youth. But they spent the rest of their lives making up for it. Chapter 4 I was born in late summer 1984, just a few months before Papaw cast his first and only vote for a Republican—Ronald Reagan. Winning large blocks of Rust Belt Democrats like Papaw, Reagan went on to the biggest electoral landslide in modern American history. “I never liked Reagan much,” Papaw later told me. “But I hated that son of a bitch Mondale.” Reagan’s Democratic opponent, a well-educated Northern liberal, stood in stark cultural contrast to my hillbilly Papaw.

Certainly not any politician—Barack Obama was then the most admired man in America (and likely still is), but even when the country was enraptured by his rise, most Middletonians viewed him suspiciously. George W. Bush had few fans in 2008. Many loved Bill Clinton, but many more saw him as the symbol of American moral decay, and Ronald Reagan was long dead. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbors could even name a high-ranking military officer. The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Like their father, the Koch brothers have always been considerably to the right of mainstream right wingers. In 1980, David Koch tossed his hat into national electoral politics, running for vice-president on the Libertarian Party ticket, which called for an end to public schools, Social Security, and taxation. He and his running mate won only 1 percent of the vote, losing to Ronald Reagan in the Reagan landslide. Undeterred, the Koch brothers set about to push America, particularly the Republican Party, much further right. Operating mostly behind the scenes, and driven by an abiding hatred of government and anything that smacked of distributing wealth more broadly, the Kochs invested massively over the next few decades in creating a vast network of think tanks, academic programs, front groups, political action bodies, campaigns, and lobbyists to influence the public, the media, and politicians, as New Yorker writer Jane Mayer documents in her powerful book Dark Money.7 Although the Kochs have funded many right-wing academics over the years, they were especially drawn to the work of Buchanan.

Among his cost-cutting measures, he had pioneered the practice of operating large freight trains with just one crew member, a practice that would end up being a crucial factor in the Lac-Mégantic disaster. Still, this immense tragedy would never have happened if Ottawa hadn’t abdicated its responsibility to enforce safety regulations for railways operating in Canada. Instead, Canadian politicians embraced neoliberal economic policies, championed by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, that argued for getting government “out of the way” so that the market could work its magic. This involved radically reducing regulations, which were increasingly depicted as nothing more than a costly regulatory burden on business, one that hampered the ability of corporations to get on with the task of creating jobs and wealth.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

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

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

Using 13 satellites, the live concert reached a global audience of over one billion people in 110 countries; it was a triumph of both organisation and technology.3 There were, of course, strong elements of the past that featured in the concert: when Bob Dylan sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind' together with Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, it could have been Woodstock 16 years earlier, but the sheer technological scale of this endeavour made it feel like a new world; perhaps Dylan's ‘The Times They Are a Changin’ ’ might have been more appropriate. These changes were felt in the world of politics, too, where there were stirrings of major reforms that would change the shape of the global political and economic system in the years that followed. The supply-side reforms of UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan were in full swing, and the divisive miners' strike in the UK had just ended with the closure of most of the nation's coal mines. The US introduced the Tax Reform Act of 1986, designed to simplify the federal income tax code and broaden the tax base. Meanwhile, international events were also in flux.

In 1973, the Watergate scandal in the US increased market uncertainty, and by October that year the Arab-Israeli War, together with an OPEC oil embargo and industrial unrest, had fuelled further market instability. By the end of the 1970s, stock markets had enjoyed some sharp rallies. In the US, Ronald Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter in November 1980 and Republican control of the Senate were viewed as market-friendly. For the first time since 1976, the Dow Jones index rose back through 1000. But the enthusiasm did not last. A further sharp round of interest rate hikes (the Fed raised its discount rate to an all-time high of 14%) forced another sharp fall in the stock market and most economies around the world entered another recession.


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

In the decades leading up to the crash, a series of US Presidents had done everything they could to make sure that capital, rather than labor, was the driving force of the American economy. This process was called deregulation. These Presidents were: Ronald Reagan, George Bush I, Bill Clinton, George Bush II. None of them had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises. Ronald Reagan was a former actor who had starred in a movie in which he taught morals to an ape. He was the Governor of California before he was President of the United States. George Bush I came from such an old money family that his father sat on the board of a bank under Nazi control.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

This logic explains the largely hands-off policies we have seen thus far with respect to the monopoly or near monopoly of technology giants like Google and Facebook. Those virtual monopolies provide outstanding short-term efficiency—and the long-term detriments appear to pale in comparison, because they are very hard to measure. Some commentators claim that the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan was responsible for this profound shift in the philosophy of antitrust regulation, because the revisions began during his terms in office. However, the efficiency defense continued to strengthen under the administration of Democrat Bill Clinton. In addition, much more historically procustomer and anticorporation jurisdictions such as the European Union and Canada have adopted similar if not stronger efficiency defenses in their antitrust policies.11 The shift in antitrust philosophy has had a spillover effect on capital-markets policy.

This led to the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which—among other measures—cut the top marginal personal-income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. That was followed by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut the top rate to 28 percent, roughly a level last seen in 1931. It is easy to see these two acts as the doings of a conservative Republican President—and indeed the tax-cutting movement was spurred by Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on it in both 1980 and 1984. However, when both acts were passed, the Democrats held large majorities in the House of Representatives (242 to 192 in 1981, and 253 to 182 in 1986). The Republicans had a small majority (53 seats) in the Senate at the time of both acts. The 1981 act was passed by a vote of 282 to 95 in the House and 67 to 8 in the Senate, meaning that almost 100 House Democrats voted in its favor.24 The 1986 act was the deeper cut, taking the rate down from 50 percent to 28 percent.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

He wasn’t trying to win political points as much as attempting to put as many influential people as possible in play—in order to convince them that North Korea was playing the United States and its allies for fools—and succeeding. One person who liked what he was hearing was John Bolton, the former assistant U.S. attorney general for Ronald Reagan who kept reappearing to hold positions around national security in each successive Republican administration, with his signature mustache and expansive views of how the United States should flex its geopolitical muscles. In the Bush administration, Bolton was among the most hawkish of the hawks, nakedly calling for regime change in all of George W.

On February 12, in the White House Situation Room, the National Security Council staff showed a film to the president showing four previous presidents hailing great deals they got with North Korea. In the next sequence, the film described North Korea’s actual conduct falling far short of its promises and included a clip of Ronald Reagan stating that in deal making sometimes the best strategy is to hold firm. The message from Bolton was clear: do not accept piecemeal denuclearization. In his eyes, North Korea would never denuclearize unless it felt it was an existential matter. Any attempt to go about things “action for action” was a recipe for North Korea to weaken sanctions while retaining its nuclear arsenal


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

With the help of a band of powerful businessmen, thinkers and economists known as the Mont Pelerin Society, it had grown, since the 1940s, spreading through a network of well-funded ‘think tanks’, to eventually become influential in all the right places. It was taken up as the guiding principle behind the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It also, of course, had much in common with the views of Ayn Rand and her acolyte Alan Greenspan – who, in this new world, suddenly found himself in favour, and in power. And so, with Thatcher famously declaring, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and families,’ the two world leaders took up their mission to liberate the individual from the shackles of the oversized state and turn society into a game of warring individuals.

They would increase competition as much as and wherever possible. Everyone would compete in self-correcting, wealth-creating free markets (after all, just as humans required freedom to fully actualize, so too did markets) whose ‘invisible hand’ could be relied upon to raise us all into a stable and wealthy future. In June 1987, Ronald Reagan gladly announced the appointment of his new Chairman of the Federal Reserve – Alan Greenspan. This position, writes economist Dr E. Ray Bradbury, made Greenspan ‘the single most powerful figure affecting the global economy’. He remained in this extraordinarily powerful job until 2006, a period of nearly thirty years, during which he became known, by some, as the ‘Central Banker of Neoliberalism’.

They could prove, scientifically, that self-esteem was the vaccine for all social disease. But Vasco had a problem. He’d first have to conquer the Duke. California State Governor George ‘The Duke’ Deukmejian was a Republican with a reputation that out-no-nonsensed even his predecessor-but-one Ronald Reagan. What’s more, he hated Vasco. And Vasco hated him. Not only did the Duke revel in his reputation as a tough fiscal conservative but California was on the verge of insolvency. Nobody thought it remotely possible that he’d release millions of tax dollars to indulge Vasco’s ridiculous notion. By the mid-1980s, Vasco’s intellectual explorations had taken him to far shores, and he’d become notorious, around the Capitol, for some of his crazier ideas.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

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

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

That year, William Gibson published Neuromancer, a science fiction novel about a drug-addled hacker battling his way through a dangerous virtual reality cybernetic world run by frightening corporations and their god-like supercomputers. It was a world of no rules, no laws, only power and cleverness. Gibson meant it to be a metaphor for the growth of unrestrained corporate power at a time when poverty and inequality spiked under President Ronald Reagan—a science fiction experiment of what would happen if this trend ran to its natural conclusion. Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia.

Among the pantheon of techno-heroes promoted in the magazine’s pages were right-wing politicians and pundits, telecom tycoons, and corporate lobbyists who swirled around Washington to whip up excitement and push for a privatized, corporate-dominated Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. Republican congressman Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan’s economics guru George Gilder graced the magazine’s cover, their push for a privatized telecommunication system profiled—and their retrograde views on women’s rights, abortion, and civil rights played down and ultimately ignored.99 John Malone, the billionaire cable monopolist at the head of TCI and one of the largest landowners in the United States, made the cut as well.

He compared Google’s email scanning to the surveillance and prediction project at DARPA’s then-active Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a predictive policing technology that was initially funded by DARPA and handed to the National Security Agency after the September 11 terrorist attacks.56 A year after Google launched Gmail, Hoofnagle testified at hearings on email and privacy held by California’s Senate Judiciary Committee. “The prospect that a computer could, en masse, view transactional and content data and draw conclusions was the plan of John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness,” he said, referring to President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser who, under President George W. Bush, was put in charge of helping DARPA fight terrorism.57 “TIA proposed to look at a wide array of personal information and make inferences for the prevention of terrorism or general crime. Congress rejected Poindexter’s plan. Google’s content extraction is different than TIA in that it is designed to pitch advertising rather than catch criminals.”


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

I and about four thousand other people, most in business suits, have already made it through four tight rings of security, descending at each stop-and-check farther underground until we pass the final metal detector and emerge into a startlingly well-appointed, underground bunker of a conference center, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The lighting is subtle, the decor an elegant symphony of beige. For the next five days this venue will play host to the (mostly) men who spend their lives making, regulating and transporting electricity to American homes and businesses. Welcome to Grid Week.

And then “all these Wall Street types turned up, hiding themselves so we wouldn’t see them, but crawling all over this place.” This sentiment of too much investment too fast is echoed by energy analyst Paul Gipe, who points out that the “tax credits were so lucrative that they attracted those who knew more about constructing a deal than about building wind turbines.” Unwittingly Ronald Reagan had created one of the weirdest marriages American business has ever seen, as Manhattan investment bankers scrambled to buy up wind turbines made by commune-living, Vietnam-era draft dodgers. The result was that California, by the mid-1980s, had a massive wind bubble, ripe for popping. California might have been the planetary center of wind energy in the mid-1980s, but their turbines were more machines for churning out visions of greener futures than actual watts.

See especially Amory Lovins, “There Are Cheaper Ways to Keep the Lights on than Vast Electrical Storage,” Financial Times, April, 13 2016. The comments section is also revealing. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a437955e-0098-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.html#axzz48YT31YG7. fuels 98 percent of the local power plants: This statistic comes from an advertisement I saw at Ronald Reagan International Airport in January 2012 (it was produced by Friends of Coal, http://www.friendsofcoal.org/). duration of the blackout: Edmund Conway, “World’s Biggest Battery Switched on in Alaska,” Telegraph, August 27, 2003, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3312118/Worlds-biggest-battery-switched-on-in-Alaska.html.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

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

Writing in 1992 on “the self-image of Americans,” New York Times correspondent Richard Bernstein notes with alarm that “many who came of age during the 1960s protest years have never regained the confidence in the essential goodness of America and the American government that prevailed in earlier periods,” a matter of much concern to cultural managers since.37 The basic patterns established in the early conquest persist to the current era. As the slaughter of the indigenous population by the Guatemalan military approached virtual genocide, Ronald Reagan and his officials, while lauding the assassins as forward-looking democrats, informed Congress that the US would provide arms “to reinforce the improvement in the human rights situation following the 1982 coup” that installed Rios Montt, perhaps the greatest killer of them all. The primary means by which Guatemala obtained US military equipment, however, was commercial sales licensed by the Department of Commerce, the General Accounting Office of Congress observed, putting aside the international network that is always ready to exterminate the beasts of the field and forest if there are profits to be made.

Insatiable in his quest for power and love of violence, Castro sent “experienced officers” to train Nicaraguans to resist the terrorist army the US dispatched from its Honduran bases with orders to attack “soft targets” such as health clinics and agricultural cooperatives (with explicit approval of the State Department and left-liberal opinion, in the latter case). The monster even considered retaliation “in case the United States under Ronald Reagan invaded Nicaragua,” and he was “far more involved than we knew” in supplying the army of Panama “in anticipation of the United States invasion.” But for those who believe that there are limits to what the criminal mind might contemplate, there is still more. “With Cuban soldiers in Angola to support the Marxist Government, Mr.

This is, of course, the historic project, intensified when need arises.9 Caterpillar decided in the ‘80s that its labor contract with the UAW was “a thing of the past,” the Tribune study observes: the company would “permanently change it with the threat of replacement workers.” That tactic, standard in the 19th century, was reinstituted by Ronald Reagan to destroy the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) in 1981, one of the many devices adopted to undermine labor and bring the Third World model home. In 1990, Caterpillar shifted some production to a small steel processor that had broken a Teamsters Local by hiring scabs, “a swift and stunning blow to the workers, a harbinger” of what was to come.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

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

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

Bush’s building at College Station, spread over 90 carefully watered acres of what was once Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College – now Texas A&M University – narcissistically limits itself to portraying his own career. It sets out to place the former director of the CIA, America’s Ambassador to China, and Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, in the heroic tradition. In much the same way, the eighteenth century portrayed even its least competent leaders as classical heroes, equipped with breastplate and helmet, laurel leaves and toga. But despite its aspirations to grandeur, and an all but complete absence of Dan Quayle, Bush’s library is a masterpiece of unintentional architectural frankness.

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

As a finale, Bush has an art gallery for temporary exhibitions. I saw Rick Kelly’s show, ‘Reflections of Freedom’, including his lovingly rendered painting of a flight of Phantoms, entitled with conspicuous insensitivity ‘Bad Day for Uncle Ho’ to set the tone. It was as kitsch as anything in Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Ronald Reagan’s library has no pretensions to patrician values. Reagan had initially wanted to build it on the Palo Alto campus at Stanford. A site was chosen and a design drawn up, but the university rebuffed him, just as Harvard eventually turned its face against accommodating Kennedy’s library. Instead Reagan decided to slum it and accepted the gift of a site from a house builder on a ridge at the outer edge of Los Angeles in Simi.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Aside from its technological infeasibility—if we cannot keep terrorists off airplanes or individual “sleepers” from engaging in biological and chemical warfare, how can we imagine that we can intercept multiple warheads and their multiplying decoys without a hitch?—the missile shield once again isolates America from a world it ought to participate in in changing. In Ronald Reagan’s vivid fantasies that resonated so powerfully with the American public, a virtual bubble would envelop the good nation and keep it safe from foreign nightmares. But the nightmares have come to our shores in the bright light of morning, and there is no shield against their terror except a confrontation with Jihad’s complex global genealogy.

Indeed, distinctions of every kind are fudged: ABC places its news and sports departments under a single corporate division; television newsmagazines blend into entertainment programs, creating new teletabloids that (in the new parlance) are reality-challenged; films parade corporate logos (for a price), presidents play themselves in films (President Ford in a television special), while dethroned governors (Cuomo and Richards) do Super Bowl commercials for snack food in which they joke about their electoral defeat, Hollywood stars run for office (Sonny Bono, no Ronald Reagan, was elected to Congress in 1994), and television pundits become practicing politicians (David Gergen and Pat Buchanan have crossed and recrossed the street to only mild chastisement from peers). Politicians can do no right, celebrities can do no wrong—homocide included. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Pay TV and satellite television has paid little attention, however, and while the measure survived the 1993 GATT round it will eventually yield to market forces via satellite or home video or other new technologies. The time is not so far off when there will be one single image—an American image of America, something like Ronald Reagan’s opening shot in his celebrated It’s Morning in America video, or a burger sizzling on the desert-baked enamel of a Chevy V-8—an image so generic, so affecting, so ubiquitous, and so empty that it will no longer be recognized as American, it will just be.16 The dismal story of film in Europe can be duplicated over and over again around the world.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

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

His views on free trade shaped discussions in the international economics community, especially at GATT, the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Haberler parlayed his profile as a laissez-faire economist into political relevance. After tentative connections to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, he developed working relationships with Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, serving on Reagan’s preinauguration economic team and his International Monetary Task Force. He exchanged birthday cards with both men and received an invitation to Reagan’s first inauguration. He wrote pro-free-trade and anti-inflation opinion pieces in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

He became a household name for his liberal economics and philosophical defense of freedom. He was also directly involved in epochal events that seemed to belie a dedication to open and progressive liberalism, including the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Hayek’s greatest direct influence came in the political and economic culture of the United Kingdom. The culmination of his intellectual and ideological groundwork came in the form of the IEA. The IEA grew out of Hayek’s MPS as the original free-market think tank. It offered educational and policy materials to politicians dissatisfied with the postwar economic order.

Relieved of its Austrian historical context and, indeed, even of the very historical reference, this set of assumptions—imported to the U.S. in the suitcases of a handful of disabused Viennese intellectuals—has come to inform not just the Chicago school of economics but all significant public conversation over policy choices in the contemporary United States.”29 The Austrian argument that planning necessarily leads to dictatorship, Judt alleged, paved the way for a reactionary backlash: the destruction of (social) democracy and the rise of neoliberalism; the ascension of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; the economic successes of Milton Friedman’s libertarian Chicago School; and the “Washington Consensus” at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and US Treasury, which advocated deregulation, privatization of state industries, trade liberalization, and other market-fundamentalist positions.


pages: 450 words: 134,152

The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll

Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, cross-subsidies, George Santayana, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, union organizing, vertical integration

He simply told Brown that the negotiations were on again, and he made an appointment to see Litvack in Washington on Friday. Of course, Brown and Trienens could make an intelligent guess about why Litvack was suddenly willing to talk. Just as Ken Anderson had been when he initiated the menu discussions, Litvack was now a lame duck. In November, Ronald Reagan had been elected president over Jimmy Carter in a landslide. That meant Litvack would have to vacate his office when Reagan nominated his own Antitrust chief sometime after January. Trienens, Brown, and Litvack all knew that any Reagan nominee would likely be a conservative opponent of many of the Antitrust division’s policies and practices and that the nominee probably would not be sympathetic to the AT&T case.

But before the bill could be voted on and passed to the Senate, Peter Rodino, chairman of the House antitrust subcommittee, intercepted the legislation and killed it in his committee. Despite claims to the contrary by AT&T, Rodino said he was afraid that if the bill passed, the government’s antitrust suit would be stopped cold because many of the competition issues would be resolved. So even though AT&T’s top executives assumed that the election of Ronald Reagan augured well for their relationship with the government, Trienens was nonetheless seriously prepared to negotiate with Litvack when he flew to Washington on Friday, December 19. He also realized, however, that Litvack’s lame-duck status offered AT&T at least some advantage in the talks; since Litvack had made the first overture, he must be somewhat eager to strike a deal.

Steve Coll Gaithersburg, Maryland March 1986 About the Author Steve Coll is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and the bestselling author of seven books. Previously he served as president of the New America Foundation and worked for two decades at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a four-part series on the Securities and Exchange Commission during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The award-winning series became the basis for Eagle on the Street (1991), coauthored with David A. Vise. Coll’s other books include New York Times Notable Book The Deal of the Century (1998); Ghost Wars (2004), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; The Bin Ladens (2009), winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and Private Empire (2012), winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

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

Just as the invasive vine kudzu ended up smothering the US South, a reductive competition ideology has smothered any effort to limit toxic competition, and we’ll explore how lobbyists, policy makers, and powerful firms have used the competition ideology to hide their corruption, exploitation, ineptitude, and ignorance. We’ll learn the ominous origins of the term privatization (no, it wasn’t Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan who came up with it). Finally, we’ll encounter the most sinister actors along our trip, the Gamemakers, who design the competitive process to ensure that they always profit, regardless of whoever else might seem to be winning or losing the race. Here we’ll use the example of a gaming app aimed at children to see how the Gamemakers rig the competition to attract us, addict us, extract our data, and manipulate us, all in the interest of massive profits, which are concealed behind an opaque process that no one can penetrate.

One poll showed 83 percent of respondents favoring renationalization.78 A Short History of a Word Given privatization’s star role in the competition ideology, we began wondering about the origins of the term. Who coined the word privatization (or, to be more precise, reprivatization—the opposite of renationalization)? Not Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. Rather, the Nazis. During the early 1930s, the word Reprivatisierung began to appear in press and journal articles in Germany to describe the shift of state-controlled functions, like urban transport, banking, and steel production, to the private sector under the Nazis. What “may well be the first recorded use of the term ‘reprivatization’” in the English language then occurred in a 1936 economics journal article reporting on the sale of three banks under the Reich.79 According to a 1941 book written by an American scholar who was an expert on the structure of the German economy, “In return for business assistance, the Nazis hastened to give evidence of their good will by restoring to private capitalism a number of monopolies held or controlled by the state.”80 She went on to say, “The practical significance of the transference of government enterprises into private hands was thus that the capitalist class continued to serve as a vessel for the accumulation of income.

But the concept of competition they’ve been peddling for the past forty years—one drained of any ethical or moral content—isn’t the only or even the best form of competition for purposes of creating a healthy, prosperous, and just society. Indeed, as we’ll see, it is often the worst. Greed Is Good. Greed Is Right. Greed Works. President Ronald Reagan told the nation in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Competition and markets were his answer, and the concept of competition he was espousing was the narrow one espoused by Milton Friedman and his cohorts at the University of Chicago.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

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

“Like all things, this too shall fade.” She planted herself on my bed, talking as I dressed. “Interesting thing about New York, bright girl,” she said. “I think Americans are not knowing how much Uncle Sam exports hatred to rest of world. Soviets hate Blacks because Hollywood hates Blacks. Ronald Reagan loved putting Negroes in cages. When I come to New York, I see race is myth. темнокожий are no different. Some terrible, of course, but when is teenaged male not terrible? When was last time great hymn and high Hosannas written to virtue of horny seventeen-year-old? And in person, I see many are quite attractive.”

Instead I was chasing a necromancer through an abandoned park. I’d spent too much of my life in New York, too much time interacting with its street people, with its lunatics, its mad ones, its charlatans, its would-be revolutionaries. I remember when I could be held rapt by any street preacher with a grievance against Ronald Reagan. But I knew now that none of it amounted to anything. It was all substance abuse, underlying emotional problems, and enforced commitment at Bellevue. I found them beneath the graffiti-covered canopy of the Temperance Fountain, the word CHARITY above them, the zinc statue with her missing arms like the crippled goddess of a forgotten pantheon.

It’s a way of disguising personal complicity in the descent of our public life into trifles and nonsense, an excuse for what we’ve let ourselves become. Historically, the enemy has been evil rich people and stupid people. The latter are used by the former, trapping society within a death cycle of pretense, the great myth of an America that flourishes in spite of, rather than because of, her laws. A world in which the zombified corpse of Ronald Reagan embraces profound and systemic industry deregulation and is followed into the presidency by Bill Clinton, a back-slapping Southern politician who never saw a civil protection that he didn’t detest. Both men abandoned probity, abandoned good thought, abandoned rational thinking, inhaled the jargon-saturated monocultures of Hollywood and Wall Street.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

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

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

“We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” Nixon said, praising the “great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” Thiel’s parents would be fanatical Republicans, and their son would absorb the sentiment, too, coming to identify with these non-shouters, venerating the Nixon era as well as Nixon’s political successor, Ronald Reagan. The Thiel family, which added a fourth member, Peter’s younger brother, Patrick, in 1971, was stern. Not long after his brother had been born, Peter’s father would explain death to him in terms that—as Thiel relayed them years later—would seem cold, bordering on cruel. Peter, in an existential mode for perhaps the first time, had asked Klaus about a rug in their apartment, which Klaus explained was made out of the hide of a dead cow.

Its 285-foot tower was the campus’s tallest building and its defining landmark. The institution’s executive director, W. Glenn Campbell, would serve as a senior adviser to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. Ten years later, he named Goldwater’s ideological successor, California governor Ronald Reagan, an honorary fellow. By the time Thiel showed up on campus, in September 1985, Reagan was into his second term as president, and the White House was full of Hoover Institution alumni and fellows, including Martin Anderson, the economist credited with writing a policy memo that led to Reaganomics.

Thiel eventually joined the College Republicans and discovered Ayn Rand. He also became friendly with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a South African academic and theologian who was dean of the chapel at Stanford and minister of the big nondenominational church on campus, whose growing membership he’d ascribed to “the same forces that elected Ronald Reagan.” Hamerton-Kelly was a moderate on South Africa; he was against apartheid but confessed feeling “ambivalence” and favored partial, rather than a full, divestment. Thiel and the minister had something else in common besides South African roots: a shared admiration and fascination with another iconoclast on campus, René Girard, who frequently lectured at events organized by student religious groups.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

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

The answer had to be bigger than New York and bigger than gentrification. The answer had to be global, a force with enough power to grip much of human civilization. Neoliberalism is an ideology and a set of economic policies, a brand of capitalism considered the lunatic fringe until it was popularized in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—whose famous statement “there is no such thing as society” summed up a major tenet of the thinking, that is, the primacy of the disconnected, independent individual who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. The ideology crystallized in the 1990s, and by the dawn of the twenty-first century it had become a fait accompli of globalized life, largely unquestioned, barely visible, and resistant to critique.

It is clear that the city’s and federal government’s slow response to the AIDS crisis reflected a homophobic, racist, classist, and anti-urbanist unwillingness to help these populations. It was policy. While he was at times a supporter of gay rights, and possibly a closeted non-heterosexual of one sort or another, Koch’s financial response to the AIDS crisis, like President Ronald Reagan’s, was murderously slow. Nineteen-eighties New York was a time of both boom and austerity. It was boom for Wall Street, big business, and real estate, which got megabucks in tax breaks. As Soffer outlines, Koch gifted developers and corporations with the expansion of three kinds of tax abatement: J-51, giving subsidies to landlords to renovate apartments and increase gentrification; 421a, reducing taxes on luxury buildings to induce their construction in “underused” areas; and “individually negotiated tax reductions,” giving hundreds of millions to corporations like AT&T to bribe them into doing business in New York.

In her book Branding New York, Miriam Greenberg reveals how, for the first time in history, New York began to fervently market itself in the late 1970s, selling a cleaned-up image for the purpose of commodifying the city for a new clientele of middle-class suburbanites and corporations. To reorient the city after fiscal crisis, as Greenberg explains, “the standpoint of the out-of-towner and the imagination of the average tourist became overwhelming preoccupations for the established and emerging leadership of New York.” Especially when Ronald Reagan pulled federal funds for cities. The resulting rise of mass tourism, like gentrification, was planned. Through a grand campaign, Greenberg says, the city was reframed, packaged, and branded as “one that was almost entirely white, Manhattan-centric, and decidedly not working class.” It was another maneuver in the battle for New York, another advance of the neoliberal shift.


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A Milanese judge, Bruno Apicella, indicted Luigi Mennini and Pellegrino de Strobel and twenty-two other defendants for fraudulent bankruptcy and illegal currency trading related to the 1974 collapse of Sindona’s Banca Privata.33 Sindona was among those charged, as was Massimo Spada, the former IOR official and top Sindona aide.34 Before the month was finished, Luigi D’Osso, an investigating magistrate, sent comunicati giudiziari (judicial communiqués) to the Vatican informing Marcinkus, Mennini, and de Strobel that they were material witnesses in the criminal probe into the Ambrosiano’s collapse.35 The Vatican refused to accept that notice since the Italians had not sent it through diplomatic channels.36 With all the bad press and flurry of charges and countercharges, even some of Marcinkus’s best friends sometimes worried about whether he might have crossed some legal line. One of them, William Wilson, then Ronald Reagan’s personal envoy to the Vatican, was a convert to Catholicism who was—according to his deputy, Michael Hornblow—“more Catholic than the Pope.”37 Wilson was one of Reagan’s closest friends, the head of his informal kitchen cabinet, and a co-trustee of Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s living trust.38 He had lobbied hard to get the Vatican assignment even though he could have chosen a far more prestigious foreign service posting. Although he was a businessman and not a politician or diplomat, Wilson’s instincts were good.

Just three days after Wojtyla’s election, the CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center circulated a four-page confidential memo that concluded that the election of a Polish Pontiff would complicate matters for the Soviet Union and would “undoubtedly prove extremely worrisome to Moscow.”10 And just as Pius XII’s zeal about fighting communism was shared by contemporaneous, secular Western leaders like Harry Truman and Winston Churchill, similarly like-minded heads of state would soon join Wojtyla. Margaret Thatcher began her eleven-year tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister just five months after he became Pope.11 And Ronald Reagan came into office two years later. Reagan and Thatcher would lead the fight to break the Soviet empire. They had Wojtyla’s full support. As he settled into the Papacy, John Paul II met with CIA analysts, who briefed him on American efforts to destabilize communist governments behind the Iron Curtain.

The National Intelligence Service’s intimate working alliance with the KGB later served as the foundation for the conspiracy theories that identified those agencies as the ones likely to have wanted John Paul II, the most stridently anticommunist Pope since Pius XII, dead.8,I Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the deputy speaker of the Russian State Duma, later told Russian Radio: “There is no direct evidence of necessarily a Russian connection here, but it was not to our liking that a Pole became the Pope of Rome, inasmuch as it was done specially by the CIA special services and by the USA to influence the situation in Poland through a Pole, the Pope of Rome, and this succeeded. A movement began there for real, akin to what we now regard as an orange revolution.”10 The “orange revolution” to which Zhirinovsky referred was the beginning of Pope John Paul’s activism against the communist regime that controlled his native Poland. Encouraged by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (who himself had survived an assassination attempt only six weeks before John Paul was shot), the Pontiff embarked in early 1981 on a policy of covertly supporting anticommunist movements throughout Eastern Europe.11 John Paul had been Pope less than a year when Polish shipyard workers in Gdańsk, led by Lech Walesa, a young union activist, had a standoff with the communist authorities.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

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

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

He added that the patient he had treated for Kaposi’s “had no T cells. Zero. Zip.” Curran, Guinan, and Harold Jaffe were convinced that something serious was going on, but they lacked the resources for a full-scale study. Curran appealed to CDC director Dr. Bill Foege, who was fighting a losing battle with the new budget-cutting administration of Ronald Reagan. Swept into power in November 1980 on the promise of slashing the federal bureaucracy, Reagan vowed to reduce spending in all areas other than the military, domestic law enforcement, the space shuttle program, and a handful of other sectors. He had also promised to cut taxes, and sent a bill for the largest tax reduction in U.S. history to Congress for approval.

Television evangelist and leader of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell denounced “perverted lifestyles,” saying in a nationally televised sermon, “If the Reagan administration does not put its full weight against this, what is now a gay plague in this country, I feel that a year from now, President Ronald Reagan personally will be blamed for allowing this awful disease to break out among the innocent American public. “AIDS is God’s punishment,” Falwell concluded. “The scripture is clear: We do reap it in our flesh when we violate the laws of God.” Bobbi Campbell shortly thereafter denounced the religious leaders before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Like their Islamic counterparts in the Middle East, many Christian political leaders in the United States were convinced that there was a religious message to be derived from AIDS, an epidemic that would best be stopped through moral virtue. The year 1987 was unique in recent American history in that Christian moralists ran against one another in national elections, and a disease rose to the dubious status of a pivotal issue in state, federal, even presidential elections. Ronald Reagan’s second term in the White House wasn’t scheduled to end until January 1989, but campaigning for the November 1988 election began extraordinarily early. His Vice President wanted to be next in line for the job, but George Bush was no shoo-in. Sensing that the national mood was volatile, and no single issue or candidate had yet captured widespread support, more than a dozen men were already stumping for office in the spring of 1987, a full year before the first round of scheduled primary elections.


pages: 158 words: 16,993

Citation Needed: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing by Conor Lastowka, Josh Fruhlinger

airport security, citation needed, en.wikipedia.org, jimmy wales, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autograph_hobby_timeline Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har The latter’s name is ironic, as it’s an onomatopoeia for laughter, and Hardy is an eternal pessimist, Hardy is the stereotype of someone with a very deep Major depressive disorder; indeed, one short implies that expression of joy or happiness actually puts Hardy in pain. The expression of joy or happiness has the same effect on Rupert Murdoch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippy_the_Lion_%26_Hardy_Har_Har Pac-Man In December 1982, an 8-year-old boy, Jeffrey R. Yee, supposedly received a letter from U.S. President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a worldwide record of 6,131,940 points, a score only possible if he had passed the Split-Screen Level. Whether or not this event happened as described has remained in heated debate among video-game circles since its supposed occurrence. When forced to testify before the Senate Committee on Video Game Excellence on this important issue, Reagan gave responses that were variations of “I can’t recall” seventeen times over the course of half an hour of questioning.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

We sometimes forget that as late as 1966 it was impossible to have an outdoor public meeting in Boston—probably the most liberal city in the United States—to protest the war, because it would be broken up with considerable violence. In the spring of 1966, even meetings in churches were physically attacked by counterdemonstrators. Compare all of this to what happened in 1981, when Ronald Reagan moved to escalate Carter’s war of torture and massacre in El Salvador with measures that threatened to lead to the direct use of U.S. military forces. The February 1981 white paper, which laid the basis for this escalation, elicited virtually no critical comment in the media, reflecting the subordination of the intellectual community to the state propaganda system, but there was a spontaneous popular reaction, unanticipated by people who had assumed that the Vietnam syndrome had been laid to rest by the ideological campaigns of the seventies.

He observed that Senator Moynihan had “made the point with great power” in a law school address in which he criticized the Reagan administration for “forsaking our centuries-old commitment to the idea of law in the conduct of nations” and for its “mysterious collective amnesia,” its “losing the memory that there once was such a commitment.” Our U.N. delegation, Moynihan said, “does not know the history of our country.” Unfortunately it is Ronald Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick who understand what the rule of law has meant to this country, and it is Anthony Lewis and Senator Moynihan who are suffering from a mysterious collective amnesia. The case they are discussing is a good example. It happened before, in almost exactly the same way. The story is told by Walter LaFeber, in his valuable book Inevitable Revolutions.

It is of some interest that his pride in his complicity in war crimes does not affect his reputation as a leading advocate of the sanctity of the rule of law among American liberals. The World Court incident provides some lessons concerning the system of indoctrination. It is easy enough to make fun of Ronald Reagan, but that is itself a diversion from the main point. Violence, deceit, and lawlessness are natural functions of the state, any state. What is important in the present context is the contribution of the harshest critics (within the mainstream) to reinforcing the system of indoctrination, of which they themselves are victims—as is the norm for the educated classes, who are typically the most profoundly indoctrinated and in a deep sense the most ignorant group, the victims as well as the purveyors of the doctrines of the faith.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Clearly, this had little to do with the conservative revolution in the latter two countries in the 1980s, at least to a first approximation.43 No doubt these issues are too strongly charged with emotion and too closely bound up with national identities and pride to allow for calm examination. Did Maggie Thatcher save Britain? Would Bill Gates’s innovations have existed without Ronald Reagan? Will Rhenish capitalism devour the French social model? In the face of such powerful existential anxieties, reason is often at a loss, especially since it is objectively quite difficult to draw perfectly precise and absolutely unassailable conclusions on the basis of growth rate comparisons that reveal differences of a few tenths of a percent. As for Bill Gates and Ronald Reagan, each with his own cult of personality (Did Bill invent the computer or just the mouse? Did Ronnie destroy the USSR single-handedly or with the help of the pope?)

Briefly, the shocks that buffeted the economy in the period 1914–1945—World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression, World War II, and the consequent advent of new regulatory and tax policies along with controls on capital—reduced capital’s share of income to historically low levels in the 1950s. Very soon, however, capital began to reconstitute itself. The growth of capital’s share accelerated with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in England in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, marking the beginning of a conservative revolution. Then came the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, followed by financial globalization and deregulation in the 1990s. All of these events marked a political turn in the opposite direction from that observed in the first half of the twentieth century.

By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels.


pages: 286 words: 82,970

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Again, this was a caution born out of concern that any such intervention could lead to a direct clash with forces of the Soviet Union, which presumably would have been deployed to protect what Moscow saw as interests vital to its empire and, as a result, to itself. This is not to say that either country ignored what was going on inside the other. The United States under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (and Congress before that) did raise human rights issues in the Soviet Union, pressing among other things to have high-profile political dissidents freed and for most Soviet Jews to be able to emigrate. And the Soviet Union would regularly point to shortcomings in American society. But these efforts were limited and did not assume a priority that threatened what was seen as a more basic stake in maintaining order either at the nuclear level or in critical regional disputes.

Named for Woodrow Wilson, who championed various rights and freedoms around the world in the aftermath of the First World War, it often makes shaping the internal conditions or nature of other societies the principal objective of what this country should do in the world. The purpose can be to promote human rights or democracy or to prevent human suffering. This philosophy is most associated with the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Contemporary adherents of such thinking can be found in both major political parties; indeed, the American foreign policy debate is increasingly waged as much within the Democratic and Republican parties as it is between them. The other dominant foreign policy tradition tends to fall under the heading of realism.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

But, if it is any consolation, the bad breaks do make life a little easier for economists to study. Economists use the arbitrariness of life to test for causal effects. Of forty-three American presidents, sixteen have been victims of serious assassination attempts, and four have been killed. The reasons that some lived were essentially random. Compare John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Both men had bullets headed directly for their most vulnerable body parts. JFK’s bullet exploded his brain, killing him shortly afterward. Reagan’s bullet stopped centimeters short of his heart, allowing doctors to save his life. Reagan lived, while JFK died, with no rhyme or reason—just luck.

Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003). 227 Of forty-three American presidents: Los Angeles Times staff, “U.S. Presidential Assassinations and Attempts,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2012, http://timelines.latimes.com/us-presidential-assassinations-and-attempts/. 227 Compare John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan: Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken, “Do Assassins Really Change History?” New York Times, April 12, 2015, SR12. 227 Kadyrov died: A disturbing video of the attack can be seen at “Parade surprise (Chechnya 2004),” YouTube video, posted March 31, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHWhs5QkfuY. 227 Hitler had changed his schedule: This story is also discussed in Jones and Olken, “Do Assassins Really Change History?”


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The Fed thereafter took the lead in the fight against inflation no matter what its consequences (particularly as concerned unemployment). Across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher had already been elected Prime Minister of Britain in May 1979, with a mandate to curb trade union power and put an end to the miserable inflationary stagnation that had enveloped the country for the preceding decade. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and, armed with geniality and personal charisma, set the US on course to revitalize its economy by supporting Volcker’s moves at the Fed and adding his own particular blend of policies to curb the power of labour, deregulate industry, agriculture, and resource extraction, and liberate the powers of finance both internally and on the world stage.

But in all these cases this monetarism was paralleled by acceptance of strong union power and a political commitment to build a strong welfare state. The turn to neoliberalism thus depended not only on adopting monetarism but on the unfolding of government policies in many other arenas. Figure 1.5 The ‘Volcker shock’: movements in the real rate of interest, US and France, 1960–2001 Source: Duménil and Lévy, Capital Resurgent. Ronald Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980 proved crucial, even though Carter had shifted uneasily towards deregulation (of airlines and trucking) as a partial solution to the crisis of stagflation. Reagan’s advisers were convinced that Volcker’s monetarist ‘medicine’ for a sick and stagnant economy was right on target.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Next, while women’s groups had been lobbying the government to provide health care for pregnant women, the Bush administration extended the reach of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover both embryos and fetuses but, oddly, not pregnant women. Bush also lobbied for a ban on partial-birth abortions — which would criminalize a procedure now used primarily in extreme, life-threatening situations — and reinstated Ronald Reagan’s gag rule, barring federally funded family planners from discussing abortion or providing abortion services. “The point of these things,” says Allison Herwitt, director of government relations for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, “was to weave embryonic rights into law.

Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive ways, perhaps to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about birthplace and heritage, or identify genetic markers for a bevy of diseases that could cast doubt on leadership ability and mental acuity. How much does it take to unseat a president? The first signs of President Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s emerged during his second term. While doctors now believe it was then too mild to affect his ability to govern, if information about his condition had been made public while he was still in office, would the American people have demanded his resignation? Could Congress be forced to impeach?


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

Ample bosoms first, she hops the rail, bogarts her way past the cops, and bolts toward me, her thumb-sucking charges clinging desperately to her “Don’t You See How Insanely Long, Soft, Shiny, and Expensive This Is? Motherfucker, YOU WILL Treat Me Like a Queen!” Toni Morrison signature model pashmina shawl trailing behind her like a cashmere kite tail. Now she’s in my face, mumbling calmly but incoherently about black pride, the slave ships, the three-fifths clause, Ronald Reagan, the poll tax, the March on Washington, the myth of the drop-back quarterback, how even the white-robed horses of the Ku Klux Klan were racist, and, most emphatically, how the malleable minds of the ever-increasingly redundant “young black youth” must be protected. And lo, the mind of the little waterheaded boy with both arms wrapped about his teacher’s hips, his face buried in her crotch, definitely needs a bodyguard, or at least a mental prophylactic.

Not at all Somewhat satisfied Very satisfied 1 2 3 4 5 On the way home, Pops put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders and delivered an apologetic lecture about his failure to take into account the “bandwagon effect.” Then there was the time he wanted to test “Servility and Obedience in the Hip-hop Generation.” I must’ve been about ten when my father sat me down in front of a mirror, pulled a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask over his head, pinned a defunct pair of Trans World Airlines captain wings to his lab coat, and proclaimed himself a “white authority figure.” “The nigger in the mirror is a stupid nigger,” he explained to me in that screechy, cloying “white voice” comedians of color use, while attaching a set of electrodes to my temples.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

As Bob Dylan said in a song at Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, “The poor white remains / On the caboose of the train / But it ain’t him to blame / He’s only a pawn in their game.”3 Race and class are distinct, but they have interacted in complex ways from the U.S. slavery era that ended in 1865; to Ronald Reagan announcing his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia in Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964; to Donald Trump’s equally indirect claim to “Make America Great Again” in his 2016 presidential campaign—where “great” is a euphemism for “white.” The Civil Rights Movement changed the language of racism without reducing its scope.

Hayek focused on individual activity as the source of prosperity, and he rejected government in his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom. American economists rejected Keynes in the turbulent 1970s in favor of individual initiatives, and Keynesian macroeconomics was relegated to undergraduate courses. Professional publications amplified Hayek, while economic policymakers still rely on Keynes.20 As noted in the introduction, Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964. He did not have to say a word to communicate his opposition to full citizenship of black Americans. His announcement illustrates the shift in political discourse from overt racism to codes in actions and words.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Smith had a vision of a new economy that was then being born, one based on the division of labour and self-interest. He has been acclaimed as a sage, often by those who believe that markets should rule above all else, that governments should do as little as possible and businesses do what they like. Two hundred years after The Wealth of Nations was published, American President Ronald Reagan championed these principles, taking Smith as his inspiration. Some of his White House officials even took to wearing ties with Smith’s portrait on them. But Smith might not have felt flattered by this. For one thing, he championed the role of markets as an attack on the mercantilist system which then ruled Europe with its many restrictions on buying and selling.

Friedman even suggested abolishing central banks that decide on the amount of money in the economy and replacing them with robots that would spew out money at the required steady rate. The hoped-for result? A steadily growing economy with low inflation. In 1979 Britain voted in Margaret Thatcher as its new prime minister. Soon afterwards Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. Thatcher and Reagan tried to follow Friedman’s recipe for bringing down high inflation by tightly controlling the supply of money. But controlling the money supply was tricky and the governments of Britain and America turned out to be bad at doing it. Many economists blamed the policy for making the recession of the early 1980s worse than it needed to be, even if inflation was eventually reduced.


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

What about country white dialect? Another of my favourite quotes is one attributed to Josh Billings: “It ain’t the things people don’t know. It’s the things they know that ain’t so.” The quote (often credited to Twain too) anticipated later fears about “fake news”, confirmation bias and other mental bad habits. Ronald Reagan used the quote in 1964 but rendered it in standard English: “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” Is that any clearer? Any better? Did Reagan think this statement through better than Billings had? It’s worse, in fact: “the things they know that ain’t so” has a pleasingly punchy rhythm-rhyme combination that makes it unforgettable.

But by 1933, we have the phrase “on welfare” (“you see, there are a lot of people on welfare down there,” from an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune). The OED’s first clearly negative citation comes from 1955: “Signe … said that she was criticized for being on the welfare.” Political junkies know the rest. By the 1970s, Ronald Reagan was campaigning to reinvent the Republican Party as an anti-government party. Among the staples of his campaign was the so-called “welfare queen”, a character that made it into speech after speech of Reagan’s. According to a report of a 1976 campaign stop, “There’s a woman in Chicago,” the Republican candidate said recently to an audience in Gilford, N.H., during his freeswinging attack on welfare abuses.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

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

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

They read Fuller’s books and created the Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” strategy that conquered most of Europe at the beginning of World War II. Fuller’s ideas still govern mechanized warfare today. William J. Olson is a scholar-practitioner of a different sort. Imagine it’s 1983. President Ronald Reagan brands the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and authorizes the largest military buildup since that of the Second World War. Tom Clancy is writing The Hunt for Red October, and the United States and the USSR nearly start a nuclear war over a NATO exercise in Germany called “Able Archer.” At the height of this Cold War frenzy, Olson points to a different future.

Trump’s reversal on Afghanistan: Donald Trump, “Remarks on the Strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia,” The White House, United States Government, delivered at Fort Myer, Arlington, Virginia, 21 August 2017, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/08/21/remarks-president-trump-strategy-afghanistan-and-south-asia. 22. Teddy Roosevelt’s solution: Roosevelt, “Appendix B.” 23. Eisenhower’s solution: Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio and Television Address.” Rule 8: There Will Be Wars without States 1. Debbie Reynolds on Acapulco: David Ehrenstein, “When Acapulco Was All the Rage: Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan and Other A-Listers in Mexico,” The Hollywood Reporter, 15 March 2014, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/acapulco-was-all-rage-elizabeth-687402. 2. “Today Acapulco is a battlefield”: Jessica Dillinger, “The Most Dangerous Cities in the World,” WorldAtlas.com, 25 April 2018, www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-dangerous-cities-in-the-world.html. 3.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

Similar prophets were emerging all over the world, though mainstream economics was shifting very quickly from a corporate Keynesianism – blamed for the combination of stagnation and inflation that followed the ruinous Vietnam War – to a vigorous agenda of free market deregulation under the auspices of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The new economics’ critique came together in London in 1984 at the same time as the G7 summit in the same city that summer, challenging the right of the leaders of seven countries to dictate the economic future of the planet. There was something about the year 1984 that gave it a peculiar resonance for the post-war generation.

The sign was intended for other campaign workers, but the phrase ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ became something of a slogan for the Clinton campaign. It was the same campaign, and the same Carville, who came up with the phrase ‘trickle down doesn’t work’. By itself, this seems like a simple statement of fact, but it was important that a successful presidential candidate should spell this out so clearly. Since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and in many ways before them as well, ‘trickle down’ was the conventional economic assumption that replaced Keynesian economics. If you helped some people get rich, then they would spend more and it would trickle down through the economy to the poorest. It survives to this day in most of the assumptions of mainstream regeneration and economic development, though it is even more obvious now than it was to Carville that wealth doesn’t trickle down, it floods up.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

“Sure, professor,” I said, waving for the waiter. “That’s, like, one of my life’s ambitions.” She unwound a bit. “What’s the other?” I grinned widely. “To fuck Ronald Reagan.” While I was waiting for the call from the Hawking Institute I crashed out in front of the video, reading graphic novels and scanning reruns of twentieth century docudramas. The condenser burbled in the makeshift fume cupboard I’d built in the bathroom and the gene-spinners clicked intermittently as I soaked up Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev. Creatures of another era, when the universe was just about beginning to fill up and society was teetering on the edge of a baroque tomorrow; fascinating cut-outs in a past that was truly another country.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

If a gunman fired 30 feet away from the person you wished to save, you’d have only three hundredths of a second to get in the way. That’s three times faster than an Olympic athlete is allowed to set off at the beginning of a race without it being given as a false start. US Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy ‘took a bullet’ to save Ronald Reagan’s life from the assassination attempt by John Hinckley in 1981. But he managed this by getting into position to shield the president after shots had already been fired. In the event that you could get in the way before the gun went off, you would probably succeed in saving your friend: a handgun bullet is unlikely to pass clean through a human body.

More than 30,000 have been created – though no one has yet managed to produce a blue one. Finding names for so many varieties means that many of them don’t sound much like flowers, from Absolutely, Bubble Bath and Chuckles to Wow!, X-Rated, Yorkshire Bank and Zebra. Many roses are named after celebrities and some even after politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl and Arthur Scargill. But the English rose grower loves a home-grown actress best: you can order and plant a Felicity Kendal, a Jane Asher, a Susan Hampshire, a Hannah Gordon, a Charlotte Rampling, a Penelope Keith, a June Whitfield or a Thelma Barlow (Mavis Riley in Coronation Street).


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

It’s a legitimate question, and a brief historical example from the Democratic side suggests why. As the 1984 presidential election season got under way, Democrats were in trouble. The front-runner for their party’s nomination, Walter Mondale, didn’t stir up much excitement, and he faced an enormously popular incumbent Republican president—Ronald Reagan—who was also an incredible communicator and former movie star. Mondale represented the consummate Democratic insider. A former U.S. senator and vice president under Jimmy Carter, he had spent much of his public life preparing to run for president, working his way up the Democratic Party food chain.

Over the next few political cycles, candidates from outside the establishment of both parties gained ground as the entire political system adjusted to new rules that reformed the backroom patronage system, as well as a new media environment where television reached into every American home. In 1976, the antiestablishment candidate Ronald Reagan challenged sitting President Gerald Ford; on the Democratic side, a relatively obscure governor, Jimmy Carter, locked up the Democratic nomination without the establishment. The former governor of New York and establishment heavyweight W. Averell Harriman reportedly responded to Carter’s nomination by saying, “Jimmy Carter?


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

The shorthand answer is that it’s the system that has been dominant in the English-speaking world, and in financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for about a third of a century. The first and most prominent political exponents of the system were Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK, following her election victory in 1979, and President Ronald Reagan in the USA, following his victory in 1980. There is both a practical and a philosophical aspect to neoliberal economics. The practical aspect is the more visible, so I’ll start with that. It involves policies that are designed to favor business, entrepreneurship, and the individual; to reduce the role of the state; to cut public spending; to increase the individual’s possibilities and responsibilities, both for success and for failure; to promote free trade, and accordingly to eliminate protectionist barriers and tariffs; to reduce the roles of unions and collective bargaining; to minimize taxes; to pursue policies that encourage wealth creators and to trust in the process whereby that wealth trickles down to other sectors of the economy; to move enterprises from public to private ownership.

There is free trade within NAFTA, comprising the USA, Canada, and Mexico, and free trade within the European Union, and there are also bilateral agreements between countries and groups of countries. There has never been a war between two countries that trade freely with each other. Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) One of the most influential economists of the twentieth century—in some people’s judgment the most influential—not least because his policies were central to the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and led to the neoliberal turn in economic policy that is still dominant today. Friedman studied the Great Depression, and didn’t so much contradict the Keynesian view as expand on it, by coming to see the crisis as a problem with the money supply, or the amount of money available to circulate in the economy.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

Inflation was over 10 percent, as was unemployment. Carter's solution was tax cuts for the middle and lower classes, which only increased consumption and put further pressure on the system. All of the economic stimuli that had worked in the previous fifty years had not only stopped working but were making the situation even worse. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Reagan faced a crisis of underinvestment and overconsumption. Reagan's solution was maintaining consumption while simultaneously increasing the amount of investment capital. He did so through “ supply-side economics”: reducing taxes in order to stimulate investment. Reagan did not want to stifle demand, making consumers unable to purchase products.

Reality dictated this evolution. FIFTH CYCLE: FROM SERVICE SUBURBS TO A PERMANENT MIGRANT CLASS Now we turn to the future. If the fifty-year pattern holds—and a series of cycles that has lasted 220 years has a fairly reliable track record—we are now exactly in the middle of the fifth cycle, the one ushered in by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. This pattern indicates that the current structure of American society is in place until approximately 2030, and that no president, regardless of ideology, can alter the basic economic and social trends. Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952, twenty years after Roosevelt, but he was unable to change the basic patterns that had been established by the New Deal.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If you’re from the University of Chicago, once home to the high priest of laissez-faire economics, Milton Friedman, you believe that a pause in economic growth, such as a recession, is a temporary event. Leave the market alone to do its work and the economy will get back on track. This was the line of thinking behind the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s that drastically reduced the role of government. To free-market acolytes, an issue like rising joblessness isn’t a problem so much as a hiccup. High unemployment rates force workers to lower wage demands until it becomes profitable for someone to hire them. It’s the market (and certainly not tax-and-spend liberals in government) that will get an economy growing again, the thinking goes.

The firm almost failed, which would have been a financial catastrophe for the partners. (A former executive once confided to me that only a last-minute cash infusion from one of Canada’s wealthiest families kept the sheriff from padlocking the company’s doors.) In the 1980s, the same tide of deregulation championed by Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States swept across other OECD countries, including Canada. Until then, the financial services industry had been divided into four separate pillars: banks, trust companies, brokerage firms and insurance. Cross-ownership was prohibited. When the restrictions preventing banks from owning brokerage houses were lifted, the major Canadian banks jumped at the chance to get into the lucrative business of investment banking.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

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

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

Government spending in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) area, for example, varies from around 30 per cent in South Korea and 35 per cent in the US through to around 50 per cent in the UK, France and Germany and approaching 60 per cent in Sweden.13 The market’s influence on the allocation of resources is only a shadow of its nineteenth-century self, notwithstanding the efforts of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The global rules that used to be set by the imperial powers are now agreed upon in shifting multilateral groupings, from the G20 through to NATO, from the North American Free Trade Association through to the European Union and from the United Nations through to, as we shall see, the Shanghai Co-operation Organization.

However, given that China’s population is four times the size of America’s and twenty times the size of the UK’s, the increase that has taken place in just a handful of years is remarkable. Through investment in both physical and human capital, the rapid urbanization of China appears to have global implications that are poorly captured in the largely domestically driven explanations of growing inequality elsewhere in the world. Second, while the arrival of Ronald Reagan (and, before him, Margaret Thatcher) led to a profound shift in beliefs about free markets, political parties of all colours increasingly felt constrained by global economic realities, whether or not they necessarily sympathized with the views of free-market fundamentalists. The fear of capital or labour exodus plays a bigger and bigger role in government attempts to make economies ‘business friendly’.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

“We built it” became so popular with the Republican base that the Republican National Convention in Tampa incorporated the theme into the proceedings.11 The “you didn’t build that” remark struck a nerve in a country where small business owners feel overtaxed, overregulated, underrepresented, and underappreciated for their contribution to the building of the American economy on Main Streets across the country. All justified! Still, “you didn’t build that” speaks to a more unsettling reality—that is, a feeling on the part of many Americans that Big Government is constantly encroaching on their lives in ways that undermine their personal freedoms and the workings of the free market. President Ronald Reagan had popularized this theme in his 1980 run for the presidency with the one-liner “Get the government off the backs of the people.”12 To be fair, most Americans know that many of the things they depend on day to day come from taxpayer dollars and local, state, and federal government programs: the public schools our children attend, the roads we drive on, the air traffic controllers that guide our flights, the National Weather Service that keeps us abreast of local conditions, the public hospitals that minister to the sick, the motor vehicle departments that register our cars, the US Postal Service that delivers our packages and mail, the fire departments and police departments that protect our safety, the prisons that guard convicted felons, the systems that flow water into our businesses and homes, the sanitation departments that recycle our waste, etc.

However, a shift has taken place at the state and local levels, with more and more existing public infrastructure being sold off or leased as concessions to the private sector and new infrastructure being privatized from the get-go. These are called “public-private partnerships.” Part of the explanation for the shift lies in the change in the political landscape that began in the early 1980s with the ascent to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both of whom embraced privatization and deregulation. The rationale was and still is that government agencies overseeing and operating government-financed and -managed infrastructure, without competition biting at their heels, eventually become lethargic bureaucracies, slow to innovate, and poor managers when they finally do so.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

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 deceleration began around the time of the moon landing. In the United States, hourly wages peaked in the early 1970s and dipped thereafter, household income growth began to slow, the larger economy experienced so-called stagflation and three sharp recessions under Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Though perhaps the inflection point had really arrived slightly earlier. One of the striking patterns of the modern era was logarithmic economic growth, in which the time it took for the global economy to double in size grew shorter and shorter and shorter every century after 1492, pushing us, in theory, toward the infinite growth that utopians dub the Singularity.

In hindsight, then, the mood in the White House that spring afternoon in 2009 was deluded. But it was an important delusion, because it reflected an understandable belief: namely, that American politics could still work the way it used to work, under presidents as different as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. A failed presidency (Hoover, Carter, W.) would lead to a landslide for the opposition party, which would be interpreted as a mandate for governing, which would lead to a dramatic shift in policy, which would continue until the opposition party adapted to the new political reality and produced a Dwight Eisenhower or a Bill Clinton.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

Joining him on the line were Gary Gensler and Mary Schapiro, heads of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, respectively; Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve; Bill Dudley from the New York Fed; and all the other leaders of the country’s major financial authorities. Between them, they were responsible for markets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. The group had been created by Ronald Reagan in the aftermath of the October 1987 crash to facilitate better coordination between government agencies. Colloquially, it became known as the “Plunge Protection Team” thanks to an unsubstantiated but pervasive rumor that it routinely intervened in markets to serve government ends. The purpose of the call this particular evening was to find an answer to a question being asked by millions of people around the world at that moment: What the fuck just happened?

CHAPTER 3: THAT’S A FUGAZI Published a book called: Ralph Nelson Elliot, The Wave Principle, first published in 1938. CHAPTER 4: THE TRADE I If it wasn’t the Chinese: The “Plunge Protection Team” is a moniker given to the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, a group of the foremost U.S. regulators and government officials. The group was set up by Ronald Reagan after the 1987 Wall Street Crash to foster better communication between government agencies in times of market stress. It is the subject of frequent speculation that it intervenes in markets to serve U.S. government ends. The Bilderberg Group is a group of around 150 leading global politicians, financiers, and businessmen who meet up once a year to discuss world affairs.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

They were right, as it was the power of the federal government that eventually did away with segregation. America’s statist experiment was relatively brief, about fifty years—most of it, it should be noted, marked by roaring economic growth, rising productivity, and high levels of entrepreneurship. The Roosevelt revolution ended with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” And he said it in 1981, in the midst of what was then the worst recession since the 1930s. In other words, Reagan was dismissing the role government might play even in a calamitous crisis. Although he actually increased federal spending, the numbers are deceptive.

Founded in London in 1888, its inaugural issue promised to be the friend of “the honest financier, the bona fide investor, the respectable broker, the genuine director, [and] the legitimate speculator.” Through world wars and depression, fascism and socialism, it has been a consistent advocate of capitalism. It supported the free-market reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that ushered in the economic era we live in today, as well as the broad expansion of free trade that has brought virtually every country on the planet into a single world economy. Core to its identity is the belief that most problems in the world can be solved by more open markets and greater liberalization.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

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

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

As a nonpartisan organization, the league occasionally ran into predictable conflicts with the duopoly. In 1980, for example, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the first presidential debate of that election when the league invited John Anderson, a freethinking congressman who broke with the Republican Party to run as an independent.1 Four years later, the league condemned the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale for “totally abusing the process” by trying to control what questions could be asked. By the next presidential race in 1984, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) had begun plotting how to take over the debates themselves. The RNC chair, Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., made the reason explicit: “The two major political parties should do everything in their power to strengthen their own position.”2 Months later, a report by the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies endorsed “turning over the sponsorship of the Presidential debates to the two major parties.”3 The report’s findings, and its timing, were no coincidence.

Unrealistic promises and talk without action are worthless, but in today’s unhealthy system that’s what passes for progress. At the signing of the Social Security Act, President Roosevelt acknowledged that “this law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.”32 Since the law’s passage, presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan have worked to improve the program, expanding coverage, and scaling back costs when necessary. Today’s political-industrial complex views action as a threat. What if a powerful customer base—say, a provoked special interest—reacts poorly? Or what if a key channel, like a partisan media outlet, penalizes the action in front of millions of viewers?


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors. During the 1980s this strategy was pursued with particular zeal by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, inaugurating the approach that today we call neoliberalism.6 With the rise of neoliberalism, governments’ pursuit of growth shifted away from social objectives (use-values) and focused instead on creating the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange-value).

And yes, there might be limits to the amount of land available for renewable resources like food, but we can always develop better fertilisers and more productive crop varieties, or grow food in warehouses. The Oxford professor Wilfred Beckerman went so far as to say that, thanks to the wonders of technological progress, there is ‘no reason to suppose that economic growth cannot continue for another 2,500 years’. Ronald Reagan ran an election campaign against incumbent President Jimmy Carter – an environmentalist – by attacking the notion of limits, and linking a celebration of limitlessness to the spirit of the American Dream itself. ‘There is no such thing as limits to growth,’ he said, ‘because there is no such thing as limits to the human imagination.’


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

Between them, these satellites are carrying twenty-five high-precision clocks, built in California, as part of a navigational experiment called the Global Positioning System. These clocks could have saved everyone on board flight KAL 007. FOUR DAYS AFTER the Korean airliner was shot down by a Soviet missile, the US president, Ronald Reagan, made an emotional television address in which he described the tragedy as a “massacre,” a “crime against humanity” and an “act of barbarism” by the Soviet authorities, vowing to take steps to ensure it never happened again.2 The experimental satellites flying above the aircraft as it plummeted down to Earth were the first in a constellation we know today as GPS, then being developed by the US military.

Any state that fights another state risks harming itself and its interests. Warfare has followed globalization in becoming a web of connections and acts. GPS is global because there is no such concept any more as a singular American military force. Warring states are entangled, as are national and commercial interests. When Ronald Reagan declared publicly that GPS would be made available to civilian aircraft, following the 1983 shooting down by the Soviet military of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, he was making political capital out of a decision that had been made in the early 1970s as GPS was being designed. It was always designed for use beyond the US military and it has now become a service for the globe.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

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

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

‘Remarks by President Trump on the Illegal Immigration Crisis and Border Security’ (1 November 2018); https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-illegal-immigration-crisis-border-security/. 75. Holly Case, ‘Hungary’s Real Indians’, Eurozine (3 April 2018). 76. Ronald Reagan, presidential farewell address to the nation (11 January 1989). On Reagan’s suggestion that immigrants have ‘made America great’, see https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/03/becoming-american-initiative/did-ronald-reagan-say-immigrants-made-america-grea/. 77. Maalouf, In the Name of Identity. 78. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 306. 79.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.10 Health officials in the Nixon administration had favored a decriminalization approach and the use of methadone and other harm-reduction strategies, until Nixon overruled them with his politically motivated expansion of intolerance, prohibition, and criminalization. Ronald Reagan expanded Nixon’s framework ideologically and practically. His wife Nancy led the ideological charge with her “Just Say No” campaign, which applied the naive idea that people just needed a helpful reminder to summon the willpower to resist drugs. This head-in-the-sand approach to the problem was suitably ridiculed.

In 2009, the US government backed a coup against the democratically elected left-wing government in Honduras. That government is now torturing, executing, and disappearing environmental and labor activists.49 This was just the most recent in a long string of foreign direct and indirect interventions in the politics of Central America, including Ronald Reagan’s backing of dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala as well as of the Contras’ attempt to overthrow the leftist government in Nicaragua. Once we understand migration as a global process driven in large part by the policies of our own government, we in the United States should feel obligated to end those practices and open our doors to those fleeing them.


pages: 75 words: 22,220

Occupy by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, Martin Wolf, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, union organizing

So, for example, among Tea Party advocates and, of course, the rest of the population, a considerable majority are in favor of more spending for health and more spending for education. They’re against welfare, but more spending to help, say, women with dependent children. That’s the result of very effective propaganda. One of Ronald Reagan’s great successes was to demonize the concept of welfare. In Reaganite rhetoric, welfare means a rich black woman driving to a welfare office in a chauffeured Cadillac so she can take your hard-earned money and spend it on drugs or something. Well, nobody’s in favor of that. But are you in favor of what welfare actually does?


pages: 500 words: 156,079

Game Over Press Start to Continue by David Sheff, Andy Eddy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, air freight, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, game design, HyperCard, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, pattern recognition, profit motive, revision control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Lincoln worked on an embezzlement case in Coakley’s department (a county assessor was accused of accepting a bribe), and then for an associate district attorney named Ed Meese. He aided Meese on several cases and enjoyed working with the ambitious and contentious future U.S. attorney general. When Meese went off to work for Governor Ronald Reagan as his clemency secretary in 1966, Lincoln went into the navy with a commission as a judge advocate. He headed to Newport, Rhode Island, to take the officers’ training course and learn the ropes of military adjudication. When he was offered duty in either New York City or Seattle, he headed west.

Isolated on a naval base, he had no contact with antiwar protests, while Grace, recruiting on college campuses with a group of navy pilots, was attacked physically and verbally. When her tour of duty was over, she was relieved to retire from the military. When Lincoln followed her into civilian life in 1970, the couple had to decide where to settle down. He considered looking up Ed Meese, then in Sacramento with Governor Ronald Reagan, but in the end they chose to stay in Seattle. He sent his résumé to all the top Seattle firms and was hired by Sax and MacIver, where he built up a sizable practice, specializing in banking and corporation law. Lincoln often worked with a CPA who did the books for Ron Judy and Al Stone. The CPA asked Lincoln to look at a contract between his clients and Nintendo of America.

Another game, for computers, called “Faces,” was sold through a joint-venture company called ParaGraph to Spectrum Holobyte. “Faces” had scrambled puzzle pieces made of slices of the faces of famous scientists, painters, and politicians. Players unscrambled the falling pieces to create complete portraits. One could end up with a face that combined Mikhail Gorbachev’s bald head, Margaret Thatcher’s eyes, and Ronald Reagan’s chin. “Faces” also had digitized images of cartoon characters and paintings (a winking Mona Lisa, for instance, and a Van Gogh self-portrait). Players could also scan pictures of themselves and insert them into the game. The Los Angeles Times reviewer lauded it: “[It doesn’t] encourage you to destroy worlds, and errors do not result in gory deaths.… While playing, you do your part to improve U.S.


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

The views of a Walter Lippmann or a Walter Cronkite, not to mention a Franklin D. Roosevelt, can do more to determine the climate of opinion than the views of millions of less respected and less strategically situated people can do-consider that despite his faltering delivery and often faulty logic, Ronald Reagan gained a reputation as the Great Communicator. "[I]n a mass democracy," Ropke wrote, "policy has to withstand ... the pressure of ... mass opinions, mass emotions, and mass passions," but these are "guided, inflamed, and exploited by pressure groups, demagogy, and party machines alike."37 By concentrating on the ideas disseminated by strategically placed elites and influential persons, one has a more defensible basis for generalizations about the prevailing ideologies that matter.

Many people eventually grew jaded, having heard the bogus claim so often, but its continued assertion suggests that the emergency game still promises a positive payoff. Sometimes, most notably with the wage-price controls and the energy controls of the 1970s, the game was played with huge stakes. Even under the Tory administration of Ronald Reagan, emergency claims continued to be pressed, and honored. Special farm loans, international travel restrictions, and export controls exemplify the recent emergency actions taken by the "conservative" American government. 3 Crisis and Leviathan 239 THE MIXED ECONOMY: MARCH INTO SOCIALISM OR FASCISM?

Simon concluded: "There is nothing like becoming an economic planner oneself to learn what is desperately, stupidly wrong with such a system."46 It got no better as Congress passed ever more complicated energy legislation in the mid-1970s (see Table 10.1). Inevitably another crisis struck; early in 1979 the gas lines reappeared. The Energy Department's erratic efforts to fix the problem just made it worse. 47 Only with Ronald Reagan's election and the scrapping of all oil price controls was the mess permitted to clean itself up through market processes. Even then, however, a complex system of price controls for natural gas lingered into the mid-1980s, a political dragon too fearful for even Sir Ronald to slay. Notwithstanding the gas lines of 1979, the Carter years were relatively calm: no great wars, no burning cities, no masses of angry protesters in the streets.


pages: 468 words: 145,998

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Henry M. Paulson

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doha Development Round, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, price discovery process, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, trade liberalization, young professional

I was hesitant to leave Washington, but Nancy Reagan had long ago invited me to speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I knew the markets were watching my every move: canceling the trip could spark rumors that might further endanger Citi. I arrived at the Westlake Village Inn in Simi Valley at about 9:30 p.m. and went to bed almost immediately in order to be rested for the morning. Of all the rough nights I’d endured throughout the crisis, this one was by far the worst. Surrounded by photos of Ronald Reagan in the White House and at his Santa Barbara ranch, I lay awake, tormented by self-doubt and second-guessing.

Before my 11:00 a.m. speech, I toured the library, where the president’s writings were framed on the walls. I stopped to read his words, neatly written in longhand, and I reflected on what an extraordinary communicator he had been. He understood the immense power of a clear message, delivered simply and straightforwardly. And his message had been clear and simple. More than any other president, Ronald Reagan represented the free-market principles I had long believed in. As I was about to address an audience of Reagan conservatives, I was struck by the irony of my situation. To protect free-enterprise capitalism, I had become the Treasury secretary who would forever be associated with government intervention and bank bailouts.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

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

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

For some years, large corporations had argued with governments that they needed to move money around the world faster and in much greater quantities in order to take full advantage of its value as they expanded global operations. Their requests were greeted with skepticism until they found steadfast allies in the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. By the late 1980s, the most powerful capitalist economies had lifted the bureaucratic barriers that blocked the free movement of capital between them. The sovereign control of money flowing in and out of individual countries, one of the keystones of the nation-state, was abandoned.

This was occasioned by the struggle in the Cali region following the arrests, as the smaller mafias making up the cartel jostled to seize the top spots the Rodríguezes had vacated. Taking down an Escobar or a Rodríguez is the stuff of law enforcement legend, and rightly so. But in the case of cocaine, these spectacular operations do nothing to disrupt supply or demand. It is now more than a quarter of a century after Ronald Reagan announced the Colombian cartels to be the prime target in a war on drugs that the president redefined as a central national security issue for the United States. And yet cocaine from Colombia is cheaper and easier to acquire in the United States than ever before. Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent in an attempt to root out an industry that has merely grown in size, in scope, in profits, and in human sacrifices—tens of thousands of people have lost their lives; millions more lives have been shattered.

Hatanaka’s business dealings to discover that he had been close to some notorious exponents of land sharking—the most ruthless business practice to emerge during the baburu, and one that quickly inspired a dizzy mixing of Japan’s mighty corporate world with the proud yakuza underworld. The chain of events leading up to Hatanaka’s death in 1994 began nine years earlier, halfway around the world at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Ronald Reagan, under pressure from Congress but emboldened by his ideological partner and friend Margaret Thatcher, was now convinced that the world of international finance needed a big shake-up in order to usher in the regime of free trade that became known as globalization. Reagan’s vision of free trade and of the liberalization of international financial markets was coming under intense pressure from the Democrat-controlled Congress.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Boulware took a hard line toward unions, in negotiations presenting the company’s offer as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, while arguing its reasonableness through newspaper advertisements and other media to employees and residents in the towns where GE plants were located. In addition to promoting the virtues of the company, Boulware worked to educate GE workers and the general public about the merits of free-market capitalism, hiring Ronald Reagan to be a spokesperson for the firm in its ideological offensive. GE’s efforts, though unusually extensive, were part of a broad corporate campaign to reshape public thinking about the economy, an extended drive to counter the ideological and political impact of the New Deal.17 GE and other electrical equipment manufacturers also started transferring operations out of their large factories to smaller plants located in the South, the border states, the West Coast, rural New England, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic region, and Puerto Rico.

Between 1949 and 1958, workers built 14,885 apartments in Nowa Huta, with the original plan essentially completed two years later, as the population reached 100,000. Many residents came to view the city quite favorably.41 The pre-1960 part of Nowa Huta forms half an octagon, with major boulevards radiating out from a central square on one edge (in 2004 renamed after Ronald Reagan). The steel mill gates are a half mile away, far enough so that the plant is barely visible from the center of the city, though, no doubt, in its heyday smoke from the mill, a notorious polluter, could have been seen. A tramline connects the mill and the original housing and commercial district.

Seen as a success, additional special zones were established over the course of the 1980s in other coastal areas and, in 1990, in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai. Two years later came a new set of zones in other parts of the country.16 During the 1980s, Chinese leaders came to share the cultlike faith in the power and efficacy of markets associated in the West with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and their followers. The dream of modernity in China, wrote Hong Kong–based social scientist Pun Ngai, became associated with “the great belief in capital and the market,” a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree shift from the prior belief that socialism represented a more advanced phase of history. “Search for modernity” and “quest for globability” became catchphrases as the marketization of a once almost completely socialist economy began.17 A similar swing took place in Vietnam.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

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

Big business and big banks loved Bork too. More and more allies emerged, and Borkist attitudes spread. It wasn’t so much that Bork’s and Posner’s ideas transformed antitrust laws; it was more that judges began interpreting them in new ways and allowed business to steer around them. When Republican Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, Borkist lobbyists increasingly used another odd argument – similar to the one that James Murdoch would use to try and bamboozle Britain many years later – that antitrust laws had to be diluted in the name of building up American national economic champions in order to defend ‘America’s international competitiveness’.15 Let them exploit American consumers and workers, they were saying, to boost their profits so they can better compete on the world stage.

The company bought out competitors in related market sectors, created economies of scale to make it harder for competitors to break in, and sold off or closed business units that did not pass muster. In the pre-Bork era antitrust laws would have stopped much of this, but no longer. Welch’s strategy caught on, helping fuel the great Wall Street merger boom of the 1980s, and spurred by Bork’s beefy message the administration of President Ronald Reagan took the brakes off.26 ‘The general modus operandi was to break apart the old conglomerates that had been assembled in the 1950s and 1960s,’ says Barry Lynn, a US antitrust expert, ‘and then reassemble the parts in ways that better linked like to like … [the] goal was to reduce competition as much as possible.’

Coelho opened the gates to a flood of new money into the Democratic Party. Some came from Don Dixon, a deal maker who later went to prison for fraud after a lurid six-week trial with testimony describing call girls, hot tubs, yachts and the gift of a $40,000 painting to the Vatican, which got him an audience with the pope. After the Democrats’ devastating loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980 Coelho became even more single-minded about pursuing the big money – in effect, corrupting the party – as the route to power.11 At the same time the new Democrats shifted their attention away from working-class whites and labour issues towards civil rights and social tolerance. In 1982 the Democratic National Committee officially recognised seven new caucuses: women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, liberals and business professionals.


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

In his speech at the conference’s opening session, he called him “the father of our nation’s and mankind’s hero.”9 High-level international conferences were a rare occurrence in Israel at the time. It was a stellar lineup of politicians, academics, pundits, and military and intelligence veterans. The star speaker was former CIA director George H. W. Bush, who had dropped out of the Republican presidential primaries a few weeks earlier and would soon be selected as Ronald Reagan’s running mate. Bush lectured on “The U.S. and the Fight Against International Terrorism.” A majority of the speakers were on the right politically, including both Republicans from the United States and members of conservative parties in Europe. The few Democrats who attended from the United States were “Cold War liberals,” such as Senator Henry Jackson, who spoke on “Terrorism as a Weapon in International Politics.”

The Reagan administration in the United States was furious over the Iraqi reactor bombing, accusing Israel of using weapons supplied for “self-defense” in an operation far from its borders and going behind the back of its ally. The administration froze the supply of further F-16s—the standard punishment over the next couple of years whenever Israel stepped out of line. Begin had high hopes for the new president and a more favorable attitude after Carter’s censoriousness. Ronald Reagan was instinctively pro-Israel and remained so throughout his presidency, though his friendship was severely tried. During the US presidential campaign, he said that the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran had “increased Israel’s value as perhaps the only remaining strategic asset in the region on which the United States can truly rely.”2 But Reagan had decided to sell Saudi Arabia five Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft.

Both were sons of lifelong Revisionists, steeped in an uncompromising version of Zionism, and both opposed any retreat from the whole of the land of Israel. But both were also their fathers’ sons. Begin’s Revisionism, like his father’s, was the parochial variety—a warmer, more Israeli ideology. Netanyahu, like his father, saw Revisionist Zionism as part of a wider Western tradition that was in tune with the conservative thinking of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Benny and Bibi could cooperate on many issues, but there was a difference between them that went to the core. One morning during the campaign, they were both interviewed on the radio. Bibi was asked what he had for breakfast. A yoghurt, he answered. Begin then said, “That’s exactly what the primaries are doing to the Likud.


pages: 523 words: 143,639

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cable laying ship, centre right, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, undersea cable, upwardly mobile

Commander Oliver now had one black mark in his service record, and the brass never overlooked submarine collisions regardless of the circumstances. This collision, however, was rather minor in comparison to the one that almost took my life two months later. CHAPTER NINETEEN We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country. —RONALD REAGAN THEY SAY YOUR LIFE PASSES BEFORE your eyes just before you die. For submariners, the only thing that passes before our eyes is a wall of water. In early 1981, while aboard the nuclear submarine USS Drum, that wall of water visited me more than once in my dreams. One nightmare seemed so real that I jolted straight up in my rack from a deep slumber and pounded my head on the steel-encased fluorescent light above me.

The collision distracted more than half of the Soviet forces searching for us, as they assumed incorrectly that the two collisions—the one with the Victor III and the one with Nissho Maru—were caused by the same boat. The Washington managed to sneak away, but the accident sparked a political furor in Japan. President Ronald Reagan now had two submarine accidents on his hands. Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki blasted him for taking more than a day to notify Japanese authorities about the Nissho Maru’s demise, and the fact that a U.S. P3 Orion aircraft circling overhead made no attempt to rescue the survivors. On April 11, President Reagan expressed regret over the accident and offered compensation to the victims while assuring the Japanese that radioactive contamination need not be a concern.

Regardless, cable-tapping missions to the Sea of Okhotsk came to an abrupt halt. There was no evidence that the Soviets found the tap placed in the Barents Sea by the Parche, so that submarine, with Commander Peter J. Graef in charge, deployed again to northern waters in 1982 for a 137-day trip. Upon her return, President Ronald Reagan awarded the Parche a fourth Presidential Unit Citation, which he delivered to Graef along with a box of cigars. The Parche went into the yards through 1983, while the noisy Seawolf was relegated to finding missile parts. In the wings, the nearly finished USS Richard B. Russell awaited her chance to pick up the gauntlet.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

It is indicative of the Black Panthers’ bold but reckless approach that they did not conduct any preliminary reconnaissance of the California capitol before executing their mission there—something that CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC certainly would have done. Instead, Bobby Seale, leading the group that day, parked and asked bystanders for directions to the assembly’s chambers. California governor Ronald Reagan soon signed into law the measure to curtail the carrying of loaded weapons in public. In fact, despite their militaristic appearance, the Panthers never developed the institutional practices and strengths that actually make military organizations effective, such as training, doctrine, unit discipline, logistics, and strategic planning.

The transformations brought about by the Movement have hardly gone uncontested. Since the 1960s, there have been three substantial backlashes against equality for Black Americans. The first, which came late in that decade, was embodied by George Wallace. The second came under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his 1980 campaign at a fairground just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech in which he emphasized, “I believe in states’ rights.” A third wave, less restrained and uglier, emerged in recent years under Donald Trump. America’s demographics and values are changing, with more Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women holding positions of power, and greater acceptance of openly gay and transgender people, and that is causing older white heterosexual men too often to react with anger and resentment.

For Cobb’s role in conceiving the Freedom Schools, see, for example, George Chilcoat and Jerry Ligon, “Developing Democratic Citizens: The Mississippi Freedom Schools,” in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, edited by Susie Erenrich (Black Belt Press, 1999), 108. Also see Bob Zellner, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (NewSouth Books, 2008), 138, where Zellner writes that “Cobb and some of the SNCC people developed the idea of the Freedom School.” “I believe in states’ rights”: “Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair Speech,” Neshoba (Mississippi) Democrat, August 3, 1980. America’s demographics and values: For example, the people who assaulted the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, tended to be older, white males with jobs. “Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

True, Ferris was only 38 years old, much less experienced than other worthy contenders. But Ferris, he believed, could grow into the job. When Carlson nominated Ferris as his successor, the United board kept him waiting for two hours while deliberating over the choice. Finally Director Justin Dart, a California industrialist serving in Gov. Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” emerged from the boardroom. “Some of the fellows have some reservations about Ferris,” Dart said. “We like his drive.… We just wish he were a little older.” In the end the directors decided to go along with Carlson’s choice. While Carlson would remain head of the holding company, known as UAL, Inc., Dick Ferris would become president of United Airlines itself, assuming responsibility for the task of preserving United’s hard-won trophy as the biggest carrier in America.

“If you agree with these recommendations … we shall implement our action program immediately.” There was silence. Then in the back of the room a single director slowly and deliberately began to applaud. Everyone turned to look. It was Justin Dart, the wealthy California industrialist, one of the best friends Gov. Ronald Reagan ever had. At one of his earliest press conferences as president, Jimmy Carter announced that airlines represented the “first question” his administration would take up in his mission to reform government. The move was counterintuitive—a Democrat proposing to dismantle regulation. But as when President Nixon went to Red China five years earlier, partisanship was in retreat.

Burr was shown into an office so expansive he could barely tell that the man at the other end was Murdoch himself. It seemed to take Murdoch half the afternoon to walk across the office to greet him. This being election day in 1980, all that Murdoch could talk about was the apparent landslide victory in the making for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter—the last thing in the world Burr cared about or wanted to discuss at the moment. Those planes … what about those planes? Murdoch, it turned out, had no idea whether he had planes on the market or not. “Come to Australia next month,” he cheerfully instructed him. Burr arrived back in Houston, dejected.


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.” PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS How do we get people to care about our ideas?

The validity of the see-for-yourself claim causes some people to leap, illogically, to the rumormongers’ conclusion. This is how testable credentials can backfire—the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid. Testable credentials are useful in many domains. For example, take the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed this question to the audience during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. Reagan could have focused on statistics—the high inflation rate, the loss of jobs, the rising interest rates. But instead of selling his case he deferred to his audience. Another example of testable credentials comes from Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA).


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

In 1967 Milton Friedman predicted that as workers got used to higher inflation, they would demand higher wages—negating any additional demand for labor. By the 1970s, he was proved right as both unemployment and inflation rose, and recessions worsened. Friedrich Hayek’s star rose as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and other conservatives embraced his deep suspicion of government meddling. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1974 and used his acceptance speech to attack his colleagues’ fondness for economic engineering: “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”

The public and politicians had never understood why the Park Service would welcome fire, especially in Yellowstone, the nation’s oldest and most beloved national park. In August, NPS director William Mott declared a freeze on all prescribed burning in national parks. That September, a group of congressmen petitioned Ronald Reagan to force the NPS to forsake prescribed burning, or what they derisively called “Let it burn.” The park had become a vital source of tourist revenue for western states, and in addition, many saw the policy of prescribed burning as endangering the economic vitality of the logging and tourism industries.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

A common language, a familiar worldview, and a growing fascination with each other are bringing together businessmen, nongovernmental activists, and writers. This doesn’t mean that the United States and India will agree on every policy issue. After all, Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed about several issues during their close wartime alliance, most notably India’s independence, and America broke with Britain over the Suez crisis in 1956. Ronald Reagan, a staunch supporter of Israel, condemned its invasion of Lebanon in 1978. Washington and New Delhi are big powers with complex foreign commitments and concerns. They have different interests and thus will inevitably have disputes over policy. Also, unlike Britain and America, they have different outlooks on the world.

The street demonstrations and public protests against the Pershing deployments made for good television, but the reality was that, in most polls, 30 to 40 percent of Europeans, and often more, strongly supported American policies. Even in Germany, where pacifist feelings ran sky-high, 53 percent of the population supported the Pershing deployments, according to a 1981 poll in Der Spiegel. A majority of the French supported American policy through much of Ronald Reagan’s two terms, even preferring him to the Democratic candidate in the 1984 election, Walter Mondale. Today, in contrast, staggering majorities in most European countries—as high as 80 percent in many places—oppose U.S. foreign policy. The percentage of people holding a favorable view of the United States has gone up considerably since the election of Barack Obama, but in many countries it is still below the levels seen in 2000.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

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

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

Journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge describe Proposition 13 as the beginning of “a peasants’ revolt that swept across the country. . . . It reminded Americans that their country was founded by a tax revolt, and that politicians were the public’s servants, not its masters.”27 Then came the presidency of Ronald Reagan. “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government,” Reagan told Americans, summing up the theme of his candidacy. The country was facing a crisis, and the problems were “parallel and . . . proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth in government.”28 Americans agreed, and elected Reagan in a landslide.

Population by Year,” Multpl.com, November 1, 2014, http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table (accessed April 13, 2015). 26. Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter 9. 27. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 88. 28. Ronald Reagan, “First Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1981, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres61.html (accessed April 21, 2015). 29. Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream? (New York: Random House, 2012), p. xxii. 30. See, for instance, Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal; Reich, Beyond Outrage; Smith, Who Stole the American Dream?


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He was a pioneer in venture capital, funding the first-ever software company, Activision; the first floppy disk manufacturers, Quantum and Priam; the first agricultural DNA company Hybritech; and the first Silicon Valley Chinese Immigrant entrepreneur, David Lee, who founded Qume, the first daisy wheel computer printer. In 1981, he was appointed chairman of the US Export-Import Bank by President Ronald Reagan, where he led the various export-import banks from around the world to make their loans at market rates, saving all the countries billions of dollars. In 1986, he became administrator of the UNDP (second in ranking only to the Secretary General of the United Nations), where he visited leaders of 110 countries, promoting free markets, women in the work force, and democracy.

Rosa Parks Money won't create success, the freedom to make it will. Nelson Mandela Some people get rich first. Deng Xiaoping Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Ronald Reagan Freedom Matters Most The more I live, the more I travel, and the more people I meet, the more I realize that freedom matters most. Free people are capable of anything. Free countries outgrow government controlled countries, and the freer they are, the faster they grow. And free products spread faster.


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

“Your face turned red as a beet,” Grandma would say, laughing and half-apologetic, whenever she retold the story. “Shit, I didn’t know what to do.” In a few months, when the election rolled around, Mom would align with one-third of Kansas voters and cast her first ballot for Carter’s reelection. But Ronald Reagan won, of course, and got to work cutting taxes. Reagan said that big, private money would “trickle down” to us through the economy, as though we were standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain. Reagan was big on states’ rights and deregulation, which appealed to the government-wary streak of my people.

The Family and Medical Leave Act that might have protected Mom’s job for a few weeks wouldn’t be passed for another eight years; toward the end of her pregnancy, she’d been forced to quit whatever low-paying gig she had at the time. So Mom would be on her own with a child not yet in school, an infant, a checkbook for a bank account with thirty bucks in it, and long miles between us and any town, any store. With Matt’s arrival just weeks before Ronald Reagan’s reelection, Mom would soon cast her second vote in a national election. This time, though, her politics were different. While her teenage instincts had gone with losing incumbent Carter the year I was born, by 1984 she had been won over by Reagan’s charm or at least by the national consensus that he was a good president.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

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

Yet a randomised evaluation showed that this had nothing to do with the program: men in the control group were just as likely to get jobs as men in the treatment group. It took randomisation to reveal the truth. Gueron was ‘hooked . . . on the beauty and power of an experiment’.20 Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Gueron worked with state and local agencies across the United States. These were controversial times for welfare policy. Ronald Reagan had told his campaign rallies the story of a ‘Cadillac-driving welfare queen’: an African-American woman who defrauded the welfare system.21 Critics claimed that forcing welfare recipients into low-paid jobs was ‘modern-day slavery’. Bill Clinton ran for president on a pledge to ‘end welfare as we know it’.

By contrast with product commercials, at least political advertisements have a measurable impact.9 But the fact that the effect has disappeared a week after seeing the ad is a reminder that few ads are memorable. The history of political advertising has produced a handful of famous advertisements – such as Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ segment, or the attack ad on Michael Dukakis for releasing Willie Horton from jail – but they are the exception. Most political advertising – like Rick Perry’s riff on Texan pride – is pretty forgettable. The Perry study suggests that a last-minute television blitz would indeed increase a candidate’s share of the vote.


pages: 377 words: 89,000

Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Edward Jenner, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, longitudinal study, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Tragedy of the Commons

Realizing that American children might soon be denied lifesaving vaccines, the federal government stepped in. On October 18, 1986, the last day of the Ninety-Ninth Congress, legislators passed a bill that protected vaccine makers: the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. One month later, President Ronald Reagan signed it into law. The act contained the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which included a list of compensable injuries possibly caused by vaccines. Designed to make things easier for parents, the act specified awards for loss of earnings, lawyers’ fees, and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering.

Given that many hepatitis B virus infections occur without symptoms—and are not reported to the CDC—this estimate is probably low. On January 20, 1961, during his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan, during a debate with President Jimmy Carter, asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Both men understood the prevailing mood. Kennedy had appealed to a sense of community, sending thousands of young people into programs like the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA); he asked Americans to see themselves as part of something greater, to take responsibility for something greater.


pages: 347 words: 86,274

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

(The Onion satirized the candidate’s many glamorous photographs in a story headlined “Obama Practices Looking-Off-into-Future Pose.”29) The source of the candidate’s glamour was not merely his campaign’s graphic design, however, but the persona those images signified. Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combined youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy (and Ronald Reagan, another glamorous president), the candidate was both charming and self-contained. While Kennedy’s wealth set him apart, Obama’s mystery stemmed from his exotic background—an international upbringing and biracial ethnicity that defied conventional categories and distanced him from humdrum American life.

But if you understand his appeal as glamour, in which the audience supplies the meaning, then it’s not surprising that Obama means different things to different people and thus, especially in his first term, often had difficulty rallying his supporters in favor of a given course of action. Glamour is an asset in a campaign, but charisma is more useful once you’re elected. A few particularly gifted leaders—Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, and, outside of politics, Steve Jobs—have had both. GLAMOUR CHARISMA Barack Obama Bill Clinton Che Castro Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Jackie Kennedy Eleanor Roosevelt Michael Jordan Earvin “Magic” Johnson John Lennon Janice Joplin Leonardo Raphael Spock Kirk Tupac Shakur Snoop Dogg Joan of Arc dead Joan of Arc alive Early Princess Diana Late Princess Diana It’s rare for a charismatic leader to be as self-contained as Reagan or Mandela, which is one reason glamour rarely accompanies charisma.


pages: 358 words: 93,969

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

Consider the case of the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from dangerous ultraviolet light. In 1974, climate scientists figured out that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the ozone layer. Americans and Scandinavian countries voluntarily banned CFC use in spray cans within 5 years. A few years after that, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played an instrumental role in bringing about an international treaty banning CFCs. Decades later, the ozone layer has still been preserved, and you do not need to think about it at all. However, climate change action has not followed that rational trajectory.

The cap-and-trade system is designed to achieve a comparable target level of overall economy-wide emissions reductions as the other pollution-reduction strategies while (1) rewarding the companies that are the most innovative or efficient at cutting pollution and (2) making certain that the target level of emissions is achieved at the least possible cost. A 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by two leading economic experts on cap-and-trade explain some of its history: In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency put in place a trading program to phase out leaded gasoline. It produced a more rapid elimination of leaded gasoline from the marketplace than had been anticipated, and at a savings of some $250 million per year compared with a conventional no-trade, command-and-control approach.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

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

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

And no one wants to lose any of the hard-won benefits of that work. Which helps explain the popularity of the Personal Responsibility Crusade amongst both boomers and their parents: Members of the middle class were so freaked out by seeping economic instability that they started pulling the ladder up behind them. They helped elect leaders, like President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who promised to “protect” the middle class through tax cuts, even though Reagan’s policies, once put in practice, worked to defund many of the programs that had allowed the middle class to achieve that status in the first place. On the state level, they elected lawmakers who passed “right to work” legislation to defang unions, which were increasingly depicted as greedy, corrupt, and destroying American competitiveness in the global market.

The story became national news and, along with the abduction and murder of a four-year-old Florida boy, Adam Walsh, helped incite a national panic over missing children, “stranger danger,” and the omnipresent threat of child molesters. Photos of missing children first began showing up on milk cartons in the early ’80s; 38 million people watched a dramatization of Walsh’s abduction, simply named Adam, when it aired in 1983; Ronald Reagan declared the day of Patz’s disappearance National Missing Children’s Day. For all of the anxiety, “crimes against children” did not, in fact, spike in the early ’80s, and since the early ’90s, they’ve actually been in decline. “A child from a happy, intact family who walks to the bus stop and never comes home is still a national tragedy,” Rosin writes, “not a national epidemic.”


pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

For decades George Gallup and his organization have been asking Americans to name the two people they admire most. The answers vary little from year to year. The pope and Billy Graham are often on the list. Bob Hope and Walter Cronkite show up occasionally. The other names tend to be drawn from government; Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Colin Powell are among the hardy perennials in this garden. As the Gallup organization points out in a caveat accompanying its survey, the poll “tends to favor those who are currently in the news.” It’s hardly surprising, then, that men and women engaged in science and engineering tend to be left out, for such people are generally not treated as news—unless they become avid self-promoters (as Edison and Ford were) or unless, like William Shockley, they set aside their technical work and begin proselytizing for political causes.

Our media-soaked society, with its insatiable appetite for important, or at least interesting, personalities, has somehow managed to overlook a pair of genuine national heroes—two Americans who had a good idea that has improved the daily lot of the world. AUTHOR’S NOTE This book began, some two decades ago, with a disappearing typewriter. On November 3, 1980—the day before Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States—I returned to my desk at The Washington Post after a year of constant travel covering the presidential campaign. To my distress, my cherished old typewriter had disappeared. In its place, the Post had installed a computer terminal; from now on, I was to write my stories on that.


pages: 277 words: 89,004

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

When we went to the Oscars, I sat down, and Marvin Hamlisch was in front of me. He turned around, and he said, ‘Uh-oh.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘Lionel’s on the aisle.’” Their imperfect record at awards shows was disappointing, sure, but the best prize of all came when, on February 4, 1986, President Ronald Reagan name-checked and quoted directly from the movie—where we’re going, we don’t need roads—in his State of the Union address. Overnight, a sequel became inevitable. “We all bought Universal stock, a hundred shares each. We thought we were going to get rich because the movie was doing well,” Frank Marshall says.

In his concept for the first film, Paull sought to create a saccharine look for the 1955 set, which was then altered for the modern-day scenes. Remnants of consistency remained, such as the Essex Theater, but there was an obvious deterioration in terms of the quality of life for Hill Valley’s 1985 residents. Instead of Cattle Queen of Montana being shown, which starred Ronald Reagan decades before his presidency, the pornographic Orgy American Style is the prominent title on the marquee. The design, in effect, highlighted a subtle, understated critique the Bobs’ script made about the 1980s. Maybe Marty and other teenagers believed their current decade was great, but there was an innocence and naïveté lost between the 1950s and the 1980s.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

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

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

Even without the computer’s analysis, Andropov might anyway have instructed his spies overseas to gather incriminating evidence suggesting an imminent western assault. But he was wrong, and so too was the computer: a dangerous combination. And after all, what chance did a computer really have of understanding the real intention of Ronald Reagan, the bullish American President? The job was hard enough for humans. How can we know what the enemy is thinking? Can we even be sure about why we decide the way we do? These two skills—empathy for others and self-awareness—are really complementary. Psychologists sometimes bracket both together under the rubric of ‘emotional intelligence’.

Traditional AI doesn’t cut it, and centaur teams can’t yet out outmatch the best humans. But what if man and machine truly became one? In August Cole’s fun 2019 short story ‘Holeshot’ the US President straps into an AI system called METIS in order to tackle an impending strategic threat to the United States.20 I’m wearing a haptic suit that was conceived as a mash-up of Ronald Reagan’s red phone and the ‘football’ nuclear launch-command briefcase toted around for American presidents since the Cold War’s hottest days. The old way is too slow for the threats out there. So in the blink of an eye—I’m not making this up because I can do it with a stern look—I can take the country to war.


pages: 376 words: 91,192

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations by Garson O'Toole

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, en.wikipedia.org, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, ought to be enough for anybody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra

David Haglund, “Did Hemingway Really Write His Famous Six-Word Story?” Browbeat (blog), Slate, January 31, 2013, http://goo.gl/S6z8Gq. QI has been unable to locate any compelling evidence that Rutherford B. Hayes made the infamous skeptical remark about the telephone that dogs his legacy. Both presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have even repeated the anecdote.1 The earliest known citation connecting Hayes to the telephone anecdote appeared in a 1982 book titled Future Mind about computers. Details are given further below. Oddly, in 1939 an almost identical anecdote was told about Ulysses S. Grant, who preceded Hayes in the White House.

The note for the saying above states that the information was submitted by the author of a 1983 book called The Naked Computer: A Layperson’s Almanac of Computer Lore, Wizardry, Personalities, Memorabilia, World Records, Mind Blowers, and Tomfoolery:8 Rutherford B. Hayes, quoted from Jack B. Rochester and John Gantz, The Naked Computer (New York: William Morrow, 1983). Submitted by Jack B. Rochester. In 1985 Ronald Reagan used the remark attributed to Hayes as part of a joke about his own longevity:9 At a recent ceremony in which technology awards were given, Reagan recalled that President Rutherford B. Hayes once was “shown a recently invented device.” “‘That’s an amazing invention,’ he said. ‘But who would ever want to use one of them?’


pages: 90 words: 27,452

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

The last, practical question is the least interesting because it’s the one most easily solved. As I said in the preface, just abolish the cap on Social Security contributions and increase taxes on corporate income. All fiscal problems solved. And don’t say corporations will relocate overseas if we tax them at higher rates—they’ve already done that, at an accelerating pace since Ronald Reagan’s cuts. Also, don’t speak of diminished incentives, because then you sound like a moron. Sure, CEOs wanted higher profit rates. They got what they wanted, and they destroyed the world economy, circa 1987 to 2015: We should increase their incentives? The real question, then, is what disables us.


pages: 98 words: 27,609

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

He previously worked as vice president of programs at the Manhattan Institute and as president of the Commonwealth Foundation. Mr. Olsen’s work has been featured in many prominent publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Guardian, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. He is the author of Ronald Reagan: New Deal Conservative (HarperCollins, 2017) and coauthor (with Dante J. Scala) of The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). About the Author MICHAEL R. STRAIN is director of Economic Policy Studies and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The humiliating departure of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in February 1989 marked the beginning of the rapid demise of the Soviet Union, first as a superpower and soon as a nation. But it was not only the Soviet Union that had disengaged, leaving Afghanistan to descend into extremism and anarchy. Much had changed in Washington’s global strategy since 1986, when a glittering White House dinner hosted by President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan had honored Abdul Haq as a special guest. On that occasion the president had turned to the valiant Mujahidin commander, who had been wounded seventeen times fighting the Soviet Army, to offer a toast. “Abdul Haq, we are with you,” Reagan declared above the din of thunderous applause from the guests in the ornate White House dining room.19 President George H.W.

The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia reported that a fatwa issued by Chief Mufti bin Baz authorized the payment of zakat to the Afghan “freedom fighters.”13 The Saudi government agreed, dollar for dollar, to match the American covert funding for the Mujahidin begun by the Carter administration in July 1979 and substantially increased by President Ronald Reagan after he took office in January 1981. In the months after the Soviet invasion, the American and British governments attempted to convince the Soviet Union to revive Afghanistan’s buffer status in Central Asia. The State Department and National Security Council staff members proposed offering Moscow Western guarantees of Afghanistan’s neutrality if the Soviets withdrew their army.

“Moscow,” it surmised, “probably believes that it can eventually stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, and that, as it does, international pressure will decrease, much as it did in 1968 with Czechoslovakia.”20 The Soviet Union’s invasion and its rejection of Western initiatives to revive the Afghan buffer in Central Asia sapped what little energy remained in détente. President Carter faced a tough challenge from Ronald Reagan in the November 1980 presidential elections. Many Americans considered Carter too weak to handle Soviet aggression. Days after the invasion, his naïveté inadvertently surfaced in an unusual acknowledgment to the press that would return to haunt him on the campaign trail: “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week, more than even in the previous two and a half years before that.”21 Presidential candidate Reagan’s declaration in a New York speech, “I don’t agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands,”22 suggested to voters that he would be more resolute in standing up to the Soviets.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Under this liberationist banner, they fought for such policies as tax cuts, free trade deals, for the auctioning off of core state assets from phones to energy to water—the package known in most of the world as “neoliberalism.” At the end of the 1980s, after a decade of Margaret Thatcher at the helm in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and with communism collapsing, these ideological warriors were ready to declare victory: history was officially over and there was, in Thatcher’s often repeated words, “no alternative” to their market fundamentalism. Filled with confidence, the next task was to systematically lock in the corporate liberation project in every country that had previously held out, which was usually best accomplished in the midst of political turmoil and large-scale economic crises, and further entrenched through free trade agreements and membership in the World Trade Organization.

He urged Americans “for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense—I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”60 The address was initially well received but came to be derided as the “malaise” speech and is frequently cited as one of the reasons Carter lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. And though he was not talking about climate change but rather a broad “crisis of confidence” against a backdrop of energy scarcity, the speech is still invoked as proof that any politician who asks voters to sacrifice to solve an environmental crisis is on a suicide mission. Indeed this assessment has shaped the win-win messaging of environmentalists ever since.

As a result, many of these newly professional environmentalists came to pride themselves on being the ultimate insiders, able to wheel and deal across the political spectrum. And so long as the victories kept coming, their insider strategy seemed to be working. Then came the 1980s. “A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?” With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, and the ascendency of many think-tank ideologues to powerful positions in his administration, the goalposts were yanked to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

His initiative was floundering when, on September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, starting an eight-year war. Overnight, both countries ceased supplying oil, and in anticipation of shortages, inflation and a recession, oil prices soared. The government in Saudi Arabia increased oil production to stem the emergency, and the crisis was short-lived. In 1981 Ronald Reagan, the new president, abolished price controls, and America was promised as much cheap oil as it needed. No one anticipated the turmoil this would cause. America’s oil industry was booming, and the supply gap from Iraq and Iran was filled from the North Sea and Alaska. Then, just as Saudi Arabia increased production, oil demand in the West fell.

The oil business, it was said, was as safe as rolling dice in Las Vegas. Even Exxon lacked sufficient money and personnel to instantly boost production. The US government offered no leadership to fashion a new energy policy. In 1988 America had believed that George Bush Sr. was the oil industry’s dream candidate, although as Ronald Reagan’s vice president he had offered it no help, and he had in fact campaigned for the presidency as an environmentalist. During his single term Bush would dilute an energy bill giving the industry minor tax relief, would not limit imports, and would cancel the sale of eight offshore leases. Texans, surrounded by abandoned derricks, were angry that the president sent the army to Kuwait out of fear of losing 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, but that no one appeared to care about Texas’s similar losses since 1986.

Russia was condemned for seeking to control the region as part of the new Great Game. The US administration, they urged, should support the Caspian nations against Russia. Several of those experienced Americans were retained by the Caspian governments to promote their cause in Washington. Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s hawkish former defense secretary, spoke for the imperialists in May 1997 by decrying Russia’s attempts to “achieve strategic victory of its own: dominance of the energy resources in the Caspian Sea region. If Moscow succeeds, its victory could prove more significant than the West’s success in enlarging NATO.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

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

By then, most everyone in their suburb was staunchly Republican, and someone stole the Obama-Biden signs right out of the Connaughtons’ front yard. Mr. Connaughton was voting for his son. Jeff Connaughton was short and sandy-haired, smart and hardworking, with the lifelong inferiority complex that’s bred into boys from Alabama. Growing up, he had no clear political views. In 1976 he was inspired when Ronald Reagan spoke at the Republican convention about “the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country”; in 1979, when Jimmy Carter diagnosed a “crisis of confidence” in America, warning that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Connaughton defended what came to be called the “malaise” speech in an opinion piece for The Tuscaloosa News.

In 1968, George Romney said on TV that he’d been brainwashed by the generals in Vietnam, and his presidential campaign was finished. In 1972, Ed Muskie stood on a flatbed truck in the falling snow outside William Loeb’s Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the cameras rolled and wept tears of rage at the editor who had slandered his wife, Jane—and that was the end of Ed Muskie. In 1980, Ronald Reagan cocked his head and chuckled, “There you go again,” and Jimmy Carter shrank into a one-term president. In 1984, Walter Mondale asked, “Where’s the beef?” and Gary Hart suddenly looked like a slick young man with a full head of hair. Ten seconds on TV could frame a character forever, could crown or end a campaign.

He had started life as a Boy Scout in the home of spring break, Daytona Beach. His uncle, Don, was director of the Florida Republican Party when the state was still largely Democratic—under him the party was established in all sixty-seven counties and held its first state convention, in 1979. Matt was suckled at the breast of Ronald Reagan, attended Young Republican events, devoutly believed in God and country, American exceptionalism, self-reliance, and small government. In college, during the Gingrich revolution in Congress, he named his boxer Newt. He was all for invading Iraq—“We’d do a good deed and get a forward operating base of a gas station.”


pages: 558 words: 164,627

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

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

MMOs were far in the future and still a figment of the imagination. SIMNET was about training warfighters for battle. And Jack Thorpe had more than a decade of work ahead of him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Star Wars and Tank Wars On the evening of March 23, 1983, a long black limousine pulled up to the south gate of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the back sat Edward Teller, now seventy-five years old. Teller was not exactly sure why he was here. He had just flown in from California, where he lived, because the aide who called him three days earlier said President Reagan thought it was important that he be at the White House on this night.

As a consequence, the American military establishment would begin a hyper-militarization not seen since the explosion of the 15-megaton Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954. CHAPTER TWENTY Total Information Awareness The nuclear physicist John Poindexter is rarely noted for his prowess in nuclear physics. Instead he is almost always referred to as the retired Navy admiral and former national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra affair who was convicted on five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents, and obstructing congressional investigations. The day after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Poindexter was pulling his car out of the quiet suburban subdivision where he lived outside Washington, D.C., when he was struck with an idea for DARPA.

He served as director of Low Observable Technology and was responsible for developing and fielding the Pentagon’s stealth programs. Later, as under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology, he had responsibility for an annual budget that exceeded $100 billion. See also “Dr. Paul G. Kaminski, Former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, 2011 Ronald Reagan Award Winner,” Missile Defense Agency, digital archive. 18 DSB members: Email correspondence with Major Eric D. Badger, public affairs officer for the DSB Executive Director; Department of Defense press release, January 5, 2010; DSB, Appendix D—Task Force Membership, 109, Appendix E—Task Force Briefings, 110.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Friedman reaffirmed economists’ early conviction that the market helped people choose what was in their interest. Competition, he said, worked best for consumers and producers alike. He won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. His ideas soon percolated into public policy first in Great Britain with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then in the United States. As President Ronald Reagan announced in 1981, “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government,” though he recognized that the imperative was to make government work better.1 While Thatcher and Reagan were in power, Friedman was showered with awards, prizes, and appointments. In actual practice, monetarism enjoyed Federal Reserve support only for the years between 1979 and 1982.

Writers began depicting capitalist enterprise as a Gulliver tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings from environmentalists, safety monitors, and the like. Business people argued that an economy became robust when its participants had the freedom to act freely and quickly. This era of deregulation, associated with English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, was completed in the United States in 1999 with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Service Modernization Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton. A boon to banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, and highfliers generally, the law permitted banks to merge with insurance companies and liberated investment banks from many of the restrictions that applied to regular commercial banks of deposits.

Joyce Appleby, “Modernization Theory and the Formation of Modern Social Theories in England and America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20 (1978): 260; Crafts, “Golden Age of Economic Growth in Western Europe,” 434; Barbara Weinstein, “Developing Inequality,” American Historical Review, 113 (2008): 6–8. CHAPTER 11. CAPITALISM IN NEW SETTINGS 1. Sheldon L. Richman, “The Sad Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” Free Market, 10 (1988): 1. 2. Milton Friedman, “Noble Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment” and Gary Becker, “Afterward: Milton Friedman as a Microeconomist,” in Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers (Chicago, 2007), 1–22, 181–86. 3. Edward Perkins, “The Rise and Fall of Relationship Banking,” www.Common-Place.org, 9:2 (2009). 4.


pages: 526 words: 158,913

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America by Greg Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbus A320, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Long Term Capital Management, mass affluent, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, yield curve

“I’m convinced that the Democrats will win back the White House in the aforementioned election. Under our new presidential administration I am confident that you will be called upon [by] our president-elect to serve as his, as an elite member of his or her new cabinet. “It would be similar to what late President Ronald Reagan did for former chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, Don Regan, in 1980, who quietly slipped away in 2003. If you accept to do for our country what you have done for Merrill Lynch, I would no longer just be a content American, I would be a proud American. Thank you and have a nice day.” O’Neal smiled at this bouquet of gushing praise.

The men in the most senior positions at the firm jockeyed for the top job in discreet, oblique fashion, knowing that any overt statement about their ambition would probably disqualify them from the corner office. The most successful CEO of Merrill Lynch in the modern era, Don Regan—who would become Treasury secretary and then White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan—ascended to the top job by force of his effectiveness as a senior executive, prevailing over a powerful rival. Regan proved to be a fiery leader of Merrill Lynch in the 1970s, railing against the club of Wall Street firms that fattened their bottom lines at the expense of the average investor.

The greatest of those innovations was the cash management account, which allowed Merrill Lynch brokerage customers to keep all of their financial products—mortgages, insurance, checking account, credit cards, and stocks and bonds—in a single account at Merrill Lynch. Under Regan, Merrill Lynch did business with Wall Street but was not of Wall Street. A combative, sometimes bullying presence, Regan feared no one. In 1981, he was sworn in as President Ronald Reagan’s treasury secretary, and in 1985 he became White House chief of staff. He was a top advisor to Reagan during the secret swap of arms for hostages that became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Although he was not intimately involved in the transaction, he was eventually called to testify before Congress about his role.


pages: 553 words: 168,111

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market by Leah McGrath Goodman

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, East Village, energy security, Etonian, family office, Flash crash, global reserve currency, greed is good, High speed trading, light touch regulation, market fundamentalism, Oscar Wyatt, peak oil, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit motive, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Unbeknownst to him, the phenomenon would be only a simulacrum of what the global energy market would become over the next thirty years. A barrel of oil, by 2008, would trade roughly forty-five times before being delivered and consumed, making it one of the most overtraded products in the world. Marks’s foray into heating oil went so smoothly that he launched a second energy contract with Safer, in tandem with President Ronald Reagan’s gradual lifting of oil-price controls imposed by President Richard Nixon during the runaway prices of the 1970s. (Reagan’s motives for lifting Nixon’s controls, to this day, are hotly debated, but likely stemmed from his enthusiasm for free markets, coupled with his desire to create an environment in which oil prices would be allowed to fall as a way of starving Russia of the oil money it needed to fund its arms race against the United States.)

I remember he was considering dumping one of his mistresses, because he could only spend 10 percent of his free time with her. But then he changed his mind, because he decided that even 10 percent of his time was better than 100 percent of the time she could be spending with anyone else.” Like Marks, Guttman was intimidated by the Chicago money machine. While the CME was throwing $5,000-a-plate dinners for Ronald Reagan, the Nymex traders were digging in their pockets for quarters to feed the parking meters outside the Chamber Maids strip club on Chambers Street just up the block from the pits. Melamed wasted no time in showing Guttman he’d done his homework. Striding in with his cuff-linked entourage, he said, “Lou, I understand you and I are both immigrants and Holocaust survivors.”

High-level staffers at the CFTC began to indicate to Guttman that their chairwoman, Dr. Wendy Gramm, did not find the evidence against him compelling and was inclined to let his case sink into the already considerable agency quagmire. Gramm, the Hawaiian-Korean wife of Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas), had been running the CFTC since Ronald Reagan had appointed her its head in 1988. “Wendy did not want to bring the case, and, while she was there, she did not let it proceed any further. She thought the commission had better things to do,” Guttman says. Except for bumping into Gramm a few times at business conferences in Washington and a few formal meetings, he had hardly ever talked to her.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

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

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

In a sense, airlines are only responding to what the market wants, and those who want (slightly) better service only have to pay for it. The terms of engagement have, however, also changed for airline staff, something we will return to in the next chapter. The United States, first during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, then under President Ronald Reagan, deregulated a number of other industries such as electric power, trucking, and finance. Both Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom gained substantial public support by facing down powerful unions. In 1981, Reagan fired over eleven thousand striking unionized government air-traffic controllers, and banned them from federal service for life.

While there are some differences between the Anglo-American economies and continental Europe based on their different reform paths, ultimately practices spread. What follows relies heavily on studies in the United States, but the analysis applies more generally to developed countries. THE PRIVATE SECTOR’S REACTION TO LIBERALIZATION Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher pushed back against the state. They believed this would imply a greater role for markets and ensure greater individual freedom. Rolling back state oversight did not free everyone. While too much government leads to privileges for some, so does too little government. Moreover, in the fervid evangelical individualistic environment they had unleashed, what was privately optimal for the individual could be detrimental to the community.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

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

Walter Ulbricht, East German head of state; 15 June 1961 ‘Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’ Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet communist party secretary (1953–64) ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ John F Kennedy, US president; 26 June 1963 ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!’ Ronald Reagan, US president; 12 June 1987 ‘Private travel into foreign countries can be requested without conditions…Permission will be granted instantly.’ Günter Schabowski, East German government official; 9 November 1989 * * * The fun came to an instant end when the US stock market crashed in 1929, plunging the world into economic depression.

East and West Germany recognise each other’s sovereignty in the Basic Treaty. 1976 The Palace of the Republic, which houses the GDR parliament and an entertainment centre, opens on 23 April on the site where the royal Hohenzollern palace stood for 500 years. 1987 East and West Berlin celebrate the city’s 750th birthday separately. On 12 June Ronald Reagan visits the city, proclaiming ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!’ while standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate. 1989 Bye, bye Berlin Wall and hello Love Parade! What would grow into the world’s biggest street party begins modestly with one truck and 150 ravers. 1991 Members of the Bundestag (German parliament) vote to reinstate Berlin as Germany’s capital and to move the federal government here.

It’s a simple, geometric space of lawns dappled with beech and oak trees. In summer, a rather commercial beach bar called Capital Beach sets up shop below the pedestrian-only bridge. Return to beginning of chapter BRANDENBURGER TOR & AROUND Here’s a trivia question for you: Who said ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’? Answer: former US president Ronald Reagan, during a speech in 1987, with the Brandenburger Tor trapped behind the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Two years later, the Wall was history and the famous gate went from symbol of division to symbol of a reunited Germany. Since then, Pariser Platz, the former wasteland east of the gate, has resumed its historic role as the capital’s ‘reception room’ and is framed by embassies, banks and hotels.


pages: 548 words: 174,644

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

Alvin Toffler, desegregation, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joseph Schumpeter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman

The caller said that for years he had wanted to do a piece about national defense, a deep and wide exploratory piece about the state of America’s military. The story was sidetracked when he spent two years as chief speech-writer for President Jimmy Carter, but now he wanted to resurrect the idea. The timing was perfect, as Carter was dueling with Republican challenger Ronald Reagan over defense spending. Reagan said he wanted to “re-arm America,” a phrase that meant if he were elected, billions of dollars would flood into the Pentagon. Reagan knew the post-Vietnam military faced serious problems. He was going to fix everything with money. The man who called Boyd had talked to Bill Lind in Senator Gary Hart’s office.

The Reformers were making too many inroads with Congress and the media. And Spinney’s briefing was too dangerous to be heard by a U.S. senator. It might give him ideas not sanctioned by the Building. Several times over the next six months or so, Nunn asked the Pentagon to send Spinney to his office. Brown was adamant in refusing. Ronald Reagan was elected in November and almost immediately afterward Brown—under the threat of a subpoena—relented. In early December, Christie, Boyd, and Spinney went to Nunn’s office and gave him the full briefing. They told Nunn the Reagan Administration was about to start throwing money at the Pentagon and that more money would only exacerbate already serious problems.

But Fallows was first, and his book gave the reform movement enormous credibility with the media and with the public. Not only did the book win the nonfiction category of what then was called the American Book Awards but it was runner up for nonfiction in the National Book Critics Circle. It launched Fallows’s brilliant career. Timing for the book could not have been better. Ronald Reagan came into office in January and no president could have been less interested in military reform. Upon taking office, one of Reagan’s first actions was to resurrect the B-1 Bomber manufactured by Rockwell in his native state of California. The B-1 later flunked its specifications for the radar cross section it presented to enemy radar, flunked its range specifications, and flunked its electronic countermeasures specifications.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

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

Physically Casey was a shambling figure with a jowly face, permanently red-rimmed eyes as if he never slept enough, and a voice usually a little more than a mumble, but from his slack mouth came shrewd judgments. After his retirement, he gave a series of interviews (some to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, others to the author). In them he characterized Ronald Reagan as “a man before his time with big visions.” President Gerald Ford was “the wrong man at the wrong time.” William Webster, the FBI director, had “swallowed a law library and whenever I proposed anything not quite in the book, he’d almost choke on it.” Nahum Admoni (head of the Mossad, 1982–89) was “a Jew who’d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.”

It had been Boren who advised him to stay on under the Bush administration for six months before deciding if the way the new White House worked was how he wanted the CIA to operate. The breakfast meeting was to discuss whether Tenet was happy on that front. AS TENET AND BOREN ORDERED BREAKFAST, Richard Clarke chaired a conference in the Ronald Reagan Building three blocks from the White House. He had run many meetings in his thirty years in government service, working in the State Department, at the Pentagon, and, since President Clinton had appointed him, as the first national coordinator for counterterrorism—a job President Bush had asked him to continue in.

“Reuters has just reported another plane has hit the south tower,” he said in a tight voice. On the screen they could see confirmation of the second hit. One of the Special Branch officers who guarded the prime minister stood in the open door of the suite and said, “They’re no accidents. It’s terrorism.” BY 9:29 A.M., RICHARD CLARKE had driven from the Ronald Reagan Building to the White House, raced through the corridors of the West Wing, ignoring the startled looks of staffers, and entered without knocking the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, who was alone with Condoleezza Rice watching the television images from the twin towers. He told them he was certain this was an al-Qaeda attack and reminded Rice that he had warned her that “something big” was coming.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

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

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

They were the real-life counterparts of Michael and Hope and Elliot and Nancy in thirtysomething, successful careerists trading banter and raising families; they were David and Maddie in Moonlighting, flirting with each other while wearing sleek suits and driving around Los Angeles in a Beemer. Along with the power suits and big careers, yuppies carried a dose of conservative Republicanism along with them—and as went Boomers, so went the country. Ronald Reagan swept into office just as the number of Boomers identifying as Republicans began to rise (see Figure 3.27 from the longest-running survey of voters conducted in the U.S.). Boomers’ trajectory intersected with the politics of the country as a whole. Boomers shifted hard toward the Republican side during the 1980s and became majority Republican by the slimmest of margins in the late 2010s and early 2020s as they aged into their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

That means the future of a generation’s political leanings can be predicted relatively well from the approval ratings of the president when they are adolescents and young adults. High approval ratings push them toward the president’s party, and low approval ratings away. This is why, for example, Gen X was more likely to identify as Republicans in the 1980s during the two terms of Ronald Reagan, who had high approval ratings. Gen X has stayed more Republican than average ever since. What does this mean for younger Millennials’ and older Gen Z’ers’ future voting patterns? Given President Trump’s low approval ratings, we would expect voters coming of age between 2016 and 2020—those born in the early 1990s to the early 2000s—to lean Democrat.

Figure 8.8: Percent of U.S. 18- to 25-year-olds who support government programs or regulations, by political party affiliation Source: Nationscape, Democracy Fund, 2019–2020 Overall, today’s young Republicans see a larger role for government than previous generations of Republicans did. More than 4 out of 10 Millennial and Gen Z Republicans agree “I favor a larger government with more services,” much higher than among Boomer and Silent Republicans (see Figure 8.9). It’s a stunning outcome for the party that worships Ronald Reagan, the president who once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” In the Reagan era, Republicans sought to cut government programs; a substantial minority of young Republicans are now not so sure that is a good idea. Among Democrats, the sizable majority favor big government, and that varies little by generation.


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

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

But on the shelves in the West – and that includes our Intershops – there were twenty models.’16 Focusing on microelectronics and rationalization wasn’t enough to heal the GDR’s festering economic wounds. Many Western countries responded to the severe problems caused by the oil crises of the 1970s by introducing cuts to their welfare systems in the 1980s – from Helmut Kohl in West Germany to Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Honecker had no such option. The GDR’s subsidies to essentials such as rent, food and childcare had become a fact of life. When prices for textiles rose briefly in 1977, it had immediately led to stockpiling by disconcerted citizens while rationing of everyday luxuries such as coffee and chocolate also caused consternation.

The gathering was a sight to behold: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, French President François Mitterrand, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu and the East German leader Erich Honecker were among the dozens of foreign dignitaries gathered in the heart of what US President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the ‘Evil Empire’ almost exactly two years earlier. Notably, the latter was absent, having ‘an awful lot on my plate right now that would have to be set aside’.36 But with the exception of the US, most of the leaders of major capitalist and communist countries had come to Moscow to bury Konstantin Chernenko, seventh General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

You get used to being spied upon, being bugged. And it didn’t really do anything. It didn’t destroy your life.’3 When Peter and his family reached Berlin in the summer of 1987, they found things had changed a fair bit from the unpleasant atmosphere that his predecessors had been exposed to. President Ronald Reagan had delivered a speech in West Berlin in front of the Brandenburg Gate on 12 June 1987, in which he demanded, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ But nobody could have foreseen that the fall of the Berlin Wall was just two years into the future. Reagan’s speech was initially just a publicity stunt.


I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live

Or, to put it more exactly, now it turns out that a chemical that’s released when you heat up Teflon gets into your bloodstream and probably causes cancer and birth defects. I loved Teflon. I loved the no-carb ricotta pancake I invented last year, which can be cooked only on Teflon. I loved my Silverstone Teflon-coated frying pan, which makes a beautiful steak. I loved Teflon as an adjective; it gave us a Teflon president (Ronald Reagan) and it even gave us a Teflon Don (John Gotti), whose Teflonness eventually wore out, making him an almost exact metaphorical duplicate of my Teflon pans. I loved the fact that Teflon was invented by someone named Roy J. Plunkett, whose name alone should have ensured Teflon against ever becoming a dangerous product.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

In February 1982 Laker Airways was driven out of business when BA led a pack of ailing major airlines that threatened retaliatory action against several institutions that had agreed to prop up Laker’s sagging finances. Absurdly, rather than supporting the free enterprise they were supposed to champion, Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan jointly turned a blind eye in their blinkered quest to do whatever was necessary to help save their failing flag carriers. As it turned out it would be a case of ‘too-little too-late’ as British Caledonian, Pan Am, TWA and others would eventually also fail, albeit of no real consolation for Freddie who had been robbed of his life’s work.

So, if like Apple, Google and others you are one of the more enlightened leaders that have already gone into ‘piazza mode’, take a step back and enjoy the amazing energy that’s being generated there. If, however, you are still living in a world of silos and little boxes, then let me paraphrase President Ronald Reagan’s historic Brandenburg Gate speech in 1987 and say it’s time to ‘tear down these walls’ and think outside the silo. You’ll never look back. Chapter 18 DECISIONS, DECISIONS Putting the pro in procrastination In manufacturing circles, ‘Just in Time’ (JIT) inventory control has become an accepted standard with most major companies.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

But fears and concerns over critical materials dampened with the recession of the early 1980s as it ushered in an era of relative price decline, and in the case of some commodities, like oil, far lower prices. Western governments started to feel that natural resource security, especially critical material supply, was yesterday’s issue. Both U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher believed if markets were left alone, businesses would allocate resources appropriately. Despite resource shortages early in his term and concerns about Soviet control over critical materials, the Reagan administration rejected the need for governments to subsidize mineral production even for defense purposes.30 At the same time, U.S. government research into rare metal supply lines slowed; resource security policies stagnated; and in some cases, the government even purposefully weakened its safeguards.

He cannot simply trade metal of a standard grade; he has to meet the quality his customers need. One substandard batch of metal ruins the relationship. It is not a risk he can take. Maintaining long-term supplier relationships and doing spot checks lessens the risk that a bad batch will reach the clients. As the Russian axiom, attributed to president Ronald Reagan, goes, “Trust but verify.”2 The market is tough, especially in Asia. Many traders tell me Chinese firms prove to be challenging partners—contracts are looser and terms can change, especially when beginning new trading relationships. As Michael Rapaport, a rare metal trader who once worked with the Lehrmans, told me, “The Chinese don’t abide by the same rules especially if the market moves out in your favor.”


pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

Even I, knowing nothing, can confirm that there really was something about hip-hop’s early arrival that made it feel seismic. I guess that’s what it means to be in the presence of a major new art form. And even I, as I got just a little bit older, wanted to read values into the new music to make it “real,” political, an answer of rival values to the grinning pumpkin head of Ronald Reagan on the evening news, a face I had learned by 1984, and his re-election, was going to get all of us killed with an arms race and his MX missile, but was busy jailing and killing black people among us and selling out Latin America in the meantime. I find it surprising how many musical moments in early hip-hop I did hear as the years passed, despite being in no sense committed as a fan.

The hip-hop historian Jeff Chang points out how few new rappers broke through to commercial success in that short generation, when label consolidation and collapse stalled the careers of some of the most talented.) West’s history comes in a song called “Crack Music” (2005). The lyrics are framed by invocations of a history of state conspiracy and deception that includes Reagan’s repressive rise as governor of California in the 1960s (“How we stopped the Black Panthers? / Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer”) and the Reagan–Bush–Bush II arming of Saddam’s Iraq before making war against it, twice (“Who gave Saddam anthrax? / George Bush got the answers”). But the main idea Kanye conveys is of a ruse of history by which the poison of crack, addicting the black ghetto, gave rise to the serum of hip-hop, by which black artists thrived and to which they have now addicted a white listening audience.


pages: 297 words: 103,910

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, content marketing, creative destruction, digital divide, Free Software Foundation, future of journalism, George Akerlof, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Louis Daguerre, machine readable, new economy, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, software patent, synthetic biology, transaction costs

Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor general was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media companies the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only one who turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he believed in. He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court. He had helped craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power in the context of the Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many positions in the Supreme Court that I personally disagreed with, his joining the cause was a vote of confidence in our argument.

(That nonprofit project comprised a consortium of the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical and technological companies, including Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo-SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, and Searle.) It included the Global Positioning System, which Ronald Reagan set free in the early 1980s. And it included "open source and free software." The aim of the meeting was to consider this wide range of projects from one common perspective: that none of these projects relied upon intellectual property extremism. Instead, in all of them, intellectual property was balanced by agreements to keep access open or to impose limitations on the way in which proprietary claims might be used.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

With the Valdez incident and the corporation’s strident opposition to action on climate change, including actively financing antiscience climate skeptism to this day, ExxonMobil has earned the well-deserved nickname of the Death Star among many environmentalists.12 There was one significant positive development in the 1980s when the world adopted a key global environmental agreement to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were creating a hole in the ozone layer. This agreement in 1987, supported by the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, remains the classic example of denial and delay by industry being followed by decisive global action once denial ends. UN chief Kofi Annan described this agreement as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and it remains a shining example of how action can be taken when business and governments decide to do so.

I was pursuing a life of making a contribution to society, and I saw the Australian military as doing just that. While in the military and now with my second child, Asher, born, I became very concerned about the threat of nuclear war. Being in the military naturally led to great interest in matters of national and global security—after all, this was the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and a massive global movement against nuclear weapons. I particularly remember a newspaper story from a science conference at the time reporting that an alarming proportion of teenagers believed there would be literally no future for them, as nuclear war was inevitable. They therefore felt there was no point in working toward a better life.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The proponents of devaluation could not have been more wrong. With faith in the dollar near the breaking point, new leadership and new policies were desperately needed. The United States found both with the appointment of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by President Jimmy Carter in August 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in November 1980. Volcker had been undersecretary of the Treasury from 1969 to 1974 and had been intimately involved in the decisions to break with gold and float the dollar in 1971–1973. He was now living with the consequences of those decisions, but his experience left him extremely well prepared to use the levers of interest rates, open market operations and swap lines to reverse the dollar crisis just as he and Arthur Burns had done during the sterling crisis of 1972.

Gold followed suit, falling from an average price of $612.56 in 1980 to $317.26 by 1985. Inflation had been defeated and gold had been subdued. King Dollar was back. Although Volcker’s efforts were heroic, he was not the sole cause of declining inflation and a stronger dollar. Equal credit was due to the low-tax and deregulatory policies of Ronald Reagan. The new president entered office in January 1981 at a time when American economic confidence had been shattered by the recessions, inflation and oil shocks of the Nixon-Carter years. Although the Fed was independent of the White House, Reagan and Volcker together constructed a strong dollar, implemented a low-tax policy that proved to be a tonic for the U.S. economy and launched the United States on one of its strongest periods of growth in history.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

To add to the bewilderment and helplessness felt in Whitehall, it emerged that the metaphorical heroin ‘epidemic’ had a real and potentially catastrophic viral element: HIV/AIDS. With the police and prison systems straining to cope with the explosion in crime fuelled by drugs, and a major health disaster on the cards, the British government was in pragmatic mood. While Ronald Reagan was going around his Cabinet table demanding to know what his team was ‘doing for the War on Drugs’, Margaret Thatcher was seeking practical solutions to the crisis. For all the front-of-house anti-drugs rhetoric, behind the scenes the Prime Minister gave approval for the introduction of community drug teams and needle exchanges, handing out clean equipment and health advice to heroin injectors.

The brainchild of a banker who said he kept finding colleagues asleep in lavatory cubicles and store cupboards, the pods have apparently been installed in a number of London city firms, bosses persuaded that the monthly rental is less than the increased productivity. The phrase ‘power nap’ reinforces the idea that success comes with the ability to control sleep. Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were all power-nappers, we are told, insisting on a short and intense rest period in the afternoon that recharged their batteries and invigorated their minds. I once sat on a train with Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, the French businessman who had been asked by Tony Blair to rescue the Millennium Dome project.


pages: 337 words: 89,075

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio by Victor A. Canto

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, global macro, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Phillips curve, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

There’s a simple explanation for the relative performance of small- and largecap stocks over the last 30 years. The 1970s were characterized by high and climbing inflation, rising tax rates, and ever-mounting regulations. Small-caps outperformed in this environment (see Table 3.2). The economic cycle came to an end with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. After his economic program—lower taxes and regulations—became fully effective in 1984, largecap stocks began a cycle of outperformance, which was only briefly interrupted by the phase-in of the second Reagan tax-rate cuts. The regulatory and tax-rate increases of Reagan’s successors, George H.W.

During the 1971–1979 period, the inflation rate (as measured by the GDP price deflator) averaged 6.6 percent, ranging from a 4 percent low to a 9 percent high. The real S&P stock index declined at a 4.23 percent annual rate during the period. In short, the economy and the stock market suffered dearly as the disincentives of increased effective tax rates mounted. Chapter 5 Linking Up 89 During the Ronald Reagan years, the commitment to a price rule—the adjustment mechanism whereby shifts in money demand are automatically accommodated by the central bank—was reestablished. Unfortunately, the rule was never (and still has not been) formally announced, and the markets have had to learn its working through experience.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

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

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

The political philosopher Yascha Mounk captures the cultural consequences of this ideology when he says it has ushered in a new “age of responsibility,” in which “responsibility—which once meant the moral duty to help and support others—has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient.” The founding parents of this revolution were political figures on the right such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who rose to power by besmirching the role of government. Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Two centuries earlier, the founding fathers of his country had created a constitutional government in order to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

While people on the right believe actively in the superiority of market solutions, liberals like Kassoy do so passively—passively in that they do not reject a public solution in theory, but pursue a private one in practice. “I have a constant debate with my father,” Kassoy said, “who thinks the single most evil human being in the history of the planet was Ronald Reagan, because he single-handedly convinced us as a society the government’s bad.” He added, “If you think about Bill Clinton’s success in the ’90s, his Third Way was all about basically adopting a lot of that language. And so no one’s really told us government is a good thing for a very long time.” Saying this seemed to make Kassoy reflect on whether he had unwittingly become the latest link in this chain of liberals consolidating the war on government by proffering private solutions to public problems.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

And it was only in 2012 I rediscovered the joys of exercise after ten years spent two stone overweight. Your point, caller? Everything can wait. But I warn you, the longer you leave it, the more you’ll regret. You picked up this book for a reason. Carpe diem, I say. RESET will show you how. Status Quo Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in[19]’. Ronald Reagan WE’RE NOW INTO THE meat of RESET. The six main parts comprise a step-by-step transformation programme, with a handy recap in the form of an “index card” at the end of each one. I hope you read it in a glorious oner for full impact; then dip into parts in future when you come to perform your own RESET.

They’re in my coat pocket when I fetch the kids from school. I leave them handy in the locker at the swimming pool (where I do much of my best thinking). And I run with them. Sound weird? Well, I’m in good company. Ryan Holiday[116], Anne Lamott[117], Robert Greene[118], Oliver Burkeman[119], Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Nabokov[120] and Ludwig Wittgenstein[121] all use (d) the humble index card to catalogue and organise their thoughts. If you’re serious about embarking on this digital journey, buy a hundred-pack of 127 x 76mm ruled index cards for less than a pound, rescue a shoebox from the attic and stick a few marker-penned notecards on their end to act as dividers.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Six years later, in early 2014, the afflicted economies had yet to recover from the wreckage of 2008 – and trust in economic experts had vanished, probably forever. My story, of course, concerns this shipwreck of the expert class rather than the crisis itself. A fitting place to start is with the life and times of Alan Greenspan, the man who transformed the economic expert into a glamorous, almost mythical figure. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Greenspan chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System – a portentous name for the central bank of the United States, usually called, without affection, “the Fed.” By law, the mission of the Fed was, and still is, to maintain the stability of prices while promoting sustainable growth and full employment.

The circle of possibilities has contracted. I have dealt briefly with the path between then and now: whatever the chain of causation, the change itself has been undeniable. When Barack Obama entered into office, he stood in the shadow of his predecessors. He looked back with envy and nostalgia to FDR, LBJ, even Ronald Reagan. Like all his contemporaries, President Obama imitated the high modernist habit of defining specific conditions as immense problems which demanded equally large solutions. In the recession of 2009, he found the need to make “a clean break from a troubled past, and set a new course for our nation.”[182] President Bush had done much the same after the atrocities of 9/11.


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

“To be rooted,” wrote Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.” It took twenty-five years—longer than the Manx shearwater, longer even than the loggerhead sea turtle—but I finally found my way back home. Chapter 3 FAULT n.: a fracture in the earth’s crust, along which parallel displacement occurs To the people of Bolivia! —RONALD REAGAN, OFFERING A 1982 TOAST—IN BRASILIA On the very first day of the University of Miami’s spring semester in 1983, assistant professor David Helgren sprang a pop quiz in his introductory geography classes. He gave each of his 128 students, mostly business and liberal arts majors, a blank world map.

In 1983, for example, it returned the name “Whorehouse Meadow” to the map of Fish Lake, Oregon, after determining that the limp 1968 replacement, “Naughty Girl Meadow,” was a bowdlerization concocted by embarrassed park officials. Today, says Hébert, the board’s workload consists mostly of hundreds of requests to name things after Ronald Reagan. Between McKinley and Reagan, we’re apparently spending a lot of time and paperwork on the iffy cartographic legacies of two-term Republicans. As long as I’ve loved maps, I’ve been an enthusiastic toponymist: a student of place-names. Maps that aren’t dotted with text look barren and lonely to me—what could be more soulless than one of those grade-school outline maps of a region with only a few sad oil derricks or ears of corn drawn on it to depict industry or agriculture?


pages: 332 words: 101,772

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis Phd

dark matter, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, impulse control, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

The trick was not to get paralyzed by the rows of multicoloured cans; not to gape, as if this were a Warhol exhibit; not to collapse into giggles at the sight of so many rolls of toilet paper; not to panic in the checkout line, frozen with self-consciousness, unable to speak. The trick was to balance anxiety and ecstasy while going about our business, unnoticed, behind enemy lines. And who exactly was the enemy? The managers of Penny Saver, the shoppers with their pastel clothing and noisy children, the cashiers, the police, Governor Ronald Reagan? The bad guys, according to Thomas and his friends, were the “straight people.” Or, if not bad, then certainly misguided. We, on the other hand, were the freaks, the people, brave explorers of the frontiers of the mind. We had read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. We took psychedelic drugs. Our very presence at Penny Saver was a rebellion.

Slowly, painfully. And it wasn’t just a harsher world than the one she’d invented; it was a world whose latest news concerned her own fragmentation, her complete and utter frailty as a human being. She had let herself fall apart. 7 A PSYCHEDELIC FINALE: COPS AND ANGELS In the spring of 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan decided to invade “People’s Park” and convert it to what it had long been destined for: a parking lot. Rumours of this move had been circulating for months, and they had a profound effect on the residents of south Berkeley. Here had been a vacant lot that took up most of a square city block, one street east of Telegraph Avenue, four blocks south of campus.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

These are all issues that can only be addressed through political action. OF COURSE, THE idea that business could play a central role in strengthening existing or creating new inclusive institutions might seem, at first glance, a little far-fetched. The very idea of government has been under assault for decades. Ronald Reagan, for example, famously declared in his inaugural address as president of the United States that “in this present crisis government is not the solution; government is the problem.”13 Grover Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform quipped in an interview, “I don’t want to abolish government.

Bryce Covert, “Walmart’s Wage Increase Is Hurting Its Stock Price and That’s OK,” Nation, Oct. 23, 2015, www.thenation.com/article/walmarts-wage-increase-is-hurting-its-stock-price-and-thats-ok/. 12. Walmart, 2018 Annual Report, https://s2.q4cdn.com/056532643/files/doc_financials/2018/annual/WMT-2018_Annual-Report.pdf. 13. “Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan,” Avalon Project—Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp. 14. A. Winston, “Where the GOP’s Tax Extremism Comes From,” [online] 2017, accessed Oct. 18, 2019, https://medium.com/@AndrewWinston/where-the-gops-tax-extremism-comes-from-90eb10e38b1c. 15.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“What better gauge of our economic misery,” asked the popular syndicated columnist Sylvia Porter, “than the murderous squeeze on us resulting from a simultaneous rise in joblessness and soaring living costs?”5 If inflation is 2 percent and unemployment is 4 percent, the misery index equals 6. The misery index—then in the high double digits—helped candidate Jimmy Carter replace Gerald Ford. Four years later, with the misery index even higher, candidate Ronald Reagan convinced voters to elect him and ditch Carter. Prepare to revisit the seventies and dust off the misery index. In 2022 the misery index was back to double digits in spite of a low unemployment rate as inflation got above 8 percent. We are due for lasting turmoil. Remembering the past can help us predict what will happen in the future.

The right resists any steps that enlarge government’s role and demands lower taxes that make deficits much larger. Despite political rhetoric, Democrats and Republicans share blame for debt. Debt grew fastest under Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt during World Wars I and II, but Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are next in line.4 The 2017 tax cut by the Trump administration also ranks as a memorable unforced error as it led to a trillion-dollar deficit in a peacetime growing economy. And the response to COVID-19 was excessive deficit spending both during the Trump and Biden administrations.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

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

When McClellan’s bill stalled in the House, the industry had five years before Nixon’s election to think about what a truly pro-industry patent policy might look like. Such a policy would be partially realized in the waning days of the Carter administration, before being fashioned into the stuff of drug industry dreams under Ronald Reagan. The midwives of this policy shift would perform burial rites over the Kennedy policy and the broader New Deal vision for public science. They would do so with a swagger born of a victory more momentous than the rollback of any law or decades-old executive order. They would do so as emissaries fulfilling an audacious intellectual project with roots deeper than the Kennedy policy and the New Deal itself.

., a lobby group, before returning to government to help Forman oversee the implementation of Bayh-Dole in the department’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. The position also reunited Allen with Norman Latker, back in federal employ as director of the department’s patent office. The trio was effectively in charge of overseeing the implementation and expansion of Bayh-Dole, and on their recommendation, Ronald Reagan signed an executive order in 1983 that expanded the law to include corporations of all sizes. (The bill was officially amended to fit Reagan’s memo in 1984.) Having served its temporary purpose, Bayh-Dole’s stage-prop halo was removed and tossed out the window. The tradition that ended with Bayh-Dole—public science under public control—survived as long as it did because its champions understood that a democratic patent policy has political and economic spillover effects.


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

Teller contradicted other physicists’ pragmatic approach to the curiosity-sin problem: build the bombs only because the other side is going to build them anyway, then work to get them banned. Teller, to the day of his death, remained a strong and loud advocate of bigger, better, and more numerous bombs; he opposed the test ban treaties. He was credited with convincing President Ronald Reagan to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative, which physicists, impugning its basis in reality, called Star Wars. Teller, physicists thought, could ignore any physics that contradicted his own political beliefs; in fact, they thought he used physics to further his beliefs; they thought he was the original Dr.

One, on the short-range flashlight laser guide star, called a Rayleigh guide star, was run by Fugate at the Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland Air Force Base. The other, on the long-range sodium laser guide star, was done at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. A year later, in mid-1983, Fugate’s Rayleigh guide star system passed its proof-of-principle test; and a year after that the sodium guide star did the same. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan had become president, and though PSAC had never been resurrected, a new and smaller science advisory committee did advise the president, though it didn’t report to him directly. On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced a new missile defense program that he called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, and that its critics called Star Wars.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER 4 THE SIZZLER A riot of noise greeted Mark Spitznagel as he stepped into the visitors’ gallery of the Chicago Board of Trade’s cavernous Grain Room. It was the summer of 1987. The market was on a roll, and so was America. The Dow industrials closed above two thousand points for the first time. In Berlin, Ronald Reagan exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall. Michael Jackson released Bad. Prozac was approved by the FDA. Inside the Board of Trade, the adrenaline-soaked machinery of naked capitalism was hard at work. Spitznagel’s teenage eyes widened at the sights before him. Shouting hordes of traders—sardined into the open-outcry floor, many outfitted in brightly colored jackets—made wild indecipherable gestures.

A walled-and-gated French-style villa, it was surrounded by a moat and had a guesthouse, swimming pool, stream, and a garden with an arbor. One room the size of a New York studio apartment had been dedicated solely to storing J. Lo’s shoes. The mansion stood a block away from a former home of Spitznagel’s boyhood idol Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan still lived there, and he fantasized about strolling up to her home and knocking on the door. Other fund managers, wanting their own J. Lo mansions and moats, did the math—and opened up copycat operations. “A growing number of money managers and financial firms are rolling out investment products designed to exploit big declines known as ‘black swan’ events,” an August 2010 Wall Street Journal article said.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

But oil was hardly uppermost on his political agenda once Bush moved on to other jobs—from ambassador to the United Nations and then chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, to United States envoy to the People's Republic of China, to head of the CIA, and then to four years of campaigning unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. In 1980, the man who beat him, Ronald Reagan, chose him as running mate, which led him to the Vice-Presidency. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who made energy the centerpiece of his Administration, Ronald Reagan was determined to make it a footnote. The energy crisis resulted mainly, he maintained, from regulation and the misguided policies of the United States government. The solution was to get the government out of energy and return to "free markets."

OPEC was nearing the end of the road, though neither the OPEC exporters, nor the industry, nor the Western consuming countries had any idea of what lay ahead. The Carter presidency had also come to an end. In a final humiliation for Jimmy Carter at the hands of the Iranians, the hostages taken at the American embassy in Tehran were not released until the very day he left office, succeeded by Ronald Reagan, whose buoyant confidence in himself and in America had proven much more palatable to the electorate than Carter's "malaise." Meanwhile, the oil market was responding to the phenomenal rise in prices over the 1970s and consumers' fears for the future. Yet the exporters were still unwilling to face up to the fact that the "objective conditions" of the marketplace were truly shifting.

That year Pickens was the highest-paid corporate executive in America.[11] The New Security In May of 1985, the leaders of the seven major Western powers met for their annual economic summit, this one in Bonn. The themes were free market politics, deregulation, and privatization. Promising a "new morning" in America, Ronald Reagan had recently been reelected by an enormous margin. His Administration had seen the passing of the defeatism and pessimism that had been so characteristic of the 1970s and that had, to a considerable degree, been the direct and indirect effect of the oil crisis. Instead of the malaise of inflation and recession, the United States was now enjoying a booming economy and bull market.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

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

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

Many explanations have been proffered for this surprise.41 Wartime restrictions on economic competition may have been sticky, outlasting World War II, but they finally dissipated, freeing the rich to get richer from their investment income and opening up an arena of dynamic economic competition with winner-take-all payoffs. The ideological shift associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher slowed the movement toward greater social spending financed by taxes on the rich while eroding social norms against extravagant salaries and conspicuous wealth. As more people stayed single or got divorced, and at the same time more power couples pooled two fat paychecks, the variance in income from household to household was bound to increase, even if the paychecks had stayed the same.

An analysis by the economist Gary Burtless has shown that between 1979 and 2010 the disposable incomes of the lowest four income quintiles grew by 49, 37, 36, and 45 percent, respectively.51 And that was before the long-delayed recovery from the Great Recession: between 2014 and 2016, median wages leapt to an all-time high.52 Even more significant is what has happened at the bottom of the scale. Both the left and the right have long expressed cynicism about antipoverty programs, as in Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.” In reality, poverty is losing. The sociologist Christopher Jencks has calculated that when the benefits from the hidden welfare state are added up, and the cost of living is estimated in a way that takes into account the improving quality and falling price of consumer goods, the poverty rate has fallen in the past fifty years by more than three-quarters, and in 2013 stood at 4.8 percent.53 Three other analyses have come to the same conclusion; data from one of them, by the economists Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan, are shown in the upper line in figure 9-6.

History is replete with weapons that were touted as war-winners that were eventually abandoned because they had little effect.106 Could nuclear weapons go the way of the Gustav Gun? In the late 1950s a movement arose to Ban the Bomb, and over the decades it escaped its founding circle of beatniks and eccentric professors and has gone mainstream. Global Zero, as the goal is now called, was broached in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who famously mused, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” In 2007 a bipartisan quartet of defense realists (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry) wrote an op-ed called “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with the backing of fourteen other former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense.107 In 2009 Barack Obama gave a historic speech in Prague in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” an aspiration that helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize.108 It was echoed by his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev (though not so much by either one’s successor).


pages: 787 words: 249,157

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald, James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, flying shuttle, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway

We learned again that this America, which Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of man on Earth, was built on heroism and noble sacrifice. It was built by men and women like our seven star voyagers, who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than was expected or required and who gave it little thought of worldly reward. —President Ronald Reagan, January 31, 1986 Contents Foreword: The Place of the McDonald Memoir in Challenger History Preface Prologue Part I. Red Flags 1. When It Rains It Pours 2. Tests and “No Tests” 3. Dire Warning 4. A Total O-Ring Failure 5. An Impotent Task Force 6. “In the Interest of Avoiding Pain” Part II.

We owe them the example of practicing what we preach. The most important thing at issue in this case is no longer how well the space program has been managed or even whether Challenger should have gone up that day. It is the maintenance of an insistence upon integrity. Go get ’em, Mr. Rogers! Knight Ridder stated: It was ironic timing that Ronald Reagan handed out the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, to six Americans, including a football coach, an actress and his good pal, publisher Walter Annenberg. “You're a group of happy rebels,” Reagan told the honorees. He quoted George Orwell, “Freedom is a right to say no.” Empty words—unless Reagan tells the space bureaucrats to lay off Allan McDonald, a real rebel who said no.

I am proud to be a charter member of the Challenger Center founded by the families of the Challenger crew. “We will never forget them nor the last time we saw them that morning as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” President Ronald Reagan January 28, 1986 GOD SPEED CHALLENGER! They shall never be forgotten: the crew of Space Shuttle Challenger: front row, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Commander Francis R. Scobee, and Mission Specialist Ronald E. McNair; back row, Mission Specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist Gregory B.


Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“Military Funding of University Research,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 502 (March 1989): 153, doi:10.1177/0002716289502001011. 3. Toxicity of War Laray Polk: We’ve spoken previously about Reagan’s “Star Wars” program as something that developed as a palatable alternative to nuclear stockpiling. Isn’t there also something to be said about the location of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, a heavily contaminated area as a result of US atomic testing?31 Noam Chomsky: I suppose it reflects the prevailing conception that the “unpeople” of the world—to borrow the phrase of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis—are dispensable.32 The level of contamination left from US atomic testing in the Marshall Islands is immensely troubling, but so too is what might be transpiring in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East due to the use of depleted uranium.


pages: 104 words: 34,784

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

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

It happened in Kansas, but it’s happened in places as diverse as Toronto, where our disgraced crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford, came into power with the support of vast numbers of working-class people who would have been ultimately affected by the cuts he threatened to city services, and in Macomb County, the suburban Detroit collection of bedroom communities where a similar set of forces was behind the ‘Reagan Democrat’ phenomenon in the 1980 and 1984 U.S. federal elections. Here traditionally Democratic voters swung right in landslide numbers, voting for Republican Ronald Reagan in both elections. It didn’t matter to the many Macomb County residents who worked in the auto plants that Reagan struck a massive body blow against the labour movement when he fired air traffic controllers in 1981. He continued to find appeal in folksy rhetoric and calls for a return to traditional values, the kind Archie and Edith Bunker sang about in the opening of the 1970s television sitcom All In the Family.


pages: 201 words: 33,620

Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2020 by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Easter island, food desert, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off-the-grid, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, trade route

On the bank of the Tidal Basin, the Jefferson Memorial honours the third US president © SHARKSHOCK / SHUTTERSTOCK Population: 703,000 Language: English Unit of currency: US dollar How to get there: It’s easy to reach DC, with three major airports serving the city: Dulles International, Ronald Reagan Washington National and BWI Marshall Airport. The award-winning facade of the National Museum of African American History & Culture © RARRARORRO / SHUTTERSTOCK TELL ME MORE… Once neglected neighbourhoods are suddenly on the rise, with revitalised spaces that have drawn a new wave of restaurateurs, microbrewers and craft makers.


pages: 116 words: 34,937

The Life of a Song: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Songs by David Cheal, Jan Dalley

1960s counterculture, Bernie Sanders, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Live Aid, millennium bug, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, side project

She also sang a German version (‘Geh in die Stadt’) and an Italian one (‘Ciao Ciao’). ‘Downtown’ isn’t just a peerless example of Churchill’s ‘special relationship’, it also marks pop’s evolution into a global lingua franca. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney 34 BORN IN THE USA In September 1984, Ronald Reagan was coasting towards re-election as president of the US. Addressing a crowd in Hammonton, New Jersey, he paid tribute to a local hero. ‘America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

It was a heyday for the bully pulpit: In 1970 alone, President Richard Nixon delivered nine prime-time addresses to the nation. The typical address of both Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, reached half of all television-owning households. As the television channels grew, however, the American president became easier to ignore. Ronald Reagan, whose telegenic skills were legendary, reached less than 40 percent of households on average, and Bill Clinton’s loquacious charm got him only to 30 percent. Meanwhile, the average presidential sound bite on the news shrank from forty seconds in 1968 to less than seven seconds in the 1990s. Cable created the golden age of television, but it ended the golden age of presidential communication.

The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.”


pages: 391 words: 106,394

Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton

double helix, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, informal economy, it's over 9,000, new economy, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan

And that smile… Jeff realized with some surprise he was actually quite turned on by his own wife. “Definitely so,” Sue said. “It couldn’t be any other way.” Jeff looked away, partially to cover his slight embarrassment. Then he saw what was playing on the screen. “Oh my God, that’s Ronald Reagan.” “Who?” “Ronald Reagan, he’s playing Rick.” Sue frowned at the black-and-white images. “So?” “Humphrey Bogart is Rick. What kind of version are you accessing, a satire?” “I don’t know. The datasphere had quite a few editions listed, I think I chose the as-it-should-be version.” He laughed. “Of course, Reagan supposedly auditioned for the part.


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Only a small number of these stalkers actually want to kill their target (the rest believe they are in some kind of “relationship” with the star), but the common factor is a desperate hunger for recognition. All of us want recognition, glory, significance to some extent, and in killing someone famous, stalkers themselves become famous. Mark Chapman and John Hinckley Jnr, for instance, are names forever linked with their targets, John Lennon and Ronald Reagan. To such people assassination makes perfect sense; it is a shortcut to fame, and psychotic people do not really care whether the attention they gain is positive or negative. The image of a crazed person going after a movie star or president captures the public imagination, but de Becker wonders why are we so intrigued by celebrity stalkers, but are blasé about the fact that, in the US alone, a woman is killed by a husband or boyfriend every two hours.

Other books include The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (1954), The Ordeal of Change (1963), The Temper of Our Time (1967), Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), and In Our Time (1976). He also published a journal of life on the waterfront, and an autobiography, Truth Imagined, was released after his death. In the year he died, 1983, Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan. 1945 Our Inner Conflicts “Living with unresolved conflicts involves primarily a devastating waste of human energies, occasioned not only by the conflicts themselves but by all the devious attempts to remove them.” “Sometimes neurotic persons show a curious single-mindedness of purpose: men may sacrifice everything including their own dignity to their ambition; women may want nothing of life but love; parents may devote their entire interest to their children.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Politicians liked him. Even the automakers—the subject of his criticism—liked him. They thought he was fair and reasonable—someone with whom they could do business. But before long, some observers started to criticize CARB’s first chairman for being too soft on industry. So it came as a shock when Governor Ronald Reagan—who had originally appointed him as chairman of the board—sacked Haagen-Smit for ordering Californians to install a thirty-five-dollar retrofit on their cars to reduce emissions. By this time, Haagen-Smit was an institution unto himself. He had practically created the new science of air pollution.

But still, Honda did not rest. It pushed ahead to SULEV (super ultra-low-emissions vehicles) and upper management egged them on. “Keep going,” they said. Eventually, criteria emissions from Honda vehicles got so low that they couldn’t even be measured by CARB’s cutting-edge emissions labs. A decade and a half earlier, Ronald Reagan had been quoted as saying that “trees emit more pollution than automobiles do.” In the past, that was certainly untrue. But now, unbelievably, it was. California had to build new instrumentation to detect the tiny amounts of criteria emissions from Honda’s most advanced engines. Some of Honda’s engines were running so clean that the air coming out of the tailpipe was cleaner than the ambient levels in the lab and natural environment.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

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

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

Meanwhile, the economic upheavals of the decade—inflation, currency instability, oil shocks, rising foreign competition—mobilized the business community to get leaner and meaner, and to begin a far-reaching assault on government regulation and labor unions. By the end of the '70s the stage was set for a new era of extreme capitalism. IN 1981, AFTER he was sworn in as President, Ronald Reagan pronounced: "Government is not the solution, government is the problem." Elsewhere, Reagan articulated another adage that summed up both his philosophy and the dawning ethos of the time: "What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich." Ronald Reagan's election stands as a historic turning point that helped crystallize and accelerate emerging trends in American society. Government activism was out.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

There are a number of ways this can happen, and you can pick up a picture of them from a few famous psychology experiments into the phenomenon. In one, subjects were read a list of male and female names, in equal number, and then asked at the end whether there were more men or women in the list: when the men in the list had names like Ronald Reagan, but the women were unheard of, people tended to answer that there were more men than women; and vice versa. Our attention is always drawn to the exceptional and the interesting, and if you have something to sell, it makes sense to guide people’s attention to the features you most want them to notice.

It’s an absurd thing to do, and moreover you could have cooked the books in exactly the same way thirty years ago if you’d wanted: the figures for individual samples are available, and in 1975 the weakest herbal cannabis analysed was 0.2 per cent THC, while in 1978 the strongest herbal cannabis was 12 per cent. By these figures, in just three years herbal cannabis became ‘sixty times stronger’. And this scare isn’t even new. In the mid-1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s ‘war on drugs’ and Zammo’s ‘Just say no’ campaign on Grange Hill, American campaigners were claiming that cannabis was fourteen times stronger than in 1970. Which sets you thinking. If it was fourteen times stronger in 1986 than in 1970, and it’s twenty-five times stronger today than at the beginning of the 1990s, does that mean it’s now 350 times stronger than in 1970?


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

On July 19, 1969, the day before the first moon landing, Pan Am’s chief executive, Najeeb Halaby, told WCBS in New York that the airline was focused on “the concept of boosters that can be reused, of a space station which is like an airport in space, and frequent trips between the orbiting space station and various points on the moon.” By the time Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the reservation list had grown to twenty-five thousand names. By 1971, when it stopped taking the reservations, more than ninety thousand people had signed up, including Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite. Pan Am folded in 1992, but believed up to the end that tourist trips to the moon were not just possible but an inevitability. “Commercial flights to the moon are going to happen,” a company spokesman told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “They might not happen next year, they might not happen in five years—but they will happen.”

The distance wasn’t the only problem with the site in the Marshall Islands. Musk worried about the conditions wreaking havoc on his new rocket. “I don’t think there’s a place in the world with more corrosion,” he said. “It’s the perfect environment of right temperature, humidity, and salt spray.” There were, however, some upsides. While the range, known as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site, was a government facility, SpaceX and DARPA had almost free rein with limited interference. Surrounded by turquoise water, sandy beaches, and palm trees on an island known as Kwajalein Atoll, or Kwaj, the setting felt like an island vacation spot. “It was fun; we had the run of the place,” Walker said.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Zuck’s early investor and mentor Peter Thiel is an outspoken advocate for libertarian values. The third big change was economic, and it was a natural extension of libertarian philosophy. Neoliberalism stipulated that markets should replace government as the rule setter for economic activity. President Ronald Reagan framed neoliberalism with his assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem.” Beginning in 1981, the Reagan administration began removing regulations on business. He restored confidence, which unleashed a big increase in investment and economic activity. By 1982, Wall Street bought into the idea, and stocks began to rise.

Epilogue We have to take our democracy back. We cannot leave it to Facebook or Snapchat or anyone else. We have to take democracy back and renew it. Society is about people and not technology. —MARGRETHE VESTAGER Freedom is a fragile thing and never more than one generation away from extinction. —RONALD REAGAN Nearly three years have passed since I first observed bad actors exploiting Facebook’s algorithms and business model to harm innocent people. I could not have imagined then the damage to democracy, public health, privacy, and competition that would be enabled by internet platforms I loved to use.


pages: 370 words: 107,791

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

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

He told a Church Conference from Below organizer that he would indeed call in the cops if they tried to stage the alternative conference at Samariter. Still the church leadership did not budge. The clock was now ticking as the official church conference was just weeks away. 50 In June 1987, U.S. president Ronald Reagan was scheduled to stop in West Berlin during the celebration of Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The history behind the date of the anniversary was highly dubious. It was ostensibly tied to the first appearance of the name of the city in court papers—in 1237—in the course of a legal dispute between the church and a member of the local gentry over tithing.

West Berlin authorities were so concerned about the potential scale of anti-Reagan protests that they brought in additional police reinforcements from West Germany, putting 10,000 cops on the street in full riot gear in the run-up to his visit. Municipal sources said it was the biggest security operation in the city’s history. It’s easy to forget now, but under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the chance of a shooting war between the US and the USSR seemed more tangible than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. The world lived in the constant shadow of a genuine existential threat: total nuclear annihilation. By the 1980s the possibility that humanity could be vaporized in a matter of minutes occupied a dark but prominent place not only in individual consciences but also, especially in the West, in pop culture.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

Between 1994 and 1998, the 144 firms mentioned earlier repurchased on average 1.9% of their outstanding shares each year, more than offsetting the 0.9% of shares issued per year, largely to meet the exercise of employee options.8 This level of substituting share repurchasing for dividends alone should have boosted share prices by a few percentage points.9 A Republican Congress and Capital Gains Tax Cuts When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, so too was a Republican Senate, the first since 1948. In 1994, the House went to the Republicans as well. Sensing the changed public attitudes that had elected them, these lawmakers were much more pro-business than their Democratic predecessors. This change in Congress has boosted public confidence in the stock market, because of a variety of controls that the legislature can exert over corporate profits and investor returns.

Thus it appears that the stock market crash had substantially to do with a psychological feedback loop among the general investing public from price declines to selling and thus further price declines, along the lines of a negative bubble, as discussed in Chapter 3. The crash apparently had nothing particularly to do with any news story other than that of the crash itself, but rather with theories about other investors’ reasons for selling and about their psychology. President Ronald Reagan, reacting to the crash, set up a study commission headed by former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady. He asked the Brady Commission to tell him what had caused the crash and what should be done about it. Investment professionals TH E N E WS ME D IA 91 are generally uncomfortable going on record to explain the causes of such events, and many reports about the crash tended to focus the inquiry away from its ultimate causes.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

With his swept-over shock of white hair and his unrivalled grasp of political wheeling and dealing, he was both a match and a foil for Ronald Reagan, whom he once described as ‘the most ignorant man who ever occupied the White House’. Part of O’Neill’s genius was to be able to maintain cordial relations with the president in spite of such remarks. On a later occasion, he said affectionately, ‘I’ve known personally every President since Jack Kennedy and I can honestly say that Ronald Reagan was the worst. But he would have made a helluva king!’ O’Neill had first been elected to the House of Representatives as long ago as 1952, and his razor-sharp mind had time to absorb and distil the central challenges of governing.


pages: 344 words: 103,532

The Big U by Neal Stephenson

anti-communist, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, invisible hand, Neal Stephenson, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue

At the end of the line, a metal door swung silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. WARNING—ALARM WILL SOUND. I stepped out the door and looked down a long, steep slope into the canyon of the Turnpike. The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on a side, and squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the north and the Ronald Reagan Parkway on the south. Megaversity Stadium, the only campus building not inside the Plex proper, was to the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel interchange interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I emerged from the north wall of the building I found myself atop a high embankment.

Krupp and the evil of the System, how the System turned good into bad, how this society was just like the one that caused the Holocaust, which was no excuse for Israel, about conservatism in Washington and how our environment, economic security, personal freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened by the greedy action of cutting the SUB’s budget. Finally out came the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah Mohammed and Abraham Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was active, dipping and diving crazily through the auditorium, dive-bombing toward walls or lights or people but veering away at the last moment, flitting through the dense network of beams and cables and catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed pipes above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated path that never brushed against any solid object.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The Bangladeshi garment explosion soon was noticed on the world stage. Astonished U.S. garment manufacturers begged for protection from the Bangladeshis, who in some product lines had surpassed such traditional bugaboos of the protectionist lobby as Korea, Taiwan, and China.9 The U.S.government, led by that ardentbeliever in free enterprise Ronald Reagan, slapped garment import quotas on Bangladesh as early as 1985. Unfazed, the Bangladeshis diversified into Europe and successfully lobbied for relaxing their U.S. quotas. Although still vulnerable to worldtrade policies, the industry is going strong today. 1 don’t mean this story to be a morality play for how nations can succeed.

Although it appears everywhere, there are some careful measures of the severity of corruption across countries that we can use. I will first give some anecdotes to illustrate the ubiquity of corruption and then present some measures to distinguish corruption across countries. Denver brewery owner JosephCoors was a big financial backer of Ronald Reagan. When his beer can manufacturing plant had to dispose of some hazardous waste, Reagan appointed several members of the Coors clan to the Environmental Protection Agency, which then lifted restrictions on dumpingof toxic waste in Colorado.There was a public outcry against Coors for his buying the right to dump toxic waste, if not for his watery beer.4 The psychologist Dr.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Cotterman that reasonable suspicion of criminal activity was required for a forensic search of a device—such as using software to analyze encrypted or deleted data, as opposed to performing a more cursory look at documents, photos, or other files. In the digital age, these loopholes have become large enough to allow for the type of suspicionless searches that outraged the Founding Fathers. * * * U.S. presidents have long been cautious about overstepping the bounds of the Fourth Amendment. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan authorized limited domestic spying in order to seek Soviet infiltrators, he ordered the intelligence agencies to use “the least intrusive collection techniques feasible within the United States or directed against United States persons abroad.” Over the years, Reagan’s directive has been interpreted to mean that domestic spying should be done cautiously, and only in cases where there is reason to suspect a crime.

Courts have largely supported a “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment: Susan Stellin, “The Border Is a Back Door for U.S. Device Searches,” New York Times, September 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/business/the-border-is-a-back-door-for-us-device-searches.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan: Exec. Order No. 12,333, 3 C.F.R. (1981), http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html. Documents revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden: “NSA Inspector General Report on Email and Internet Data Collection Under Stellar Wind—Full Document,” Guardian, June 27, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/27/nsa-inspector-general-report-document-data-collection; or ST-09-0002 (working draft), Office of the Inspector General, NSA, March 24, 2009.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

In the summer of 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was stuck in heated negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration, demanding raises and shorter hours for its members. With the talks deadlocked, the union ordered some thirteen thousand air traffic controllers to walk off the job on August 3. Thousands of flights were grounded across the country. President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire all controllers who did not return to work within forty-eight hours. On August 5, he did. The FAA soon had planes back in the air, and the government imposed a lifetime ban on all eleven thousand air traffic controllers fired by the president. Reagan’s decision sent a clear message to employers across the country: do not let strikes intimidate you.

The apartment complex, named after New York labor leader Sidney Hillman, housed members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America union. Growing up in Brooklyn Heights, Horowitz assumed everyone shared the same enthusiasm for unions as she and her family. It was not until college that she was exposed to less rosy perceptions of organized labor. President Ronald Reagan had recently broken the PATCO strike, and attitudes toward worker movements in the United States and United Kingdom were shifting. “The culture just really stopped seeing the benefits of unions,” she said. “There are many legitimate issues with unions for sure, but I think we’ve now seen that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

She believed in homeopathic medicine, which would become a source of tension between the two of them. “For a molecular biologist, believing in homeopathy is not honorable. So, life was difficult,” Hinton says. “We had to agree not to talk about it.” She was also a confirmed socialist who did not take to Pittsburgh or to the politics of Ronald Reagan’s America. But for Hinton this was a fruitful period for his own research. The morning of his wedding, he disappeared for half an hour to mail a package to the editors of Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals. The package contained a research paper describing backpropagation, written with Rumelhart and a Northeastern University professor named Ronald Williams.

Two decades after Minsky and Papert published their book on the Perceptron, it did the kind of thing they said a neural network couldn’t do. Hinton was not there to see it. In 1987, the year Pomerleau arrived at Carnegie Mellon, he and his wife left the United States for Canada. The reason, he liked to say, was Ronald Reagan. In the United States, the majority of the funding for artificial intelligence research flowed from military and intelligence organizations, most notably the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, an arm of the U.S. Defense Department dedicated to emerging technologies. Created in 1958 in response to the Sputnik satellite launched by the Soviet Union, DARPA had funded AI research since the field’s earliest days.


pages: 572 words: 179,024

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

Scores were important because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade-long history of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that Mingus witnessed so radical. It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook. No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

Osama bin Laden was known to be the architect of the 1998 U.S. embassy suicide bombings in East Africa, which killed more than 225 people, including Americans. He masterminded the suicide bombing of the USS Cole and had officially declared war against the United States. But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved. There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination.

Barnes, Colonel Leghorn, Hervey Stockman, Gerald Posner, Stephen Younger, John Pike, Gene Poteat, EG&G engineer, David Myhra 1. engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns: Interview with Barnes. This is educated speculation; Barnes did not work on the drone project. Coll also writes about this. 2. targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal: December 4, 1981, President Ronald Reagan Executive Order 12333. 3. State Department gave the go-ahead: Coll, Ghost Wars, 539. 4. CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project: Ibid., 534. “The Air Force ought to pay for the Afghan operation, CIA officers believed, in part because the Pentagon was learning more about the drone’s capabilities in a month than they could in a half a year of sterile testing in Nevada… Having seen the images of bin Laden walking toward the mosque at Tarnak, Black was now a vocal advocate of affixing missiles to the drone.” 5. on the outer reaches of Area 51: In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll places the mock-up “in Nevada” (549).


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

I have legal pads, and a pen that’s gone unused for so long it doesn’t work—I borrow a stumpy half-pencil, a “golf” pencil, from the reference desk and return to my seat, thinking perhaps I should review what’s new in the world of Nixonology before continuing the book. Nixon himself wrote ten books, the last, Beyond Peace, finished weeks before he died. Titles like that, Beyond Peace, make me nervous, like maybe some part of him knew the end was near—the first volume of Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, published in the early 1960s, had the prophetic title Where’s the Rest of Me? Is there room for another book about Nixon? People often ask me, and I say, Well, you heard about Nixon’s trip to China, but what about his passion for real estate in New Jersey? What about his interest in animal welfare?

“Well, I was thinking about you and couldn’t remember if it was Larry Flynt, Nixon, or, for some reason, that guy George Wallace; he sticks in my head because wasn’t he shot?” “Wallace and Flynt were both shot; Wallace in 1972 while campaigning for president in Laurel, Maryland, by a guy called Arthur Bremer—whose diary prompted the film Taxi Driver, which prompted John Hinckley to aim for Ronald Reagan. Larry Flynt was shot in 1978 in Georgia by a sniper while he was on trial for obscenity. These days he rolls around in a gold-plated wheelchair.” “I love that you know all that,” she says. “I’m a historian,” I say. “It’s actually more layered than that. People wondered, was Bremer working for someone?

He says it as though he’s been practicing in a mirror. It triggers an instant flashback—cultural insensitivity. “Here we go again. Don’t you people ever learn?” “What are you talking about?” Penny demands. “Iran Contra,” I say, “Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and arms-for-hostages. They sent a Bible signed by Ronald Reagan and a chocolate cake shaped like a key—baked by an Israeli, no less.” “I still don’t know what you are talking about,” Penny says. “You may not, but I do,” I say. “What’s the point of the halvah?” “I figure it might appeal to this character; also high in fat, so good for these guys, and it’s not something the government food bank can distribute easily, with all the rules about nuts and seeds.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

Since the 1980s, the dominance of new classical theory in economics has coincided with the neo-liberal capture of politics. The connection is not fortuitous. New classical economics has provided an economic-theoretic justification for neo-liberal policies; neo-liberal ideology has shaped the way economists ‘model’ the economy. Both readily sign up to Ronald Reagan’s distillation of two centuries of conventional wisdom: ‘The government is the problem, not the solution.’4 However, to say that economics is inherently ideological is not quite to get to the root of the puzzle of what went wrong in 2008. Why this ideology and not that? Ideology is highly influenced by the structure of power, as well as helping to bring about a structure of power favourable to it.

In 1982, monetarism American-style was abandoned, but Volcker was hailed as the man who had broken the back of American inflation. Unemployment came down from 11 per cent in 1982 to 5 per cent in 1990. Ironically, the worst effects of the Volcker recession were offset by the huge budget deficits Ronald Reagan ran to finance his arms build-up against the Soviet Union. The British experiment with broad money monetarism, which ran from 1980 to 1984, fared little better than the narrow money monetarism of the US. In the budget of 1980, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe presented the medium-term financial strategy (MTFS), which called for a phased reduction in the growth of the money stock, to be made possible by a phased reduction in the public sector borrowing as a share of GDP.

Of those in the mainstream, Raghuram Rajan and Robert Shiller can claim credit for having foreseen a crisis, for various reasons. The general cause of the financial collapse had been previsioned by Hyman Minsky in his ‘financial instability hypothesis’: see Minsky (1992). 3. Quoted in Kynaston (2017), p. 358. Montagu Norman to Henry Clay. 4. The original is a bit more verbose than the familiar form given above. Ronald Reagan’s actual words were: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ (See Reagan (1981).) 5. Hicks (1976), pp. 208–9. 6. Keynes (1973a (1936)), pp. 383–4. 7. Dasgupta (1985), pp. 1–2. 8. Marx and Engels (1962), p. 52. 9. Dasgupta (1985), p. 4. 10.


pages: 893 words: 282,706

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, buy low sell high, complexity theory, computer age, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Francisco Pizarro, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, job automation, land reform, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The talk was political, but only in terms of the courtroom. Oscar was dealing with two hyperpolitical trials at the same time. In one, the trial of the "Biltmore Six," he was defending six young Chicanos who'd been arrested for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel one night about a year ago, while Governor Ronald Reagan was delivering a speech there in the ballroom. Their guilt or innocence was immaterial at this point, because the trial had developed into a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system. In the preceeding months, Acosta had subpoenaed every Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them at length, under oath, on the subject of their "racism."

So there is no way of knowing if the "private Nixon" was always so different from the public version. We have only his word, and -- well, he is, after all, a politician running for office, and a very shrewd man. After several days of watching his performance in New Hampshire I suspected that he'd taken a hint from Ronald Reagan and hired a public relations firm to give him a new image. Henry Hyde denied this emphatically, "That's not his style," he said. "Mr. Nixon runs his own campaigns. You'd find that out pretty quick if you worked for him." "That's a good idea," I said. "How about it?" "What?" he asked humorlessly.

Unlike the dedicated radicals who emerged from the Free Speech Movement, the hippies were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in changing it. They were generally younger than the political types, and the press dismissed them as the "pot left," a frivolous gang of druggies and sex kooks who were only along for the ride. Then Ronald Reagan was elected Governor by almost a million-vote plurality. Shortly afterward, Clark Kerr was fired as president of the University of California -- a direct result of Reagan's victory. In that same November, the G.O.P. gained 50 seats in Congress and served a clear warning on the Johnson Administration that despite all the headlines about Berkeley and the New Left, most of the electorate was a lot more hawkish, hard-nosed and conservative than the White House antennae had indicated.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Bob Baker Marionette Theater PUPPET THEATER (www.bobbakermarionettes.com; 1345 W 1st St, near Downtown; admission $15, reservations required; 10:30am Tue-Fri, 2:30pm Sat & Sun; ) Adorable singing and dancing marionettes have enthralled generations of wee Angelenos. RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM No matter how you feel about Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), his presidential library (www.reaganlibrary.com; 40 Presidential Dr; adult/teen/senior $12/6/9; 10am-5pm; ) is quite fascinating. Galleries cover the arc of the man’s life from his childhood in Dixon, Illinois, through his early days in radio and acting to his years as governor of California, although the focus is obviously on his stint as president (1980–88) in the waning years of the Cold War.

The museum features re-creations of the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, Reagan family memorabilia, gifts from heads of state, a nuclear cruise missile and even a graffiti-covered chunk of the Berlin Wall. His grave is on the grounds as well. Get there via the I-405 (San Diego Fwy) north to the 118 (Ronald Reagan Fwy) west; exit at Madera Rd South, turn right on Madera and continue straight for 3 miles to Presidential Dr. Tours Esotouric HISTORY, LITERATURE ( 323-223-2767; www.esotouric.com; bus tours $58) Hip, offbeat, insightful and entertaining walking and bus tours themed around literary lions (Chandler to Bukowski), famous crime sites (Black Dahlia) and historic neighborhoods.

Within a decade after the war, California’s population had grown by 40%, almost reaching 13 million. The state’s military-industrial complex continued to prosper during the Cold War, providing jobs in everything from avionics and missile manufacturing to nuclear submarine maintenance. Military spending peaked in the 1980s under ex-California governor and then US president Ronald Reagan, lasting until the end of the Cold War. SOCIAL MOVERS & SHAKERS Nobel Prize- winning novelist John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath narrates the epic journey of the Joad family as they struggle to escape the Dust Bowl and reach California by motoring along Route 66. Unconstrained by the burden of traditions and promoted by film and TV, California has been a leader in new attitudes and social movements.


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

He previously worked as vice president of programs at the Manhattan Institute and president of the Commonwealth Foundation. Mr. Olsen’s work has been featured in many prominent publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Ronald Reagan: New Deal Conservative (HarperCollins, 2017).


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

Which vitamins do the White House doctors dispense, and can the rest of us get a bottle? My 79-year-old mother can’t walk up a flight of stairs without her hip popping out of its socket, but President George H. W. Bush celebrated his 90th birthday by skydiving. That’s right, someone pushed a president out of an airplane, and he still lived. Both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were 93 when they died and I’m sure their doctors were fired for incompetence. If Dad had been given Obama’s actual care, he’d be alive today, complaining about Obamacare. Sometime after your loved one dies, you’ll hear the name of a famous person who is alive and older than your dead person, and you will be struck with envy and bitterness.


9-11 by Noam Chomsky

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

Though the Sandinistas claim to have “abandoned the socialist policies and anti-American rhetoric of the past, Koch’s statement [of October 6] indicated the administration has doubts about the claims of moderation.” Washington’s doubts are understandable. After all, Nicaragua had so outrageously attacked the U.S. that Ronald Reagan was compelled to declare a “national emergency” on May 1, 1985, renewed annually, because “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” He also announced an embargo against Nicaragua “in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government’s aggressive activities in Central America,” namely its resistance to U.S. attack; the World Court dismissed as groundless Washington’s claims of other activities.


pages: 123 words: 36,533

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind

David Sedaris, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, The Soul of a New Machine

The editors of Creative Nonfiction were dismayed by the scandalous controversy over A Million Little Pieces and the debacle that followed. Of course, this was not the first time such a brouhaha over truth and accuracy in nonfiction writing had erupted. Some of us remember the debate over the legitimacy of the work of Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who, while writing the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, created himself as a fictional character in order to flesh out Reagan’s hidden and puzzling personality. To be fair, Morris was not misleading his readers; his act of fictionalizing himself was made clear in the text of Dutch. This decision, however, to publish an authorized biography as a fictionalized memoir, created an uproar that was covered in the New York Times, on 60 Minutes, and elsewhere.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

The conservative culture war of the 90s had tried to push back against the enormous gains of the cultural left over abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, pornography and the Western canon. Buchanan’s style was more pugilistic than most of the Republican mainstream was willing to risk and his culture war speech remains an undeniably brilliant piece of writing and oratory, as well as one of the most important speeches in US history. The speech was a defense of Ronald Reagan and, after losing the presidential nomination himself, a defense of the Republican nominee George Bush senior. But primarily it was really a call to engage in a larger culture war: ‘There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.’


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Milton’s simple narrative blamed the economic troubles that people found themselves in, and the crisis facing the state, on budget deficits—too much spending that had pushed things out of whack. To get back on course, the state simply needed to stop spending, and to stop listening to the demands for more and better jobs, consumer rights, and protection from the market. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, he used his position to silence dissenting voices and promote a new vision. He told stories about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs, the “Communist menace” lurking on the horizon, and “getting the government off the backs of the people” through tax cuts and deregulation. He squashed organized labor (breaking the PATCO strike by firing 11,345 air traffic controllers and banning them from future employment in the federal government), weakened environmental protections, and cut funding to agencies tasked with ensuring worker and consumer safety.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Thus was born the world’s first mass middle class, a fulfillment of the Founders’ vision in a postagrarian economy. The quarter century after World War II was the golden age of America’s middle class. Twenty million veterans went to college or bought homes thanks to the GI Bill. Green-lawned suburbs sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Families filled their garages with cars, tools, and barbecues. In 1980, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that it was “morning in America,” and most voters believed him, or wanted to. In fact, it was already after noon, though few realized it at the time. Like agriculture before it, manufacturing had begun shedding workers. Not only were foreign manufacturers outcompeting ours; American companies were moving factories overseas.


Polaroids From the Dead by Douglas Coupland

dematerialisation, edge city, guns versus butter model, index card, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, upwardly mobile, urban planning

He leans over his side table and warms his hands over Alice’s candle. “Hey,” he says, “I think I’ll stay here awhile.” Neil Summers Collection/Archieve Photos YOU CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT YOU CHOSE TO FORGET SOFTWARE HAS RAINED MONEY ON BEN. HE HAS AMASSED A CALIFORNIA FORTUNE that hums like crickets on Ronald Reagan’s ranch on a hot summer day. Thank you, Bendix. Thank you, Morton Thiokol. Thank you, GE, Bechtel, Raytheon, Amana, Honeywell and Motorola. Ben can even forget about the pair of $650 Bally Suisse brogues ruined waiting in line for tonight’s concert, shoes he purchased just this afternoon in San Francisco after sifting through his T-bills in the Bank of America VIP vault.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The nation responded by tossing Mr. Carter out of office and replaced him with a movie actor who promised to restore the Great Enterprise to all its former glory, whatever the costs. _ T H E G E O G R A P H Y O F N O W H E R E Aside from being nearly killed by an assassin early in his first term, Ronald Reagan was the luckiest President of the century. The oil cartel fell apart while he was in office without America's having to do a thing. Greed, desperation, and a war between Iraq and Iran that spanned both of Reagan's terms, foiled the oil cartel's ability to operate in concert and keep prices jacked up.

At the head of this court of nations stands the American Pavilion, a reproduction of Independence Hall. It is hard to imagine a more empty and embarrass­ ing spectacle than the show they put on there, performed by anima­ tronic robots-what a savings in actors' equity salaries and benefits ! It's as if Ronald Reagan's second inaugural address had been turned into a Broadway musical, the producers thinking that if the word America was invoked a thousand times the heavenly spheres would ring out in trib­ ute and gratitude. As it is, there is enough canned choral music to drown out a Super Bowl halftime show, so if the heavens answered nobody would hear them anyway.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

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

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

To this day, despite the resurgence of liberal values that came after the Second World War, and especially after the Cold War, the kneejerk assumption on the part of much of the intelligentsia is still based on planning rather than evolutionary unfolding. Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible. In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011. The counter-revolution of Ronald Reagan was a mere pause in the advance of government, which has become the conduit of welfare not just from the wealthy to the disadvantaged, but from the middle classes back to the middle classes. Many think government has now evolved to its maximum possible size, that it cannot be sustained on a larger scale.

In effect the upside was now private, the downside public. Says David Stockman, ‘The GSEs were actually dangerous and unstable freaks of economic nature, hiding behind the deceptive and good-housekeeping seal afforded by their New Deal-sanctioned mission to support middle-class housing.’ When Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, he set out to strangle Fannie and Freddie by gradually forcing them to borrow at market rates. Horrified lenders, brokers, builders and suppliers joined in a ‘mighty coalition to keep private enterprise humming on cheap, socialized credit’. They lobbied Congress to stop him, and led by the Republicans, it did so.


pages: 367 words: 117,340

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

Honestly, I wasn’t even really sure what they were. Twenty years later, and after much contemplation, I still don’t have much of an idea. Yet I identify with the Democratic Party. Why? Because I’m pretty sure I understand what the Republicans stand for, and I’m not down with them. To quote the patron saint of the modern Republican Party, Ronald Reagan: “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” To wit: government should stay out of people’s lives except when a woman accidentally gets pregnant. Or when banks or oil companies need money. Republicans believe in free speech unless the language being spoken is Spanish.

I try explaining the book to him but his mind is obviously elsewhere, and after confirming that we will be having dinner later that evening, he grumbles something like “see ya later” to me, gives Meghan a quick kiss goodbye and heads back out, his secretary confirming appointments and handing him stacks of phone messages as he goes, taking all the air with him. Meghan: I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to understand that things in Washington have changed within my lifetime. There was a time when Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan were good friends and would socialize after the business of politics had ended for the day. There is even a famous story of Tip O’Neill visiting Reagan in the hospital after he was shot. Can you possibly imagine John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi doing absolutely anything together after hearings close for the day?


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

“It was sort of menacing. At this stage in my life, I want a place that I can take my family.” 17. PLAYS “R” US IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, I went with my wife and parents to see August Wilson’s play King Hedley II, at the Virginia Theatre on West 52nd Street. The play was set in 1985—Ronald Reagan’s America—and the action took place in the scraggly backyard of a street of row houses in a barely-getting-along urban neighborhood. A half-demolished brick wall at the back of the stage formed an enclosure separating the world of the characters, black people who were no longer young and no longer hopeful, from the prosperous, front-yard world familiar to the audience.

(One of the two main characters of Topdog/Underdog makes a living, when all else fails, playing three-card monte, presumably not far from the theater.) To emerge from these plays is to carry with you a memory, or perhaps just an image, of something that will not be assimilated into the glossy world of Broadway, just as King Hedley and his friends cannot be assimilated into Ronald Reagan’s America. Of course, most of these illusionistic worlds aren’t meant to be disturbing in the least. They’re meant to be—even if in fact they’re often not—delightful, sentimental, splashy, and sparkling, just as they have always been on Broadway. Frothy escapism is the bread and butter of Broadway.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

The White House is also projecting that the ratio of government debt held by the public to GDP will rise from 53 percent to 66 percent over the next ten years, but many private analysts believe that it will rise to 77 percent because the economy will experience weaker growth than the administration is forecasting. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush ended their terms at 45 percent and 53 percent, respectively. The administration assumes that gradual deficit reduction will take place as the economy’s growth rate accelerates to an average rate of 5.9 percent between 2012 and 2014. If the US economy only grows at an average annual rate of 2.5 percent between 2010 and 2015, federal spending will rise to 26.5 percent of GDP in 2015.

If the United States imposed a 10 percent VAT, it could raise sums equal to 5 percent of GDP. But the president has ruled out tax hikes on people earning less than $250,000 per annum. This leaves the option of hiking the top marginal income tax rates back to 45–50 percent, where they were before Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Such a tax increase will generate massive protests from small businesses and high-income earners. It would also undermine the support that President Obama enjoyed from highly educated people during the 2008 election. Obama supported raising income tax rates to pay for health care reform in 2009, but he has not yet commented on how he will solve the budget deficit problem.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The recognition that all these things can happen has led to state policing and interventions such as regulatory laws on occupational safety and health, consumer product safety protections and the like (such protective measures have been severely weakened under the neoliberal regimes personified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that have prevailed these last thirty years or so). Almost everywhere we look in the capitalist world, the evidence of widespread illegality is palpable. The definition of what is the norm for legal capital circulation is, it seems, heavily influenced, if not defined, by the field of illegal behaviours.

George Bush Jr, who repeatedly used the words liberty and freedom in all his speeches, described in stirring rhetorical terms (as the USA marched into a trumped-up war against Iraq) the US tradition this way: ‘The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points [Woodrow Wilson] to the Four Freedoms [Theodore Roosevelt] to the Speech at Westminster [Ronald Reagan], America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom – the freedom we prize – is not for us alone.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

But forget the Third World—just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western Europe, places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews. If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They’re the right personality types. That’s the traditional pattern. Invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work for them against others.

It would have brought the US into line with the rest of the industrial world, but it was beaten back by a huge corporate offensive, complete with tantrums about how we were going to turn into a Bolshevik society and so on. Every time the issue has come up, there’s been a major corporate offensive. One of Ronald Reagan’s great achievements back in the late 1960s was to give somber speeches (written for him by the AMA) about how if the legislation establishing Medicare was passed, we’d all be telling our children and grandchildren decades hence what freedom used to be like. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein [both of Harvard Medical School] also cite another poll result: When Canadians were asked if they’d want a US-style system, only 5% said yes.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

On March 13, Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson released recommendations from the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG). Composed of the heads of Treasury (Paulson), the Federal Reserve (Bernanke), the New York Fed (Geithner), the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the PWG was established in 1988 after the stock market crash by President Ronald Reagan to “enhance the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our nation’s financial markets while maintaining investor confidence.” The shadowy nature of the PWG sparked conspiracy theories about secret cabals manipulating markets. In 1997, a Washington Post reporter interviewed various members of the group and nicknamed the PWG the “plunge protection team.”

Sometimes, as an added bonus: Ibid. CHAPTER 7: THE MAVERICK It is not the responsibility: Ben Bernanke, The Courage to Act (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 156. The Dallas Fed is a $100 billion bankers’ bank: FRBD: Richard Fisher, “A Need for Innovative Fiscal Policy (With a Nod to John Stemmons, Ronald Reagan and Paddy McCoy” (speech, Stemmons Corridor Business Association, Dallas, Texas, February 8, 2011), www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2011/fs110208.cfm. He was also one of the wealthiest: Binyamin Appelbaum, “How the Fed Presidents’ Assets Stack up,” New York Times, January 31, 2012. Despite his patrician appearance: Erica Grieder, “Money Makes the World Go Round,” Texas Monthly, October 2013, www.texasmonthly.com/politics/money-makes-the-world-go-round/.


Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

In a revealing correspondence with Kari Polanyi Levitt, a member of the New World Group at the University of West Indies, Manley reflected on the tragedy this closure entailed.14 At the height of his despair, he concluded that the NIEO was “predicated on a fantasy—­namely that anyone in international politics will respond to an argument built on ethics.”15 When Levitt reminded him, “The NIEO agenda was not based on ‘ethics’ but on the sovereign rights of developing countries over natural resources, on the need for codes of conduct for transnationals, and international measures to stabilize commodity prices,” Manley changed his tune.16 In response, he argued that the “failure to unite OPEC and other developing countries,” which he called the “real tragedy,” and the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who “buried” the Third World’s demands for equality, had led to the collapse of the NIEO.17 But if this second assessment captured the contingent political conditions that contributed to the NIEO’s displacement, it did not give Manley any hope that anticolonial worldmaking might be resuscitated.

See Daniel Sargent, “North/South: The United States Responds to the New International Economic Order,” Humanity: An Inter­ notes to ch a pter fi v e [ 221 ] national Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6 (Spring 2015), 201–­16; and Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177–­82. However, by 1981, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, the United States explicitly rejected any demands for greater economic equality. See Ogle, “States’ Rights,” 211, 224. 130. Kari Polanyi Levitt, The Origins and Consequences of Jamaica’s Debt Crisis 1970–­1990 (Mona: Consortium Graduate School of the Social Sciences, 1991), 13. See also Manley, Jamaica, 151. 131.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

They had always envisioned cyber attacks as a kind of digital equivalent to nuclear war: devastating but rare. This notion first etched itself into American consciousness with the 1983 movie WarGames, which featured a young Matthew Broderick inadvertently bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon by hacking into military computers. President Ronald Reagan saw the film the day after its release and demanded that the government investigate its premise.4 Over the five presidencies since, an endless string of Washington blue-ribbon commissions has addressed the specter of digital destruction. Books by academics and policymakers have conjured up images of hacked power plants and air traffic control networks, of food shortages and mass panic.

But Tye drew an alarming conclusion from the White House’s modifications: some American intelligence activities were beyond the reach of citizens’ democratic process. As Tye knew, intelligence agencies’ overseas activities against foreign targets are most closely governed by a presidential executive order signed by Ronald Reagan, known as EO 12333, and updated several times since. EO 12333 gives the NSA and other intelligence agencies a much freer hand in their overseas programs than they have on American soil. Historically, EO 12333’s clear foreign versus domestic distinction might have made some sense. In the Reagan years, comparatively fewer pieces of data on Americans ended up overseas.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Particularly in hospitals, patients may feel that they’re reduced to their illness—a problem to be diagnosed and treated rather than a person with hopes, yearnings, dreads, and a terrifyingly immediate need for solace. The pain of this experience also can extend to patients’ loved ones. Mychele spent most of the last year of her husband’s life at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Her husband, Vincent, had myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, a disease where your bone marrow stops making the healthy blood cells you need to survive. He’d endured chemotherapy, constant blood transfusions, and a stem cell transplant from his brother. But by Christmas Day, 2017, Vincent was in the intensive care unit (ICU).

., on veterans social, 163 from trauma, Werner study on, 175–77 Robinson, Bryan alcoholic father of, 169–70 on work addiction, 169–73 The Rock (Eliot), 53 Rogers, Annie G., 90–91 Rogers, Fred, 185 Rokach, Ami, 194 romantic relationships connection with others and, 222–23 Coontz on, 223 marriage and, 223 Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, 19 3 Wishes Project of, 20–23 Rowling, J. K., 12 Royal College of General Practitioners, UK, Stokes-Lampard as chair of, 14–15 RULER program Brackett and, 264–67 of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, 263–67 Ruston, Delaney on digital technology, 259–61 on microemotions, 263 on online behavior, 260 Screenagers documentary of, 259–60, 263 Sabry, Hala, 115–20 sacrifice, Hindu Upanishads on, 164 Saginaw, Paul, 233–36 Saslow, Eli, 145 Satcher, David, 272–73 school.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

This market-friendly ideology found its touchstone with Friedman’s famous doctrine, which held that the social responsibility of corporations and the business sector was to increase profits, and not much else.47 The consequences were seismic. By 1976, when Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the University of Chicago was arguably the most important economic institution in the world. A wholesale embrace of the power of markets was in the making. With the election of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, these ideas found their way into government. Now the emphasis was on the market, not the state. In 1981, Reagan himself famously noted that he believed ‘government is the problem’, not the solution. Both administrations sparked a bonfire of deregulation, stripping away perceived hurdles to businesses’ success.

In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s government perceived trade unions as one of the biggest internal threats, and took steps to significantly weaken their power. Between 1979 and 1988, union membership declined 20 per cent, thanks to government policies – combined with economic hardship and a decline in manufacturing employment. The US was on a similar trajectory. In 1981, the newly elected Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers and replaced them with non-union members. It marked a turning point in the history of American trade unionism. As a result, there was little unionisation in the early tech industry. This was still true as we entered the Exponential Age: the workforces of the digital superstars were completely un-unionised.


pages: 397 words: 113,304

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

“In Japan,” a senior scientist from that country told me later in my research, “the number-one threat to electricity is earthquakes; number two: jellies.” And it’s not just power plants; jellies are indiscriminate cloggers. Arguably, the most embarrassing jellyfish clog took place in 2006 during the maiden voyage of the USS Ronald Reagan. The $6 billion nuclear-powered aircraft carrier made its first international port of call at Brisbane harbor in Australia. During a five-day stay, crew aboard the football field–size vessel capable of holding eighty aircraft displayed its military might for the locals by driving the planes around on the flight deck.

See also specific cities Texas, University of at Austin, 222, 233 at Dallas, 90 Texas A&M University at Galveston, 154 Thailand, 228 Tiberias (Israel), 258, 263, 265 Tiburonia granrojo (big red jellyfish), 99–100 Titov, Gherman, 128–29 Tokyo, 79, 225, 236 Tokyo Bay, 191 Toxins, jellyfish, 11, 234, 245, 253 biochemistry of, 250–51, 255–56, 258 deadliest, 26, 58, 248–50 stinging cell mechanism for deployment of, 258–60, 263 Tripedalia, 124 Tsien, Roger, 117–19 Tsushima Island (Japan), 202, 207–14, 235, 236, 238, 297 Tuna, 159–60, 174, 225, 226 bluefin, 171, 201 Turkey, 76, 245, 300 Turritopsis, 152–57 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 106, 109–10 Tyrannosaurus rex, 67 United Kingdom, 64 United Nations, 246, 286 Food and Agricultural Organization, 147, 198, 228 United States, 10, 34, 36, 64, 100, 111, 175, 228 atomic bombing of Japan by, 110 carbon emissions in, 284–85 desalination plants in, 25 endangered animals in, 172 jellyfish cuisine in, 48–49, 51–52 jellyfisheries in, 228 marine protected areas of, 199 ports accommodating supersize ships, 31 public aquaria in, 60 research on medical uses of jellyfish in, 50 in sting protocol collaborative network, 253 television commercials in, 114 See also specific cities, states, and regions Uruguay, 73 USS Ronald Reagan, 24–25 Uye, Shin-ichi, 184, 186–89, 193, 201–2, 210, 216–25, 227–35, 299, 302 Venomous and Poisonous Marine Animals (Williamson), 44 Venus girdle, 98 Verne, Jules, 106, 109–10 Vervoort, Wim, 74 Vesuvius, 109 Vienna, University of, 73 Vietnam, 228, 299 Villanueva, Alex, 88–91 Vineyard Sound, 86, 87 Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 88 Vogel, Steven, 85 Waikiki Beach (Hawaii), 25, 250 Wales, 300 Watson, Glen, 261–63 Whales, 24, 89, 92, 106, 161, 168, 170, 229 Widder, Edith (Edie), 102–3, 105–7 Widmer, Chad, 60 Wijnhoff, Gerarda, 73, 75 Woods Hole (Massachusetts), 84–94, 96, 97, 111 Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), 84, 94, 111, 177 Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), 84 World Open Water Swimming Association, 252 World War II, 73–75, 110, 160 Yamanaka, Shinya, 155, 156 Yanagawa (Japan), 216, 225–27, 229, 235 Yanagihara, Angel, 248–51, 253–55, 299 Yellow Sea, 187, 229, 234 Zappa, Frank, 156–57, 162 Zebrafish, 117 Zombie worms, 168 Zooplankton, 28, 30, 33, 76, 168, 261–62, 296 About the Author Juli Berwald received her Ph.D. in ocean science from the University of Southern California.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The problem is “the imagery that gets associated with those names,” activist Crystal Echo Hawk told NPR.22 “It’s the racist fan behavior. When a fan paints their face red, right? That is blackface. Blackface is wrong. I think most people in this country get that now.” And for all its foot-dragging about issuing reparations to Black and Indigenous Peoples, the United States has paid reparations to its citizens before. In 1988, Ronald Reagan signed off on the bipartisan, $1.2 billion Civil Liberties Act, which authorized reparations for Japanese Americans who were ordered into internment camps during World War II. Four years later, George H. W. Bush expanded the program with a $400 million amendment. The act provided $20,000—$40,000 in today’s dollars—for each former internee still alive when the act was passed.

Even, perhaps especially, when my friends had the autonomy that accompanies a business card that says “CEO,” their personal lives took a backseat to their careers. Among the obstacles that challenge our ability to find and preserve connection is the extent to which our society has become overrun by neoliberalism, which has become the dominant approach to governance and economics in America and much of the world. Ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, neoliberalism elevates competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It defines citizens as consumers who vote with their checkbooks and credit cards; the ballot box is secondary. Since neoliberalism argues that the market is superior to all centralized planning efforts, its supporters advocate for privatization, deregulation, free trade, austerity, and elimination of the ‘public good.’


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

Even in the United States, the great experiment is more a result of mistaken assumptions about the long-term impact of public policy reforms than a testament to a principled commitment to the benefits of diversity. Neither Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor Lyndon Baynes Johnson and Ronald Reagan took a conscious decision to set up the great experiment. They all stumbled into it. That helps to explain many of the problems from which diverse democracies around the world now suffer. * * * — Many democracies have, since their inception, pledged to treat all their citizens equally, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity.

While the government has a right to impose rules on society and to assess taxes on residents, it has no moral authority to tell citizens what to think, who to worship, or how to lead their private lives. (Liberalism, in this philosophical sense, does not imply a particular position on the left-right spectrum. In the sense in which I use this term, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama all count as liberal.) The details of what this means for an array of controversial topics are far from obvious. Philosophical liberals disagree with one another about important questions like how easily parents should be allowed to homeschool their kids, under what circumstances towns can display religious symbols, or what accommodations from general rules citizens with strong religious convictions should enjoy.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

Studies of US foreign policy in the Cold War, however, rarely mention it – despite the acknowledgement by the last Cold War President, George H. W. Bush, that SIGINT was a ‘prime factor’ in his foreign policy.13 The small circle of those in the know in Washington used to joke that NSA stood for ‘No Such Agency’.* No Republican President visited NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, until Ronald Reagan in 1986.14† Over thirty years later no Democratic President has yet made a public visit.‡ By contrast, almost four centuries earlier, the great French codebreaker Rossignol was publicly visited at his château by both Louis XIII and Louis XIV.15 The virtual exclusion of SIGINT from the history of international relations after the Second World War has distorted understanding of the Cold War in significant ways.

During 1986 the CIA station in Islamabad coordinated the provision of over 60,000 tons of arms and other supplies to the mujahideen along over 300 infiltration routes by trucks and mules. The station chief, Milt Bearden, complained that the Agency ‘needed more mules than the world seemed prepared to breed’.74 American covert action against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, first authorized by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981, was far less successful than against the Russians in Afghanistan. Secret CIA support for the inept Contra guerrilla campaign against the Sandinistas was revealed by the US media and banned by Congress. Robert Gates, then the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence (head of analysis), reported to the DCI, Bill Casey, in December 1984 that covert support for the Contras was counterproductive and would ‘result in further strengthening of the regime and a Communist Nicaragua’.

The GRU claimed that in the previous June the United States had taken the decision to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in September 1961, but had been deterred at the last moment by Soviet nuclear tests which showed that the USSR’s nuclear arsenal was more powerful than the Pentagon had realized.89 Soviet intelligence was in a similarly alarmist mood at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan administration. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981, a visibly ailing Leonid Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by Yuri Andropov, who was to succeed him as General Secretary eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of his audience, the KGB Chairman announced that, by decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to collaborate in a global intelligence operation, codenamed RYAN – a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (‘Nuclear Missile Attack’).


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

Jacobs wrote a pilot script and called it Dallas—and even though Evans’s part of sweet young Pam Ewing ended up going to Victoria Principal instead, the rest of Dallas arrived on CBS virtually intact—and by the end of its first season it was one of the most popular TV series in the country. Shortly after Dallas arrived, so did the Ronald Reagan presidency, and Dallas was such a resounding international hit that in many foreign countries importing the series, the United States was epitomized by Larry Hagman’s J. R. Ewing, the villain you loved to hate: wealthy, ruthless, duplicitous, with excessive appetites and a paucity of scruples and conscience.

Except for the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes at No. 6, all shows in the end-of-season Top 10 that year were sitcoms. Sitcoms continued to develop and innovate in the early 1980s. One NBC sitcom, Gary David Goldberg’s Family Ties (1982–89), successfully inverted the All in the Family formula with perfect timing for the Ronald Reagan era by having Michael J. Fox play the argumentative conservative son of a liberal suburban father (Michael Gross). Another NBC comedy, Cheers (1982–93), not only presented one of the best workplace sitcoms ever made but eventually spawned another, Frasier (1993–2004). But for a while, these situation comedies became increasingly overshadowed by prime-time soap operas, a new wave of action shows, and another type of TV revolution with NBC’s Hill Street Blues.

Television writer-producers and network executives were beginning to accept that viewers could embrace even centrally featured characters not only in spite of their flaws but sometimes because of them. Not every viewer, however, was equally tolerant. Murphy Brown had premiered on CBS in the fall of 1988, just as a national election would hand the country’s reins from the two-term Republican president, Ronald Reagan, to his second-in-command, George H. W. Bush. When Bush ran for reelection in 1992 (a contest that would eventually be won by the Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton), his second-in-command, Vice President Dan Quayle, made national headlines by targeting the Murphy Brown series and character during a May campaign speech in San Francisco.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

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

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

He hitched a ride to Washington aboard a plane being flown there from the Douglas Aircraft plant and went to see a Flying School mate who was now a full colonel in charge of all filmmaking for the Army Air Forces. He had Ford assigned as a lieutenant to the 1st Motion Picture Unit at the old Mack Sennett studios in Culver City, California. Ronald Reagan, who had obtained a lieutenant’s commission in the Cavalry Reserve after he discovered that he liked riding horses while a young radio sportscaster in Iowa, had also been assigned to the unit and promoted to captain. Ford offered to take him out to a nearby airfield on weekends to hitch rides on planes for fun, but Reagan declined.

Bennie made certain she did not suffer in a material way, buying her an apartment in Washington and deeding her his share in a house in Palm Springs, California. He settled into a reasonably satisfying Washington life, playing golf at Burning Tree, an exclusive club in nearby Maryland; promoting his consulting business; serving on several presidential commissions, and as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Ronald Reagan. He especially enjoyed mentoring younger generals still on active duty who would quietly seek his advice when confronted with a problem. Every year there were reunions of those who had participated in the ICBM adventure. At first these were big, lavish affairs sponsored by Simon Ramo’s TRW, Convair, Lockheed, Boeing, and the other companies involved.

.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1995. _____. To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998. Moody, Walton S. Building a Strategic Air Force. Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996. Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House, 1999. Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millett. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2000. Nagorski, Andrew. The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II.


pages: 706 words: 206,202

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, creative destruction, deal flow, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, fixed income, fudge factor, George Gilder, index arbitrage, Internet Archive, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, walking around money, zero-coupon bond

Coupled with low-priced assets was the tax code's very generous treatment of interest payments on debt. Corporate dividends paid on stock aren't deductible; interest payments on debt are fully deductible. Buying assets with borrowed funds meant shifting much of the cost to the federal government. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 sent a powerful "anything goes" message to the financial markets. One of the first official acts of the Reagan Justice Department was to drop the government's massive ten-year antitrust case against IBM. Bigness apparently wasn't going to be a problem in the new era of unbridled capitalism.

Directly behind him is one of his chief public relations spokesmen, Kenneth Lerer, who is flanked by Milken lawyers Martin Flumenbaum, on Lerer's right, and Arthur Liman, partially obscured on Lerer's left. Behind Lerer is Lowell Milken, Milken's brother, who was also charged in the indictment. Milken hired the most powerful public relations team ever fielded by an individual criminal defendant. One of his leading strategists was Linda Robinson, a Ronald Reagan supporter and former acupuncture specialist who brought Republican-style "attack" politics to the public relations field. She wielded enormous influence, both in her own right and through her powerful husband, American Express chairman James Robinson, pictured on her right at a charity gala.

In March 1988, at Arthur Liman's suggestion, he hired an aggressive young PR firm: Robinson, Lake, Lerer & Montgomery. Linda Gosden Robinson, the firm's head, had become the PR embodiment of the eighties. The Southern California-bred daughter of Freeman Gosden, the actor who played Amos in "Amos 'n' Andy," Robinson had bounced on the knee of actor Ronald Reagan as a young girl. An attractive blonde who worked as an acupuncture therapist in the seventies, she had helped in the 1980 Reagan campaign and had then worked for Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis. When Lewis moved to Warner Amex Cable, she had gone with him, becoming close to the joint venture's chief executives: American Express chairman Jim Robinson and Warner Communications chairman Steve Ross.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

(This conference had, since the foundation of the union, brought together elected delegates from every local in advance of each round of bargaining.) 47 Moody, An Injury to All, pp. 168–9. 48 Alan Greenspan, “The Reagan Legacy,” Speech at the Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, April 9, 2003. Available at federalreserve.gov. 49 For the fullest account see Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America, New York, OUP, 2011. 50 Personal interview with Paul Volcker, March 2003. 51 Allen N. Berger, Anil Kashyap, and Joseph M. Scalise, “The Transformation of the US Banking Industry,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, No. 2, 1995, p. 57. 52 Steven K.

Against the backdrop of heightened competition from Japan (aggravated by high interest rates as well as the increases in oil prices) and the political defeat of the Democrats’ full-employment policy response to the recession of 1973–75, the threatened bankruptcy of Chrysler exposed, as Kim Moody has noted, the lack of any union plan for “dealing with large-scale business failure.”46 But if pattern bargaining in the auto industry was ended with Chrysler, it was soon perversely restored as similar concessions were granted to GM and Ford—and rank-and-file resistance was broken as unemployment reached 24 percent in that industry in the early 1980s. The appeal of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts to the Democrats’ working-class constituency, followed by the explicit class war from above undertaken by his administration after the 1980 election (through cutbacks to welfare, food stamps, Medicare, public pensions, and unemployment insurance), was a major factor in turning this initial defeat of labor in the iconic auto sector into an historic shift in the broader balance of class forces.


pages: 713 words: 203,688

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Gordon Gekko, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble

., a specialist in leveraged buyouts, now owned firms boasting $8 billion in revenues, throwing off enough cash for Forstmann to maintain second homes near Southampton and Aspen. His office held a smattering of Western art, a drop-dead view of Central Park, and a photo of Forstmann clasping hands with Ronald Reagan. In his spare time he bankrolled an Afghan rebel group. His wealth, it seemed, had bought Ted Forstmann everything but serenity. For Forstmann was a deeply angry man, burning with a resentment that friends and business associates knew best to steer clear of. At the drop of a name—that name—he would launch into an impassioned, ten-minute denunciation.

Raised in California, the daughter of the actor who played Amos in radio’s famous “Amos ‘n’ Andy” serials of the 1940s, she was a former debutante who spent the 1970s in a failed marriage and an array of jobs, including one at an acupuncture clinic. A die-hard Republican, she finagled a job as deputy press secretary to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. Later she went to work for a company run by the former transportation secretary, Drew Lewis, where she met and married Jim Robinson. After she founded her own New York firm with a group of friends, Linda Robinson’s affection for her husband began to be displayed publicly, and regularly.

By the next day their impact was clear. If everything Greeniaus said was true, Kohlberg Kravis could boost its bid from the low nineties to nearly $100 a share. On Tuesday, Johnson flew to Washington for a meeting with the president. Actually, he was one of several executives scheduled to see Ronald Reagan that day, all members of the commission commemorating the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Johnson was vice chairman. Ushered into the office after lunch, he shook Reagan’s hand. “Ross,” the president said, “I can’t help but notice you seem to be getting some publicity lately.” Johnson smiled.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In the US, the top decile got Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 155 almost half of the total income in 2014, while in Sweden it got only 30 percent (World Inequality Database [WID] WID.world). The advanced welfare state culture introduced by Sweden’s long-­ dominant Social Democrats, had lasting effects. Conversely, in Anglo-­American democracies, the neo-­conservative regimes led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s left a heritage in which conservatives in those countries seek to reduce government expenditures with almost religious zeal – and the US and United Kingdom now show greater income inequality than most other developed capitalist societies. In America, although real income has stagnated or shrunk for a growing share of the population, the inflation-­controlled cost of attending college for four years has more than doubled since 1981, making social mobility increasingly difficult.70 This is shaping how many Americans see their social position: in 2000, 33 percent of the public described themselves as ‘working class’; by 2015, that figure had risen to 48 percent.71 The safety net is unraveling, as politicians and corporations cut back on healthcare, income security, and retirement pensions.72 Stiglitz argues convincingly that a minority of extremely rich individuals has attained tremendous political influence in the US, which they are using to shape policies that systematically increase the concentration of wealth, undermining economic growth, and diminishing investment in education, research, and infrastructure.73 Similarly, Hacker and Pierson argue that politics in the US is dominated by an alliance between big business and conservative politicians that has cut maximum taxes for the rich from 75 percent in 1970 to less than 35 percent in 2004 and sharply reduced regulation of the economy and financial markets.74 The Republicans under Trump have slashed taxes for corporate America, while leaving most middle-­class households largely unchanged.75 To examine the cross-­national evidence, levels of political mistrust in European societies can be compared with several aggregate economic performance indicators in each country, such as rates of unemployment and growth.

Indeed populist discourse has permeated modern American presidential campaigns, with (on the Republican side) the 1952 Eisenhower campaign, the 1996 Dole campaign, and the 1968 Nixon campaign, and (on the Democratic side) the 1988 Dukakis campaign, the 1972 McGovern campaign, and the 1992 Clinton campaign with the slogan ‘Putting People First.’84 Analysis of presidential speeches suggest that many US presidential candidates from across the political spectrum, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Ross Perot, have depicted themselves as outsider reform crusaders vowing to clean up the corruption in Washington DC, to throw out beltway lobbyists, and to reform government.85 Trump’s angry anti-­establishment tone and his authoritarian-­populist tendencies also echo that of many other presidential leaders around the world.86 Latin America also has a long history of presidents using populist rhetoric to decry the corrupt establishment from the left-­wing side of the political spectrum, preaching social justice, pacifism, anti-­globalism, and anti-capitalism.87 In Asia, several political leaders have been seen Part III From Values to Votes 247 as populist; including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra,88 and the Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte.89 In Sub-­Saharan Africa, several leaders are seen to have also adopted populist strategies, such as Zambia’s Michael Sata and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.90 VII Conclusion Populist rhetoric asserts the legitimacy of popular sovereignty – if necessary, over-­riding the pluralist principles of minority rights, elite expertise, conventional power structures in liberal democracy, and decision-­making by elected representatives and professional bureaucrats.

The style was also exemplified by Governor George Wallace in the 1960s, elected in Alabama on a Southern segregationist platform.6 Part III From Values to Votes 333 The phenomenon did not originate when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower on June 15, 2016 to announce his presidential bid, with racist comments disparaging Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists (‘And some, I assume, are good people’).7 He inherited the populist mantle pioneered by Ross Perot’s third-­party challenge in 1992, when Perot presented himself as a modern-­ day common-­sense Mr. Deeds promising to restore a healthy America by cleaning up ‘the system’ on behalf of ‘the people.’8 Presidential candidates – for both major parties – have used populist language, as in the campaign speeches of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.9 Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 run for the GOP nomination was cut from the same cloth; as he said at the 1992 GOP convention: ‘The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, and women in combat units – that’s change, all right.


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The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Are political scientists, or analysts at Washington think tanks, any better at making predictions? Are Political Scientists Better Than Pundits? The disintegration of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc occurred at a remarkably fast pace—and all things considered, in a remarkably orderly way.* On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall—an applause line that seemed as audacious as John F. Kennedy’s pledge to send a man to the moon. Reagan was prescient; less than two years later, the wall had fallen. On November 16, 1988, the parliament of the Republic of Estonia, a nation about the size of the state of Maine, declared its independence from the mighty USSR.

This is one reason why it may not be harmful—some studies have even claimed that it may be helpful—for a president to experience a recession early in his term. The American economy was in recession in 1982, for example, but recovered from it with spectacular 8 percent growth in 1983 and 6 percent growth in 1984, helping Ronald Reagan to a landslide victory for a second term. There is some evidence, in fact, that presidents may have enough influence on fiscal and monetary policy to help perpetuate these outcomes. Since 1948, the median rate of GDP growth is 2.7 percent in the first year of a president’s term and 2.8 percent in the second year—but 4.2 percent in both the third and the fourth years.

“Quotation #24926 from Classic Quotes;” Quotations Page. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24926.html. CHAPTER 12. A CLIMATE OF HEALTHY SKEPTICISM 1. “History for Washington, DC: Wednesday, June 22, 1988,” Wunderground.com. http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KDCA/1988/6/22/DailyHistory.html?req_city=Ronald+Reagan+Washington+National&req_state=DC&req_statename=District+of+Columbia. 2. Kerry A. Emanuel, “Advance Written Testimony,” Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, March 31, 2011. http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/Emanuel%20testimony.pdf. 3.


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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

Its mission statement reads: “More Christians have been martyred in the past 100 years than in all prior 1900 years combined. And the persecution of Christians is growing. Today more Christians are oppressed for their faith than ever. In many nations—right now—Christians are harassed, tortured, imprisoned, and even martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ.”151 Jim Jacobson, a former aide to Gary Bauer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, runs the group, which has taken public positions against the work of the United Nations, calling some of its agencies “merchants of misery,”152 and has protested that Iraqi self-determination could harm Christians.153 In calling for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, Jacobson declared, “Only unequivocal military strikes will express our commitment to world peace and the rule of law.”154 The board of directors included Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends, former Republican Senator Don Nickles, and former Voice of America director Robert Reilly, who began his career as a Reagan White House propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras and worked briefly for war contractor SAIC on its ill-fated attempt to create a new Iraqi information ministry.155 In 2000 Erik Prince was on hand for a Michigan benefit to raise money for one of his family’s (and the theoconservative movement’s) pet causes—school vouchers.

Everybody knew for twenty years there needed to be a place like this built.”17 Not long after Clark pitched his idea to Prince in 1996, Clark says his former pupil told him, “Let’s do it.”18 At the time, the United States was in the midst of one of the darkest moments in recent history for the Republican Party and the religious right. Bill Clinton’s defeat of George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election meant the end of a twelve-year golden era of conservative governance, molded in large part by the policies of Ronald Reagan’s White House. While the right-wing political apparatus in which Edgar Prince was a key player did succeed in propelling the 1994 Republican Revolution and Newt Gingrich’s rise to Speaker of the House, the Clinton administration was viewed by the theocons as a far-left “regime” that was forcing a proabortion, progay, antifamily, antireligious agenda on the country.

He regularly introduced measures supporting the “Liberty Amendment,” which would have required the federal government to get out of businesses that would have competed with private industry.18 At one point, he proposed selling the University of California.19 In the late 1960s, he accused then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, of wanting to “run socialism more efficiently” after a tax increase.20 A year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, John Schmitz led the opposition in the California State Senate to commemorating the slain civil rights leader. After winning a Congressional seat as a Republican from Orange County in the early 1970s, he soon “established himself as one of the country’s most right-wing and outspoken congressmen.”21 He ran for President against Richard Nixon in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party, founded in 1968 by segregationist politician George Wallace.22 The elder Schmitz also served as national director of the anti-communist John Birch Society before being kicked out for being too extreme.23 He made comments like, “Jews are like everybody else, only more so,” “Martin Luther King is a notorious liar,” “I may not be Hispanic, but I’m close.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Natchez Trace Parkway KEVIN BURKE/CORBIS © The Coffee Pot, Pennsylvania WALTER BIBIKOW/CORBIS © ROADSIDE ODDITIES: LINCOLN HWY Kitschy, time-warped and just plain odd roadside attractions? Here are a few Lincoln Hwy landmarks to get you started: » Big-eared curios at Mr Ed’s Elephant Museum (www.mistereds.com; Ortanna, PA) » Ronald Reagan portrait made from 14,000 jellybeans at the Dixon Historic Center (www.dixonhistoriccenter.org; Dixon, IL) » Boot-shaped, 48ft Shoe House (www.shoehouse.us; York, PA) » Giant Coffee Pot (www.lhhc.org/coffeepot.asp; Bedford, PA) » Ghosts at the Mansfield Reformatory (www.mrps.org; Mansfield, OH) When to Go April through October is the best time to travel.

Best Places to Eat »Minibar at Café Atlantico (Click here) »Blue Hill Tavern (Click here) »Robert Morris Inn (Click here) »Fat Canary (Click here) »Local (Click here) Best Places to Stay »Hay-Adams (Click here) »Bellmoor Inn & Spa (Click here) »Colonial Williamsburg Historic Lodging (Click here) »Martha Washington Inn (Click here) »Greenbrier (Click here) Transportation The region is served by three major airports: Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD), Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI). Norfolk International Airport (ORF) and Richmond International Airport (RIC) are smaller regional hubs. Traveling by train is possible in some areas, with service provided by Amtrak (www.amtrak.com).

Websites Online visitor information (www.washington.org, www.thedistrict.com) Washington City Paper (www.washingtoncitypaper.com) Free edgy weekly with entertainment and dining listings. Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) Respected daily city (and national) paper. Its tabloid-format daily Express is free. Check online for events listings. Getting There & Away Air Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD; 703-572-2700), 26 miles west of the city center, and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA; 703-417-8000), 4.5 miles south, are the main airports serving DC, although Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI; 410-859-7111), 30 miles to the northeast, is also an option. All three airports, particularly Dulles and National, are major hubs for flights from around the world.


pages: 277 words: 41,815

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

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

Outside the northern S-Bahn station entrance are a few Berlin Wall segments with panels pointing to other Wall memorial sites and future Wall-related projects. Brandenburg Gate The Brandenburg Gate (Click here) was where construction of the Wall began. Many statesmen gave speeches in front of it, perhaps most famously former US president Ronald Reagan who, in 1987, uttered the words: ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’. Two years later, the Wall was history. Art Installation On the riverwalk level of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, which houses the parliamentary library, an art installation by Ben Wagin features original Wall segments, each painted with a year and the number of people killed at the border in that year.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

This is a global phenomenon, not restricted just to Britain, even though it has been worsened in Britain by the inequalities of austerity. The gradual collapse in the income distribution system began with the adoption of what is now called ‘neoliberalism’ in the 1980s, led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and guided by a bunch of economists linked to the Mont Pelerin Society. Neoliberalism may be characterized as the belief in open ‘free’ markets, defined by privatization, the sanctity of private property rights, free trade and minimal roles for protective labour regulations and collective bodies, which neoliberals see as distorting market forces.


pages: 150 words: 43,467

Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever Ways to (Roughly) Calculate Anything by Rob Eastaway

butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Strategic Defense Initiative, the rule of 72

and 700,000 ÷ 200 = 7 × 105 ÷ 2 × 102 = 3.5 × 103 TEST YOURSELF (a) What is 4 × 107 when written out in full? (b) What is 1,270 written in standard form? (c) What is 6 billion written in standard form? (d) (2 × 108) × (1.2 × 103) (e) (4 × 107) ÷ (8 × 102) (f) (7 × 104) ÷ (2 × 10−3) Solutions STAR WARS POWER There’s a ‘standard form’ joke that is told about Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the mid-1980s. I’d love to believe that it really happened. The idea of the SDI, which was given the nickname ‘Star Wars’, was to develop laser weapons that would be capable of destroying enemy nuclear missiles at long range. The laser weapons would need a huge amount of energy, and millions of dollars were allocated towards researching the feasibility.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Piketty’s book, moreover, provides a different perspective on the 30 or so years that followed the Great Depression and World War II, viewing this period as a historical anomaly, perhaps caused by the unusual social cohesion that cataclysmic events can stimulate. In that era of rapid economic growth, prosperity was widely shared, with all groups advancing, but with those at the bottom seeing larger percentage gains. Piketty also sheds new light on the “reforms” sold by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s as growth enhancers from which all would benefit. Their reforms were followed by slower growth and heightened global instability, and what growth did occur benefited mostly those at the top. But Piketty’s work raises fundamental issues concerning both economic theory and the future of capitalism.

I don’t think Conard will persuade the nearly 23 million Americans who would like a full-time job but can’t get one to find comfort in that. If you had to locate a fork-in-the-road moment when we started down the path toward widening inequality, when would that moment be? And what were the precipitating events? It’s hard to pinpoint a single critical moment, but clearly the election of President Ronald Reagan represented a turning point. In the decades immediately after World War II, we had economic growth in which most people shared, with those at the bottom doing proportionately better than those at the top. (It was also the period that saw the country’s most rapid economic growth.) Among the precipitating events leading to greater inequality were the beginning of the deregulation of the financial sector and the reduction in the progressivity of the tax system.


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

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

Arriving in the capital two months before Richard Nixon's resignation was a dizzying experience for a twenty-one-year-old college graduate. A few years later I was a full-fledged Washington correspondent, responsible for covering what in the face of OPEC and stagflation were the two most important domestic issues facing the Carter administration: energy and the economy. Then came the election of Ronald Reagan. Some of the stories I wrote were deeply skeptical of supply-side economics, to the point where I found myself attacked on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. My superiors decided that this would be an excellent moment for me to move to London to cover European economics. Neither London nor journalism outside Washington was particularly satisfying, however.

We did not believe that hiring non-union laborers to replace skilled UAW members was practical. The assembly of cars by GM involved hundreds of individual teams of five to six people executing highly specific tasks in forty-five- to fifty-second intervals. Nor did we believe that Barack Obama would be willing to discharge the autoworkers the way Ronald Reagan had fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. The idea that a Democratic administration would engage in union-busting was unimaginable. So even in bankruptcy, we'd have been right back at the table with Gettelfinger—only then GM would be hemorrhaging cash and consumers would likely be holding off on buying GM cars until they saw the outcome of the standoff.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Political scientist Larry Bartels, in an analysis of data on opinions and incomes collected by the National Election Survey, found that people in the bottom third of the income distribution have virtually no impact on the voting of their representatives in the U.S. Congress, compared with those in the middle and top thirds.14 Labor unions have in the past been the most likely lobbyists for lower-income people. But their in uence has been waning throughout much of the world. 15 Symbolically important changes came with the aggressive moves of Ronald Reagan, who broke the U.S. air tra c controllers’ strike in 1981, and Margaret Thatcher, who broke the U.K. coal miners’ strike in 1985. Unions’ traditional source of power, collective bargaining, has been weakened by international competition and new labor laws. We as a society must devise other, possibly very di erent, ways to energize lobbying e orts on behalf of neglected interests.

But preventing speculative bubbles and overleverage in an economy is inherently di cult for any government agency. One wonders how well these agencies will succeed. Past examples are not uniformly encouraging. In 1987, right after the biggest one-day stock market crash in U.S. history, President Ronald Reagan created such an agency, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which consisted of the secretary of the Treasury, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the chairman of the SEC, and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It was similar to today’s Financial Stability Oversight Council but had fewer members.


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A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The politician and the ideologue seek to demonize recipients and delegitimize government assistance programs, while the press seek sensational stories to sell advertising. The truth of the individual case, much less the larger truth of who receives relief and why, is immaterial to both of these powerful players.40 This is how the image of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” persists, despite the fact that she was a caricature crafted by a speechwriter.41 Propaganda, stereotypes, and myth govern our thinking about poverty and poor relief much more than the facts do. By current, official measures, for example, more than one-third of poor Americans are children under eighteen years old, more than 10 percent are over age sixty-five, and nearly 40 percent of the adult poor are disabled—that is, most poor people are “deserving” or “involuntarily” poor due to old age, youth, or infirmity.

You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare. The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things—rent, for instance—really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right. That’s why Governor [Ronald] Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them “lazy parasites,” “pigs at the trough,” and such. We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there’s something wrong with their character. If people have “motivation,” if people only want to work, they can, and they will be able to support themselves and their kids in decency.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Tech thinker Kevin Kelly has prophesied the rise of a new form of socialism as a consequence of unobstructed source technology and community-generated content.20 Capitalism is a highly adaptive creature, argues the contrarian economic reporter Paul Mason, but it is not going to survive the current revolution in information technology.21 Information, he argues, will destroy the price mechanism and new forms of collaborative production will do away with what is left of market capitalism. The passion for technological determinism also thrives on the other side of the ideological fence. “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip,” mused conservative icon Ronald Reagan,22 who drew heavily from technology enthusiasts like George Gilder, an economist who later identified the billion-transistor chip as the cure to root out all economic evil.23 A British libertarian politician has predicted that the new digital age will be the end of politics.24 Neoconservatives similarly were quick to embrace the revolutionary promise of technology.

That worldview sanctioned managerialism, and for the most part, the corporate planning machines made economies more prosperous. They certainly made us all more specialized, but they also swung the direction of capitalism away from innovation. 6 THE RETURN OF THE REGULATORS I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help. Ronald Reagan in a news conference1 The mentality of managerialism is increasingly guiding the way elected politicians make decisions about innovation and regulatory policy. The political leaders on the left and the right that have managed the capitalist system in the past four decades have united in a preference for market stability and innovation predictability.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

The U.S. president Gerald Ford escaped two assassination attempts (one by Charles Manson’s murderous henchwoman Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme), the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia, and the movie Godfather II ran away with six Academy Awards, including one to the Italian-American actor Robert De Niro. Our fifth billion came in 1987, now just twelve years after the fourth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time in history and the Irish rock band U2 released their fifth album, The Joshua Tree. Standing outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, U.S. president Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The world’s last dusky seaside sparrow died of old age on a tiny island preserve in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. A self-absorbed college sophomore at the time, I only noticed The Joshua Tree. Our sixth billion arrived in 1999.

Up until the demise of the Bretton Woods monetary regulatory system in the early 1970s, it presided for three decades over what some have called the “golden age of controlled capitalism.”29 But by the 1980s, “controlled capitalism” had fallen to a revolution of “neoliberalism”—the deregulation and elimination of tariffs and other controls on international trade and capital flows. The neoliberalism movement was championed by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, but was rooted in the ideas of Adam Smith. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the IMF, WTO, and World Bank aggressively pursued agendas of liberalizing (deregulating) trade markets around the world, vigorously urged on by the United States.30 A common tactic was to require developing countries to accept neoliberal reforms to qualify for IMF or World Bank loans.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

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

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

But countries with a modicum of power and influence were obviously unwilling to have foreign geosynchronous satellites hanging over their territories, so old-fashioned spying continued, as Americans were reminded in 2001 when China forced down a propeller-driven American "surveillance" plane flying just outside its territorial sea, briefly holding the crew and staff hostage on the island of Hainan and causing an international dispute. "Spy, but verify," as Ronald Reagan might have said. MAPPING SYSTEMICALLY Coupled with the unprecedented imagery generated by satellite-borne equipment is the equally unparalleled growth of computer versatility, including their graphic performance. Today, the map you see in your favorite magazine may well be drawn by a computer that has been instructed to manipulate information on boundaries, resources, ethnic homelands, or any other spatial feature.

Whenever I am in China, whatever college or university I visit seems able to round up at short notice a substantial number of interested students whose English is not only good enough to follow my rapid-fire lecture, but who are able to ask perceptive, often tendentious questions. How many United States universities could find a few hundred American Chinese speakers on campus to hear a visitor speak in his or her native language? And as far as terrorism is concerned, we obviously need a better mental map of the Islamic world than we have. When Ronald Reagan was asked, following the disastrous terrorist attack on the marines near Beirut in 1992, why the United States had so many troops in Lebanon, he answered "we're there because of the oil" (Clarke, 2004). But there was no oil in Lebanon. Oil certainly is entwined with the terrorist threat, as is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


pages: 460 words: 122,556

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, break the buck, Brownian motion, Carmen Reinhart, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, geopolitical risk, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Y2K

International opinion was already shifting, sharply, toward the view that free markets had been too free. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, a onetime advocate of American-style capitalism, was espousing government protection of essential industry. Broadly, Europe was backing away from the Milton Friedmanesque theology praised in political salons since the era of Ronald Reagan. The ideological reexamination was also under way at home. Chris Cox, the SEC chairman, once an extreme proponent of deregulation, told a Senate hearing the United States needed new oversight of exotic derivatives; he then admitted that the SEC’s regime of voluntary supervision of investment banks had proved to be woefully inadequate.

Indeed, Geithner promptly traveled to Beijing where, before an audience at Peking University, he pleaded, in the manner of a humbled plenipotentiary, that his government continue to be afforded credit. The legacy of the bust—what Wall Streeters called the “new normal”18—entailed, prospectively, a weaker dollar, a greater government presence, more joblessness, and higher taxes. It was a world of pinched horizons. From roughly the 1980s on, no horizon had been deemed necessary. Ronald Reagan had decreed that government was the problem, not the cure. Markets were viewed as self-regulating ecosystems. The province of regulation shrank, the volume of market innovations commensurately expanded. By the 2000s, the market’s innovations were no longer even questioned: Anything invented on Wall Street was perforce good.


pages: 363 words: 28,546

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation by R. Marston

asset allocation, Bob Litterman, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carried interest, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, German hyperinflation, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, inventory management, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, passive investing, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Its relatively low return in Swiss francs was offset by a large appreciation of its currency relative to the dollar. The United Kingdom would have had as large of a return as Switzerland if the pound had not depreciated against the dollar over this 35-year period. In the short run, exchange rate movements can lead to much larger variations in stock returns measured in dollars. Consider the period of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981 to 1988. During Reagan’s first term, the dollar rose sharply against the other major currencies. For example, the French franc price of the dollar rose from less than five FF per dollar in January 1981 to more than 10 FF per dollar in February 1985. As a result, the dollar returns on French stocks were severely depressed.

In the case of the EAFE index, for example, the return in dollars averaged 1.9 percent above the local currency return from 1970 through 2009. The higher return in dollars reflected the depreciation of the dollar that occurred over this period. At times, currency gains or losses can be a dominant factor, as in the first and second terms of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. But there is little evidence that such currency gains or losses can be easily forecasted. An American investor must decide whether the total return on foreign stocks, including the currency component, is sufficiently attractive to warrant investment. As with all assets, returns have to be evaluated on a risk-adjusted basis, and the risk of foreign stocks is best evaluated in a portfolio context where their diversification benefits can be assessed.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Technology and market changes came first, and banks could not survive without a significant alteration of the New Deal rules and barriers. Something had to change, but deregulation was by no means the only option. The era also coincided with a conservative political revival in America and Europe and a deregulatory philosophy in other sectors. Ronald Reagan wanted to get the government off the people’s backs, and the banking sector needed exactly that. But deregulation was not just about Ronald Reagan. A decade later, Bill Clinton finished what Reagan had started. Additionally, other changes occurred in the United States that explain the ideological transformations of the time, such as a historic rise of income and wealth disparity and an economic boom.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Levy and Temin use “The Treaty of Detroit” as a shorthand to describe the broader set of political, social, and economic institutions that were established in the United States during the postwar era: strong unions, high taxes, and a high minimum wage. The Treaty of Detroit era was a golden age for the middle class, and a time when the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else shrank. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Treaty of Detroit began to break down. This was the decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They both sharply cut taxes at the top—Reagan slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and reduced the maximum capital gains tax to 20 percent—reined in trade unions, cut social welfare spending, and deregulated the economy. This Washington Consensus was exported abroad, too.

Konrád and Szelényi’s book was a revolutionary act—its authors retreated to a village in the Buda Hills to write it in an effort to evade the secret police, and they buried their manuscript in the garden every night, to protect it from being seized in a feared early morning raid. The book caused a predictable splash when it was published in the West in 1979, five years after it had been written—this was, after all, the beginning of the final triumphant chapter of the cold war, the year Ronald Reagan was elected and Leonid Brezhnev was starting the fifteenth year of his reign as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Anything that discredited the so-called workers’ paradise, particularly from the inside, was a geopolitical event. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power built on the arguments of an even more groundbreaking work smuggled out of Eastern Europe a generation earlier: Milovan Djilas’s The New Class.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Another result of the crisis of the 1970s was to discredit the reigning economic orthodoxy—Keynesian government-led or -guided economic development—in favor of a corporate-inspired movement restoring a measure of laissez-faire (a program usually called neoliberalism outside North America). Its standard-bearers were Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and international enforcement of the neoliberal model was put into the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Dozens of countries currently operate under IMF “structural adjustment” programs (SAPs), and despite—or because of—such tutelage few ever complete the IMF/World Bank treatment to regain financial health and independence.

The overall pattern has been cautious incrementalism—a series of modest proposals, each just slightly more ambitious than its predecessor, and all doomed to be ineffectual—with the saving grace that no powerful interests would be offended. The Baker Plan The majority of today’s Third World population was not even born in October 1985, when President Ronald Reagan’s second treasury secretary, James A. Baker III, announced his “Baker Plan” for debt relief. The plan acknowledged that the market-based debt-rescheduling approach that had been pursued by commercial banks since 1982 wasn’t working. Indeed, traditional debt rescheduling was aggravating the problem, because banks had ceased to provide new loans while continuing to roll over back-due interest at ever-higher interest rates.


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

Regarding property rights, Reynolds pointed out that “the mere absence of regulation is not enough to encourage investment: there must be positive legal protection for property rights.” 2.6 Pioneering Visions Numerous studies have been commissioned at inflection points of the United States space program, to assess its status with an effort to extrapolate optimal trajectories going forward. In 1986, The Report of the National Commission on Space predicted a human outpost on the Moon by 2005, and one on Mars by 2015. ( 27 ) The Commission was created by Congress and appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and was designed to formulate a space agenda for the United States into the 21st century. Figure 2.6.America at the Threshold: America’s Space Exploration Initiative 1989 After President George H.W. Bush took office and gave his July 20, 1989 speech known as the Space Exploration Initiative, NASA Administrator Richard H.

Fuller would have been fifth-generation Harvard had he not been expelled, twice, the first time for skipping an exam because he was dating a showgirl and the second time for lack of ambition (he was eventually awarded an Honorary Degree by Harvard – as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan). Rated number four by TIME magazine in their 2010 list of the Top Ten College Dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Frank Lloyd Wright were one through three respectively), he actually appeared on the cover of TIME in 1964. Bucky Fuller never saw himself, or anyone else, as a noun. He was described by others frequently as a philosopher, mathematician, architect, author, poet, inventor, teacher, etc.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We need to understand and think hard about both sides of this equation. One big challenge is how to do this well. Our ability to turn on a dime in response to search warrants is a process that was honed through trial and error since the birth of email and electronic documents in the 1980s. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, affectionately known by today’s privacy lawyers as ECPA. At the time, no one knew whether the Fourth Amendment would protect something like electronic mail, but Republicans and Democrats alike wanted to create this type of statutory protection.

California’s initiative process had changed the course of American history in the past. Four decades earlier, in 1978, the state’s voters adopted Proposition 13 to limit taxes. The measure reduced property taxes in the state, but its broader impact was far greater. It helped fuel a public movement across the country that added momentum to Ronald Reagan’s Presidential election in 1980 and stronger national pressure to reduce the size of government and cut taxes. It created a watershed political moment, reflecting in part the fact that one in every eight Americans lives in California. If Cambridge Analytica could become the equivalent of Three Mile Island, could Alastair Mactaggart create the privacy equivalent of Proposition 13?


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

As Vince Cannistraro, a CIA operations officer, put it to me as I was researching the history of the CIA’s covert Afghan program, the earlier aid was “just enough to get a very brave people killed” because it encouraged the mujaheddin to fight but did not provide them with the means to win. That began to change in 1985 when President Ronald Reagan, at the urging of a clan of politically appointed New Right activists in his administration, signed National Security Decision Directive 166, which authorized among other things “all necessary means” to aid the Afghan rebels against the Soviets. This led a team of Pentagon and CIA guerrilla-war specialists in Washington to unleash on the Afghan battlefield much of the U.S. military’s high-technology arsenal and operational expertise.

Akbar population growth Pound, Ezra poverty: in Bangladesh; BCCI and; caste system and; communism and; development programs and; economic reform and; in India ; in Nepal; in Pakistan; in Sri Lanka Prabhakaran, Villaphallai Prakash, Om Prashad, Ram Pratap, Anita Premadasa, Ranasinghe: assassination of ; and death squads Price Waterhouse private property rights privatization public-sector employment Punjab, India; counterinsurgency campaign in ; Pakistan and; Rajiv Gandhi and; separatist guerrilla movement in ; Sikh assassins in Quayle, Dan Quayle, Marilyn Qutubuddin Aibak racism Rahman, Abdul railroads Rajasthan, India Rajgopal, P. R. Rajiv (repo man) Ram, Mohan Ram, N. Ramayana Ramesh, N. Ranatunge, Cyril Rao, N. T. Rama Rao. Narasimha; and economic reform; elected prime minister; and religious conflict Raphel, Amoid Rashid, Ahmed Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Rawalpindi, Pakistan Reagan, Ronald Reagan administration Reagan Doctrine ul-Rehman, Mir Reliance Industries religious conflict; Partition riots; in politics . See also Hindu-Muslim conflict Revelle, Oliver Rising Nepal Ron (driver) Roosevelt, Franklin D. Rushdie, Salman; Iranian death edict against Samarweera, Mangala Santosh (driver) Satanic Verses (Rushdie) sati Saudi Arabia Saxena, G.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Generally, the radical right-wing parties place much greater emphasis on noneconomic issues in their manifestos than do established left and right parties.6 In Europe, at least, there is much anti-elite criticism from euroskeptical, smaller, new parties.7 In the United States, criticism of the mainstream parties comes from above (the White House) and increasingly from the grass roots, where mainstream incumbent politicians (such as the Democratic congressman Joe Crowley) are being supplanted by new, previously unknown candidates (in the 2018 primary, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now congresswoman). The rise of protest-oriented parties is amplified by social media. Media and communication strategies have always conditioned politics. Ronald Reagan’s television performances (notably his 1984 “Morning in America” television ad) and the duel between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960s are good examples of the power of media in politics. Radio had the same effect in the 1920s. Nor is Europe immune from the impact of media. Tony Blair probably prevailed over Gordon Brown as the leader of New Labour because of his media and communication skills, and in Germany in the late 1990s Oskar Lafontaine ceded the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership to Gerhard Schröder as the latter was apparently better on TV.8 Schröder then went on to become German chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

In this way they are like football clubs: there is always a sense of place, of roots, and of an identity even though players come and go and the level of support ebbs and flows too. Another reason established parties are drifting from their political moorings is that many of them are associated with events and individuals in history (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Éamon de Valera, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, and Charles de Gaulle are examples). As time passes, events foundational to their rise have less meaning and relevance for younger generations. In this respect, political parties may also follow a life cycle: an initial enthusiastic start-up phase, growth and government, entering the establishment, and then in some cases decline.


pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

The hatred even intensified, during the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson was president. Johnson was a New Deal acolyte, and he expanded the reach of government even further when he passed the Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Backlash against these programs and the New Deal animated the conservative movement that would gain power with the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan. In the mid-1990s it fueled the rise of a more radical Republican-controlled Congress under Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He personified the antigovernment spirit of the New Deal critics, which portrayed their grievance as a defense of the little guy. This birthed a new era of politics as warfare and made-for-TV conflict, characterized by the government shutdowns in 1995.

The only jarring thing about him was the shock of white hair that rose up right at his part, like a stripe. Powell did well at Dillon, Read, but his education in corporate debt was interrupted before he could earn the kind of fortune that drew corporate lawyers to Wall Street. In 1988, the company’s chairman, Nicholas F. Brady, was recruited by Ronald Reagan to become secretary of the Treasury. After George H. W. Bush was elected president, and Brady’s job security was ensured, Powell left Dillon, Read to join Brady at the Treasury. There is no more telling sign of Powell’s success during his early years in private equity. “He clearly had Brady’s trust, if he went to Treasury,” Fitts said.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

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

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

Without their support, Mises was unable to overcome the general antipathy of the gentile faculty and never secured a tenured position. He was still extraordinarily influential. Among those who flocked to the private seminars Mises held in his office was future Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, whose criticisms of central planning and socialism would inspire economic liberalizers like Margret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan – and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Morgenstern attended the ‘Mises Seminars’ for many years, though he complained in his diary that he was ‘uncomfortable’ as ‘the only pure Aryan (out of 8!)’ and deplored the ‘unpleasant discussion in this arrogant circle of Jews’.30 In 1925, the twenty-three-year-old Morgenstern submitted his doctoral thesis.

Instead of merely following the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics, something unique in our knowledge would occur. The degree of cosmic organization would increase. Life could become commonplace, whereas now it seems quite rare. New rules, the rules of life, would spread far and wide. It was not to be. When, in 1983, Laing heard rumours that President Ronald Reagan was about to launch a massive new space initiative, he looked forward to the speech with great anticipation. What the president announced instead was the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. The dream has not been forgotten. In 2021, the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, a charity based in London, unveiled an updated design of a von Neumann probe that they say could be built within a decade.78 Ellery’s group is whittling away at the last few percentage points that will get them to 100 per cent closure.


pages: 438 words: 126,284

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn

Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

The powerful National Rifle Association inundated NRA members, and, even more critically, members of Congress, with accusations of ATF assaults on Second Amendment rights. As a result, while other federal agencies, the FBI especially, enjoyed widespread congressional support, ATF leadership struggled during every budgetary cycle. Republican presidents in particular recognized political opportunity. In 1981, newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan announced plans to abolish the ATF as a stand-alone agency and fold it into the Secret Service. But the NRA convinced the president otherwise: a former NRA lobbyist told The New York Times that his clients “always loved to have an agency on the edge that is a whipping boy.” ATF remained independent—and also chronically underbudgeted, understaffed, underequipped, and generally unappreciated.

Randy Weaver, a former Army Green Beret, moved, with his wife, Vicki, and their children, to rural northwest Idaho in the 1980s to escape what they considered an increasingly out-of-control world. The Weavers purchased property along a creek and lived there in a rustic cabin. Weaver came under federal notice in 1985 for alleged threats against President Ronald Reagan, the pope, and additional officials, and was interviewed by the FBI and local lawmen. Though Weaver was reputed to be a member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations and supposedly maintained a substantial arsenal, he wasn’t charged with breaking any laws; it couldn’t be proven that he had threatened the president and others.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Owens was the only person Gordon had ever met who knew all the stanzas, not just the verse people sing at sporting events. As a student, Owens had participated in the civil society demonstrations against Noriega. He proudly kept the X-rays that show where his wrist was injured by police. For years President Ronald Reagan had countenanced Noriega’s alliances with money launderers and drug traffickers because the dictator was an ally in the fight against the Sandinistas. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Noriega’s usefulness diminished.12 The December 1989 invasion ended years of economic and social turmoil in Panama but left the country’s banking secrecy and tax haven status intact.

The Icelandic elite could scarcely imagine their ruinous fate when they started privatizing the country’s banks in the late 1990s. Iceland’s finance minister, Geir Haarde, took the occasion of the 2002 sale of Landsbanki, a leading Icelandic bank, to offer a toast. Thoroughly indoctrinated in the cult of market efficiency, Haarde quoted Ronald Reagan: “The government is not the solution to our problems, the government is the problem.” He then delivered Landsbanki, which held the deposits of one in three Icelanders, into private hands.6 With the krona strong and investment capital widely available, cheap money flooded Iceland in the early 2000s.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Outside of the prime-time premiere of each episode, CBS or anyone else needed to pay Desi and Lucy every time any episode of I Love Lucy ever aired. As the show progressed, the Ricardos gained a stronger foothold on the American dream. TV’s most famous family—an interracial one—packed their bags and moved up to Connecticut. • • • FOR A ONETIME radio star like Lucille Ball, television was a step up. For Ronald Reagan, television was a step down. On the big screen, Reagan was a well-known actor who never quite broke into A-level stardom. By the 1950s Reagan was coming to the realization that he was fighting Father Time in his chase after coveted leading roles. Reagan’s life had up to that point been uniquely reflective of the changes, trials, and successes of the American century.

By the late seventies, Milken’s clients had made substantial returns, and Milken was a top player in the high-yield bond market. In one account, a loyal Milken client joked that a particular high-yield bond was priced like it was “junk.” The pejorative term stuck. But there was an unlikely competitor at the turn of the decade. The bonds of the government itself seemed to bear interest like junk bonds. When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, America was in the midst of a recession and a period of severe inflation, a rare combination. American Treasury notes were paying over 13 percent annually—rates on six-month FDIC-insured certificates of deposits, CDs, were nearly as high. In the first month of Reagan’s presidency, Chrysler came out with a $400 million bond issue fully guaranteed by the federal government—even with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government backing them, Chrysler’s bonds carried an interest rate of 14.9 percent.

revenues to surpass those of radio: Bureau of the Census, “Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970,” Washington DC, September 1975, series R 106–122 (Radio Advertising Expenditures, Finances, and Employment: 1935 to 1970), 797; and series R 123–139 (Television Advertising Expenditures, Finances, and Employment: 1945 to 1970), 798. horse-drawn carriage: Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 25. partial football scholarship: Ibid., 45. enthusiastically cast his ballot: Ibid., 66. radio sports announcer: Ibid, 65. $5 and bus fare: Ibid., 66. $200 per week: Ibid., 105. “You had seven companies”: Ibid., 117.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Outside of the prime-time premiere of each episode, CBS or anyone else needed to pay Desi and Lucy every time any episode of I Love Lucy ever aired. As the show progressed, the Ricardos gained a stronger foothold on the American dream. TV’s most famous family—an interracial one—packed their bags and moved up to Connecticut. • • • FOR A ONETIME radio star like Lucille Ball, television was a step up. For Ronald Reagan, television was a step down. On the big screen, Reagan was a well-known actor who never quite broke into A-level stardom. By the 1950s Reagan was coming to the realization that he was fighting Father Time in his chase after coveted leading roles. Reagan’s life had up to that point been uniquely reflective of the changes, trials, and successes of the American century.

By the late seventies, Milken’s clients had made substantial returns, and Milken was a top player in the high-yield bond market. In one account, a loyal Milken client joked that a particular high-yield bond was priced like it was “junk.” The pejorative term stuck. But there was an unlikely competitor at the turn of the decade. The bonds of the government itself seemed to bear interest like junk bonds. When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, America was in the midst of a recession and a period of severe inflation, a rare combination. American Treasury notes were paying over 13 percent annually—rates on six-month FDIC-insured certificates of deposits, CDs, were nearly as high. In the first month of Reagan’s presidency, Chrysler came out with a $400 million bond issue fully guaranteed by the federal government—even with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government backing them, Chrysler’s bonds carried an interest rate of 14.9 percent.

revenues to surpass those of radio: Bureau of the Census, “Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970,” Washington DC, September 1975, series R 106–122 (Radio Advertising Expenditures, Finances, and Employment: 1935 to 1970), 797; and series R 123–139 (Television Advertising Expenditures, Finances, and Employment: 1945 to 1970), 798. horse-drawn carriage: Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 25. partial football scholarship: Ibid., 45. enthusiastically cast his ballot: Ibid., 66. radio sports announcer: Ibid, 65. $5 and bus fare: Ibid., 66. $200 per week: Ibid., 105. “You had seven companies”: Ibid., 117.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

In politics—for it is hardly to be expected that imagery so deeply embedded in popular culture would fail to shape perceptions of political leaders, even their own perceptions of themselves—some of his characteristics can be discerned in half-mythical figures like Joseph McCarthy, whose supporters excused his rough methods in the struggle against subversion on the grounds that it was dirty work but someone had to do it, and of course in the more genial person of Ronald Reagan, himself a veteran of the screen and therefore an ideal choice for the real-life reenactment of a role that sums up the chauvinistic, self-righteous, expansionist implications of Western mythology. -99- The close identification of Western themes with expansionism, in the twentieth century, did not completely extinguish the pastoral image of the West, often invoked by anti-imperialists against the glorification of conquest and hyper-masculinity.

In recent years, journalists and politicians have used the term so loosely that "populism," like every other term in the political vocabulary, seems compromised almost beyond hope of redemption. At one time or another, it has been applied to Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Jackson, among others. It has been applied both to the new left and to the new right. Historians too have used the label carelessly; and revisionist scholarship therefore had to begin, a few years ago, by distinguishing the free -217- silver movement of the I890s, which culminated in William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech and the memorable campaign of 1896, from the more radical movement that grew out of farmers' experiments with cooperative finance and marketing.

When democratic liberalism carries so little conviction, those who once supported liberal policies begin to look to the right for clarity and direction. Legalism is a poor substitute for moral passion and a sense of purpose. As Fred Siegel has shown, liberals' growing inclination to give every question a legalistic answer has contributed to the right-wing reaction against liberalism; see his book Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (1984) and his penetrating articles on the 1968 campaign, "Campaign across Cultural Divides," Commonweal 115 (II March 1988): 137-41; "Competing Elites," Commonweal 115 (7 Oct. 1988): 523-25; and "What Liberals Haven't Learned and Why," Commonweal 116 (13 Jan. 1989): 16-20. Liberalism has been further weakened by its increasingly explicit identification with elitism.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

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

York 105 less than Experts on New in citing "singularly Puerto Rican income from in 1960 to barely half increase in Puerto Rican poverty during the 1990s by 1990; the boom; or the abysmal ratio of college graduates in 1999 (only 10 percent of Puerto Ricans over age twenty-five, in contrast to 40 percent of non-Hispanic whites). Others have fretted over why Puerto Ri- can family structures seemingly collapsed following the election of Ronald Reagan: the share of female-headed households soaring from 34.8 percent in 1980 to 43.9 percent in 1985.^^^ More Figure 5 Unemployment Rates in Puerto Rico, 1940-90 Source: Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Carlos Santiago, Island Paradox: Puerto Rico in the 1990s, New York 1996, p. 6. MAGICAL URBANISM 106 recent studies have confirmed the negUgible dividends earned from Ufetimes of toil in New York's sweated trades: "It takes 15 years for Mexicans and 25 years for Puerto Ricans [in City] to have statistically significant There is surprisingly little wage New York gains."


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

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

The state that facilitated and presided over all these changes would function as the executive committee of financialized capitalism, strengthening its defences and, when necessary, intervening to save it from total collapse, as in 2008–2009. The structurally adjusted system required a novel type of politician in the wake of those pioneers of the new order, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The first was a second-rate actor, operating like a brainwashed zombie and way out of his depth in the White House. Even so he learned his lines well and was lauded as a great communicator, till he began to forget which Latin American capital he had landed in and to fluff the script at home as well.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

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

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

A more elaborate example of this approach is Sascha Pohflepp's The Golden Institute (2009). Pohflepp revisited a moment in history when a very different America could have developed: "The Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado was the premier research and development facility for energy technologies in an alternate reality where Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan in the US election of 1981. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding to make the United States the most energy-rich nation on the planet, its scientific and technical advancements were rapid and often groundbreaking." He then developed a number of large-scale project proposals including turning Nevada into a weather experimentation zone causing a gold rush of lightning energy harvesters and making modifications to freeways so they became energy-generating power plants.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

The Maastricht Treaty came hard on the heels of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany. It was very much a product of its time marked by the discrediting of state-controlled socialism, the retreat of organized labour in the previous decade in the face of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ascendancy of neoliberal economics in both theory and policy. That was the moment of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a book that gained tremendous visibility by claiming that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism went hand-in-hand, and together had actually won the grand historical contest among political and social systems.2 The Maastricht Treaty encapsulated the spirit of the time for Europe, and was a moment of historic importance in the evolution of the European project.3 The EU engaged in further sustained expansion in the 1990s and the 2000s, above all by incorporating a host of new countries in Eastern Europe and developing its international presence.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

From this side of November 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the sudden, unexpected, and complete collapse of communism and its system of economic planning, it is easy to assume that those events were inevitable. That is not how it looked beforehand, not even when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won their respective first election victories in 1979 and 1981, and certainly not in the 1970s. In 1970, Stalin’s crimes against his own people were known, but Mao’s did not emerge for another decade. As for the economy, even expert analysts in the intelligence community who studied the figures did not realize the extent to which the statistics on communist-bloc economic output were fictitious.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

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

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

In fact, it was our age more than our attire that made us stand out. Eyeballing the crowd, we guessed that more than two-thirds of the attendees were under thirty-five years old. The next-largest demographic was 1960s-era hippies who were now seventy or older. There were very few people like us, who came of age during the 1980s and ’90s, the years of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, their successors George H. W. Bush and John Major, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which socialism seemed pretty thoroughly refuted. All down the hallway, young people were selling T-shirts and other merchandise sporting such asinine slogans as “Solidarity,” “People over Profit,” and “Tax the Rich, A Lot.”


pages: 453 words: 142,717

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

We fell into the swing of things pretty easily and discovered that behind the hype, some celebrities were pretty nice folks. Singer Wayne Newton, when he heard that Tracy was learning to ride, presented her with a beautiful Arabian colt, just as a gift between buddies. I played golf with Bob Hope, cooked pasta with Frank Sinatra, and found real friendship with Ronald Reagan, Phil Harris, Connie Stevens, Baron Hilton and even my personal hero, John Wayne. Barbara and I spent New Year’s Day of 1969 in Acapulco, then flew to Washington for the inauguration of President Nixon. We were back at the White House for the second time in two months, this time as guests of Congressman, later President, Gerald Ford.

At the start of June, we began a whirlwind national tour for NASA that began in California, where Tom, John and I rubbed elbows with the television elite and received golden Emmy awards for the dramatic color telecasts from space. One of the most popular TV shows that year was Mayberry, R.F.D., on which the character of Andy Griffith’s son, Opie, was played by a kid named Ron Howard. Our paths would cross a quarter-century later when Ron, who grew up to be a movie director, made the wonderful film Apollo 13. Governor Ronald Reagan declared the Golden State to be ours for a whole week, and we got to say thanks to Charles Schulz for letting us take Charlie Brown and Snoopy to the Moon. San Francisco saluted us with a deluge of ticker tape. Other parades flowed in Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles, dinners and receptions filled the evenings, and I had a chance to see old friends from my days as a summer intern at Aerojet and a student in Monterey.


pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

I try to address the politics of this situation directly with him and get nowhere, which is amusing in itself when you think about it. He tells me that he’s always just thought there were more interesting things to consider than himself and if I, child of the hang-it-out-there Sixties, don’t necessarily agree with him, I’ve grown to respect the sentiment. I try macro politics, too, wondering whether he thinks Ronald Reagan’s aggressive “Star Wars” proposals of the 1980s damaged the image of space, but this only brings a frown such as you might see on the face of a friend you’ve just shot in the arse with a dart gun, followed by a shocked-sounding “I have no idea.” I ask whether he would have done anything differently in his life?

Bush is delivering at NASA headquarters on that day. The details of the speech have been widely leaked and these leaks suggest that the president will announce a return to the Moon, followed by a crewed mission to Mars. It seems almost unbelievable and is exciting stuff, though my first thought upon hearing the underground rumblings was that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. both trumpeted similar plans, which came to nought. And that 2004 is an election year, at the start of which the incumbent’s popularity ratings are poor. Captain Cernan (always Captain Cernan) has been the hardest of the still-visible Moonwalkers to nail down. He’s a busy man with a punishing schedule, because this is what he does for a living; he’s a professional Moontalker.


pages: 496 words: 137,645

Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris

clean water, David Sedaris, East Village, index card, Joan Didion, place-making, Ronald Reagan

They commenced barking and she yelled, “Peanut and Pee Wee, y’all need to shut up!” Finally she opened the door a few inches, and when the dogs stuck their faces through, she kicked them into silence. One of them stole the slipper off her foot, and that made her even madder. The woman said that $100 worth of heating oil now costs $175 and that she don’t know what the hell Ronald Reagan is doing to us poor people. Did we know? she asked. The last stop of the day was behind the Purina plant. I’d never been to that neighborhood. Every house we went to had TVs on. The window boxes are easy to install. Tomorrow we’ll do more. Today it was seasonably cold and the sky was white. November 11, 1981 Raleigh At all the rural houses we stopped at today, the men wore overalls.

Before they left, I had them each write a few paragraphs explaining to me how they’d lost their feet. Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time. Meanwhile, my diet is working. I went down a belt notch and was comfortable. January 19, 1989 Chicago This is the last day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and on All Things Considered they asked a variety of people how he had affected their lives. The person I most identified with said that after the past eight years, she will never trust a Republican again. There were many people who cheered him, and a few who hated him in a personal way.


pages: 487 words: 132,252

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography by Stephen Fry

Alistair Cooke, back-to-the-land, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Live Aid, loadsamoney, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Winter of Discontent

I caught Hugh’s eye, which held the wild, rolling look of a gazelle being pulled to earth by a leopard. I dare say my expression was much the same. As we lumbered sweatily off stage, with Paul going forward for his monologue with the brave tread of an aristocrat approaching the guillotine, Emma whispered to us, ‘Someone’s shot Ronald Reagan!’ ‘What?’ ‘All the Twentieth Century Fox executives have left and gone to the phones …’ I rang my mother that night. ‘Well that’s settled then, darling,’ she said. ‘No member of this family ever goes to an event at the Dorchester again. It’s not fair on America.’ Corpsing Chorus Back in Cambridge, Brigid Larmour was directing the Marlowe Society production that term, Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Sloane Rangers, big hair, Dire Straits, black smoked-glass tables, unstructured jackets, New Romantics, shoulder pads, nouvelle cuisine, Yuppies … we have all seen plenty of television programmes flashing images of all that past our eyes and insisting that this is what the decade meant. As it happens, resistant to cliché as I try to be, the eighties for me conformed almost exactly to every one of those rather shallow representations. When I was tipped out of Cambridge and into the world in 1981, Ronald Reagan was beginning the sixth month of his presidency, Margaret Thatcher was suffering the indignity of a recession, Brixton and Toxteth were aflame, IRA bombs exploded weekly in London, Bobby Sands was dying on hunger strike, the Liberal and Social Democrat parties had agreed to merge, Arthur Scargill was about to take up the leadership of the National Union of Miners, and Lady Diana Spencer was a month away from marrying the Prince of Wales.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

By 1980, Congress had authorized over $1 billion per year for solar incentives, including $150 million for solar PV R&D.24 And the government’s solar push established the preeminence of the American solar PV industry, which by the 1980s accounted for 85 percent of global PV sales.25 But U.S. dominance of both the solar panel production industry and the installation market was short-lived. The combination of the incoming Reagan administration’s ideology and a crash in oil prices in the 1980s led U.S. government support for solar to plunge. In 1985, Carter’s solar tax credits lapsed, and by 1988, President Ronald Reagan and his administration had led Congress to slash R&D funding for photovoltaics by 75 percent compared with its 1980 peak.26 President Reagan was partial to nuclear power, allergic to subsidies for uncompetitive energy sources like solar, and ideologically committed to funding only basic science research, rather than the applied R&D and demonstration projects supported by his predecessor.27 Unfortunately, instead of making way for U.S. companies to privately fund applied R&D themselves, the withdrawal of government support simply drove American companies out of the market.

In the more than seventy years since the publication of his landmark report, it has become clear that just funding basic scientific research is not enough to guarantee new commercial technologies, especially in energy. Yet along the way, Bush’s philosophy has entered the conservative canon. President Ronald Reagan and his advisers fused Bush’s support for basic research with their free-market principles, concluding that federal support for applied R&D would encroach on the private sector’s territory. The Trump administration, focused on paring back what it perceives as a bloated government, is channeling Reagan’s aversion to applied R&D to hack off any government program that advances technology development with an application in mind.


pages: 510 words: 141,188

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Frances Oldham Kelsey, global pandemic, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

The Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, which became known as Hatch-Waxman, passed unanimously in the House of Representatives, 362–0, in 1984. Though a huge victory for generic drug makers, it also extended by a few years the length of patents for brand-name companies. President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation in a Rose Garden ceremony that September. Touting the benefits of lower-cost drugs, he told his audience, amid laughter, “Senior citizens require more medication than any other segment of our society. I speak with some authority on that.” The Hatch-Waxman bill “really started the generics industry,” said Haddad.

363128528119674-L_1_0-1 (accessed May 23, 2018). a CNN business reporter assessed it as: Aaron Smith, “Investors Biting Nails over Lipitor,” CNN Money, August 2, 2005. “extra gland that produces publicity”: Nora Ephron, “Oh Haddad, Poor Haddad,” New York, November 25, 1968. Touting the benefits of lower-cost drugs: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984,” September 24, 1984, Reagan Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/92484b. “a place where you put raw materials into a mixing vat”: This quote attributed to Seife comes from Herbert Burkholz, The FDA Follies (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 26.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

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

“When you speak to a police officer today, you’re terrified that you’re going to offend him, and that he’s going to arrest you and take you off to jail. Sure, a judge will let you out and drop the charges in a few days. But you’ve spent those days in jail. And now you have an arrest record. There’s just no accountability for excessive force.” He adds that his old boss’s war rhetoric, later taken up by President Ronald Reagan and his successors, is to blame. “There has always been confrontation between the rational, educated way to look at policy and the escalation of language to make a political point. If politicians can get away with calling it a ‘war on crime’ or a ‘war on drugs,’ then they will. And yes, that’s going to make law enforcement more willing to push the envelope when it comes to the use of force.”81 After Nixon left office in the fall of 1974, the federal drug war went into a brief period of détente.

Chapter 6: The 1980s—Us and Them 1. Drug Policy Foundation, “Policy Briefs: Asset Forfeiture,” 1999, p. 3, available at: http://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/Asset_Forfeiture_Briefing.pdf. 2. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 38. 3. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Federal Initiatives Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime,” October 14, 1982, available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43127 (accessed October 20, 2012). 4. Ibid. 5. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, pp. 171–173. 6. Reagan, “Remarks Announcing Federal Initiatives Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime.” 7.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The CIA trained the Contras “in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, demolitions, and in the use of…assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, grenade launchers, and…Claymore mines.” The CIA accomplished this even though CIA director William Casey mangled the name of the country, saying something like “Nicawawa,” prompting an outburst from an aide: “You can’t overthrow the government of a country whose name you can’t pronounce!.11 President Ronald Reagan’s vision of Central America didn’t reflect reality in the mountains: “If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy…. Since the exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those who sacrificed and struggled for freedom—the stand at Thermopylae, the revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw uprising in World War II.12 Reagan got Congress to approve making war on the Sandinistas only to interfere with Sandinista arms supplies to the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.

He was tarnished by such documented incidents as: (1) murdering dissidents, including burning alive a couple and their three children; (2) kidnapping foreign aid workers as hostages; (3) using famine as a weapon of war, such as attacking UNICEF and Catholic Relief Services food convoys to drought victims; and (4) establishing the personality cult that demanded total obedience to O Mais Velho (The Eldest One).39 On February 1, 1986, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s representative to the UN, called Savimbi, “One of the few authentic heroes of our time.” Ronald Reagan welcomed Savimbi to the White House in 1986, saying that American support would enable UNITA to win “a victory that electrifies the world and brings great sympathy and assistance from other nations to those struggling for freedom.40 The Reagan administration got Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, allowing military aid to let loose the dogs of war in Angola.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Don't worry: the book gets easier from here. But there is no escaping the fundamental theorems of welfare economics if we are to examine the claim that competitive markets necessarily lead to efficient outcomes. These claims are made not just by theoretical economists but by practical politicians. Ronald Reagan was not much interested in algebraic topology; but the intellectual influences on him, when finally disentangled, can be traced back to those flXed-point theorems. {part IV} THE TRUTH ABOUT MARKETS ••••••••••••••••••• { 17} ........................... . Neoclassical Economics and After Smith and Hayek ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Some economists regard the Arrow-Debreu results and the fundamental theorems of welfare economics as the modern expression of Smith's invisible hand. 1 But Smith would be surprised at what is attributed to him today.

These economists found support from a business community ready to promote their views (to influence public policy, not business policy) and organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Hoover Institute helped give them a popular platform. The arguments put forward by Greg Mankiw that I quote on page 201 are more intellectual than those Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or either George Bush would espouse, but these politicians draw comfort from the perception that solid academic arguments can be found in support of their positions. And they influence a generation of students. As Mankiw himself observes, quoting Paul Samuelson, the most successful of all writers of economics textbooks: "I don't care who writes a nation's laws, or crafts its advanced treaties, if I can write its economics textbooks." 23 (This is before Mankiw took a position in the Bush administration.)


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

Now we know why. Meanwhile, in Moscow, all five suspects were gently eased out of active service. Polyakov was given a fake medical diagnosis by KGB counterintelligence. Finally, an American traitor heading counterintelligence at CIA, Aldrich Ames, sealed the Russian’s fate. Before President Ronald Reagan could plead for his life, Polyakov was executed on March 15, 1988. As head of section in the KGB investigative directorate, Aleksandr Dukhanin noted that Polyakov “stood firm” until the very end.33 They could not but admire his unrelenting defiance despite what he had done. The bottom line for the Soviet Union was that loyalty was increasingly a rare commodity.

The man responsible, Kryuchkov, ever anxious to secure his own future, and heartily disliked by Andropov’s anointed successor as general secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, was more concerned with guarding his own back rather than owning up to failure where it occurred. This is easily illustrated. After Ronald Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency in 1981, Stanislav Androsov, a creature of Kryuchkov, was appointed KGB rezident in Washington, D.C. He decided to pin up next to his office a massive map of the district. Every operative, on leaving the premises, had to indicate with a pin on the map his precise location, so that Androsov could tell at a glance where everyone was.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

By the mid-1970s, all of these inventions and many others had made First National City the most profitable financial institution in America—and Wriston, now the CEO, was quite the player, driving around New York in a red Corvette. He was well on his way to becoming the first commercial banker since the Great Depression to earn more than $1 million in one year.44 He had also made powerful friends in Washington, as an adviser to the Kennedy and Nixon administrations. (A few years later, under President Ronald Reagan, Wriston would sit on the president’s Economic Policy Advisory Board and help craft some of his infamous “trickle-down” economic policies.) The success of the CD and other Wriston-led innovations was more that just a windfall for First National City, which changed its name to Citibank in 1976.

Financially driven outsourcing, worker displacement by cost-saving technology, payouts to investors rather than investments in workers and assets, and short-term thinking in the boardroom and C-suites has undermined American business’s competitiveness and the ability of US firms to create secure, decent-paying jobs. By the late 1970s these corrosive effects of financialization had begun to show up in economic data, which pointed to slower growth and lower investment in the real economy as firms jockeyed to make higher margins from speculating with their cash. Even Ronald Reagan, one of the biggest advocates of unfettered capitalism around, knew it. Changes in the regulations governing mergers and acquisitions during the early part of his presidency, in 1982, had opened the way for the proliferation of giant conglomerates prone to financial wheeling and dealing. Between 1980 and 1990, a full 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s largest manufacturing firms received tender bids, most of them hostile, from people like T.


pages: 513 words: 141,963

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Part I Mount Rushmore Chapter 1 The Black Hand As I waited in the drowsy neon-lit customs line at JFK, I tried to remember precisely when the war on drugs started. In some vague way, I had a sense that it must have been with Richard Nixon in the 1970s, when the phrase was first widely used. Or was it with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when “Just Say No” seemed to become the second national anthem? But when I started to travel around New York City interviewing experts on drug policy, I began to get a sense that this whole story had, in fact, begun long before. The pledge to wage “relentless warfare”1 on drugs was, I found, first made in the 1930s, by a man who has been largely forgotten today—yet he did more than any other individual to create the drug world we now live in.

He decided after a few years to shut the program down so he could move on to exploring schizophrenia and manic depression and genuinely interesting conditions. “I found this a bit of a headache,” he said to me, “and I had bigger fish to fry.” But as he prepared to do this, there was a directive from Margaret Thatcher’s government, inspired by her friend Ronald Reagan’s intensified drug war across the Atlantic. Every part of Britain had to show it had an antidrug strategy, it said, and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to show what worked. So John commissioned the academic Dr. Russell Newcombe to look into it. He assumed Newcombe would20 come back and say these patients were like heroin addicts in the United States, and like heroin addicts everywhere, at least in the cliché—unemployed and unemployable, criminal, with high levels of HIV, and a high death rate.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Democratic Senator George McGovern seriously considered White as a potential running mate in his 1972 presidential bid, and many political insiders believed White would eventually parlay his local popularity into his own run for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But before White could contemplate higher office, he would have to survive a massive attack launched by an emerging political adversary named William Floyd Weld, who was appointed U.S. attorney for Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. A graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude, 1966) and Harvard Law School (cum laude, 1970) and the scion of a wealthy and prominent blueblood family, Weld cut a decidedly patrician figure. Some suspected that he had his own aspirations for high elective office, both state and federal.

Prosecutors during Muntasser’s later criminal trial tried to make it appear that Care’s efforts were focused on helping only the injured “mujahideen,” or holy warriors, and the families of deceased fighters. In fact, the beneficiaries of Care’s charitable efforts were the “martyrs” of the conflict, a much broader concept in Islam, as it covered anyone killed in the Afghan conflict. Muntasser’s charitable efforts ran into a rather sudden change in American policy in that tumultuous region. Ronald Reagan had called these Muslims “freedom fighters,”48 and the U.S. government had supported them with guns and money in their resistance to the Soviet invasion (as readers might recall from the Tom Hanks movie Charlie Wilson’s War), but American opinion gradually turned against the mujahideen through the early-1990s.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

While the liberals and the libertarians hoped that the latter organization would protect the interests of ordinary citizens, they had little confidence it would do so. Their fears were justified. A look at the prior history of the two organizations laid the blueprint for an imbalance of power. After the Church hearings in the seventies, the entire organization of the NSA had felt chastened. But in 1984, at the apex of Ronald Reagan’s presidential power, the NSA showed signs of reentering the realm of domestic policy. At the apparent behest of Fort Meade, Reagan issued a National Security Decision Directive intended to monitor information in databases—both in- and outside government—that fell into the vague category of “sensitive, but unclassified, government or government-derived information.”

And then he heard Daniel Ellsberg speak at a nuclear freeze rally in Denver. In high school, Phil Zimmermann had pretty much ignored Vietnam, but at Florida Atlantic he had come to adopt a passive but heartfelt antigovernment stance. The Nixon scandals had opened his eyes to how brazenly the government could lie. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he had totally soured on politics. He read Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels, and worried about nuclear annihilation. Zimmermann and his wife decided to move to New Zealand, the better to avoid the coming holocaust. They went so far as to acquire passports and immigration papers.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

They go back instead to the 1980s when a particularly harsh form of capitalism took hold: neoliberalism, an ideology with an overriding emphasis on freedom – ‘free’ choice, ‘free’ markets, ‘freedom’ from government or trade union interference. One that prized an idealised form of self-reliance, small government and a brutally competitive mindset that placed self-interest above community and the collective good. Championed initially by both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and later embraced by ‘Third Way’ politicians such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerard Schröder, this political project has dominated commercial and government practices over the past few decades. Why it has played a fundamental role in today’s loneliness crisis is, first, because it has precipitated a significant rise in income and wealth gaps within countries across many parts of the world.46 In the US, in 1989 CEOs earned on average fifty-eight times the average worker’s salary, but by 2018 they made 278 times as much.47 In the UK, the share of income going to the top 1% of households has tripled in the last forty years with the wealthiest 10% now owning five times as much wealth as the bottom 50%.48 As a result, significant swathes of the population have, for a considerable time, felt left behind, branded as losers in a society that has time only for winners, left to fend for themselves in a world in which their traditional moorings of work and community are disintegrating, social safety nets eroding and their status in society diminishing.

In Germany, the UK, the United States and Canada around half the population believed this to be the case, with many feeling that the state was so in thrall to the market that it wasn’t watching their backs or looking out for their needs.50 It’s lonely to feel uncared for, invisible and powerless in this way. The huge interventions governments made to support their citizens during 2020 were completely at odds with the economic ethos of the previous forty years, embodied by comments made by Ronald Reagan in 1986: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’ Even if the various coronavirus stimuli do signal the dawning of a new approach, the long-term social and economic impact of neoliberalism will inevitably take a long time to unwind.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Instead of speaking up in meetings, he’d get his points across by leaving his memos at the top of the stack when he’d finally leave after everyone else had already gone home. “David certainly didn’t have charisma,” Eizenstat said later. “What he had was a sort of intensity of intellect and dedication and devotion to public service.” But then Carter lost his bid for reelection, to Ronald Reagan. And David Rubenstein, thirty-one, took this not only as a sign of a nationwide political shift, but as a rebuke of his own public-service idealism. “I tried to help my country, and it didn’t work,” he said years later. He would try something else: breaking into the other Washington growing up around him.

Kennedy appointed C. Douglas Dillon, a former investment banker, to be secretary of the treasury. Lyndon Johnson’s treasury secretary, Henry Fowler, was recruited to join Goldman Sachs. For the Republican Party, the transfers became so predictable that few objected when the Merrill Lynch CEO Donald Regan became Ronald Reagan’s treasury secretary, or when Senator Phil Gramm of Texas was named vice-chairman of the investment bank division of UBS, or when George W. Bush appointed the Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson to be treasury secretary. But the movement became more radioactive on the Democratic side in the 1990s, as NAFTA, welfare reform, and capital gains tax cuts, all passed under President Clinton, made Democratic leaders sensitive to the charge that they were abandoning their underdog roots.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Kennedy eventually conceded to pressure from U.S. cotton textile manufacturers to offer at least some protection, and capped the import growth rate for cotton textiles and apparel at 6 percent each year. Kennedy also provided tax breaks to southern textile producers to help them upgrade equipment, and established funds to provide for job training and assistance for displaced workers, which remained in effect until Ronald Reagan cut these programs in the 1980s. But these programs were designed to help the U.S. industries fade less slowly, not to keep them alive. Trade liberalization became the new paradigm. And Kennedy’s quota was to have unexpected consequences. * * * — Kennedy’s quota regime had been set at the behest of the American Cotton Manufacturers Institute, and thus it only regulated cotton fabric and clothing made from cotton fabric.

State Department have worked together over decades to bring cheap garments to American consumers, framing job creation as a blessing for the Honduran economy while simultaneously engaging in political interventions that keep Honduran citizens poor. The story of Honduras’s emergence as a garment exporter began in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan moved to confront what he saw as a rising threat to U.S. interests—a communist drift in the Caribbean Basin. His two-pronged strategy was to consolidate U.S. military hegemony over the region, and to encourage the growth of export processing. He launched the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), which granted military aid and one-way duty-free access to the U.S. market for a designated range of products.


What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

In reality, a few years later a North–South compact permitted the slaveholding states to reinstitute a form of slavery by effectively criminalizing black life, providing a cheap and disciplined labor force for much of the industrial revolution, a system that persisted until World War II created the need for free labor. The ugly history is being reenacted under the vicious “drug war” of the past generation, since Ronald Reagan. As for women, it was not until 1975 that the Supreme Court recognized women to be “peers,” with the guaranteed right to serve on federal juries—hence advancing to the category of full personhood. Recent court decisions extend the right of personhood that had already granted to corporations, while excluding undocumented aliens from the category.28 It would be no great surprise if chimpanzees are granted the rights of persons before undocumented immigrants are.


pages: 137 words: 43,960

Top 10 Maui, Molokai and Lanai by Bonnie Friedman

airport security, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, G4S, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan

The giant camphor tree Tedeschi Vineyards Some 20 acres of hybrid carnelian grapes grow on the sunny leeward slope of Haleakal… – the fruit destined for the vats of Maui’s only commercial winery. Tedeschi Winery The winery (tasting room left) made its first product, Maui Blanc, from Hawai‘i’s best-known fruit – pineapples! Grapes were harvested in 1980 and turned into sparkling wine, Maui Brut-Blanc de Noirs, which was served at the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. Maui Blush, Maui Nouveau, Rose Ranch Cuvee, Maui Splash, ‘Ulupalakua Red, and Plantation Red have since been added to the list. King Kal…kaua’s Cottage Also in the King’s Cottage is the History Room (right), which contains photos and artifacts of the ranch’s most renowned owners, the story of Maui’s paniolo (cowboys), and tales of polo ponies.


pages: 165 words: 48,594

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

The leftist surge of the late 1960s marked a major milestone in the demise of the New Deal legacy. On the one hand, it represented the protest—especially of younger Americans—against the long ideological and practical decline of that legacy. On the other hand, the right’s reaction to the 1960s’ resurgence of struggles culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a key indicator of shrinking working-class support for a Democratic Party that had proven itself incapable of inspiring much hope because it could not even protect, let alone advance, New Deal gains. Reagan’s election also represented the right’s renewed confidence and its determination to govern the next phase of US history.


pages: 178 words: 52,374

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, open borders, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

And did southern Ireland really care that much, given its preoccupation with its devastated economy? Haughey was well aware that much of the southern electorate was uninterested and that Northern Ireland was a ‘footnote’ rather than a mainstay of general election campaigns. Nor could he persuade US president Ronald Reagan to play the green card in Washington, a miffed Haughey then calling for a strategic British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. There was certainly substance to Haughey’s assertion that because of Northern Ireland’s troubles it could not be solved as a problem ‘internal to the province’; it needed an ‘Irish dimension’, a position eventually accepted by Britain.


pages: 162 words: 50,108

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In 2008, the hedge fund industry was down an average of 22 percent, which is much better than the market, which was down approximately 55 percent. Furthermore, according to Hedge Fund Research, an investor who put $1,000 in hedge funds at the beginning of 2001 would have $1,418.89 at the end of 2010 (inclusive of all fees and taxes). One who put $1,000 in the Standard & Poor’s 500 in 2001 would have just $920.67 at the end of 2010. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Facts are troubling things, they don’t lie and are irrefutable.” Hedge funds are products that, for the most part, have performed well in down or choppy markets. If you want to make money for yourself in the future and also find ways to potentially lose less money, then you need to spend the time to learn about the differences of hedge funds versus mutual funds.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Evidence from the Big Bang,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, February 2016, https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=11094. 23. Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The term Washington Consensus refers to an ideological consensus between the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, at the beginning of the 1980s, subsequently transformed into a series of measures aimed at liberalizing commodity and capital markets and at reducing the role of the state in economic affairs. [On the controversy surrounding this term, see the 2004 paper by John Williamson, the English economist who coined it, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus” (commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for “From the Washington Consensus towards a new Global Governance,” Barcelona, Spain, September 24–25, 2004), https://piie.com/publications/papers/williamson0904-2.pdf.


pages: 197 words: 49,454

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World by Dominic Chinea

Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, The Spirit Level

It wasn’t until 1957 that he became a full-time saddlemaker, and two years later, his designs were so well thought of that he was asked to design the saddles for the Rodeo Cowboys Association World Championship. King is credited with developing what became known as Sheridan Style – a type of saddle with its distinctive decorative wild roses in patterns of interlocking circles. King’s saddles have travelled far and wide. Former US president Ronald Reagan has one, as does Queen Elizabeth II. g SPECIALIST TOOLS g Contents TOOL STORIES SIGNWRITING I’d never learnt signwriting before the time I had to out of necessity when I was doing set design. I was doing a commercial job and the client wanted their logo on the front of something, I think it might have been the front of a bar.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The experience of the twentieth century, with its history of maniacal totalitarian regimes from Stalin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany to Mao’s China, has understandably focused the attention of much of the world on the misuse of overweening state power. This is nowhere more true than in the United States, with its long history of distrust of government. That distrust has deepened since the 1980s, which began with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” The emphasis on effective states should in no way be construed as a preference on my part for authoritarian government, or particular sympathy with regimes like those of Singapore and China that have achieved seemingly miraculous economic results in the absence of democracy.

Second, the experience of a more democratic America suggests that there is an inherent tension between democracy and what we now call “good governance.” 9 THE UNITED STATES INVENTS CLIENTELISM How America is different from other modern countries; the nature of early American government and the rise of political parties; the Jacksonian revolution and American populism; the patronage system and how it spread; clientelism and American municipal government Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it has been common to contrast “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism to its continental variety. The former celebrates free markets, deregulation, privatization, and a minimal state, while the continental version, exemplified above all by France, is dirigiste and regulatory, and supports a large welfare state.

As a result, the ICC, while eventually acquiring adequate enforcement powers to do its job, remained captive of the political forces that created it. Subject to rules not of its own making, the ICC over time appeared hidebound and nonadaptive. It was one of the first objects of the deregulatory trend that began in the 1970s, even before Ronald Reagan became president. The Forest Service was very different. It was organized with a distinct ethos of scientific forestry by Bernhard Fernow and was lodged within a modernizing Agriculture Department that had strong and stable leadership under Secretary James S. Wilson for an extraordinary length of time.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Nott asked to see the Prime Minister immediately in her room in the Commons. An informal meeting of Ministers and Permanent Under-Secretaries gathered to discuss initial reactions. Margaret Thatcher recalls that the sigint from GCHQ was extremely compelling, and there was ‘no ground to question the intelligence’.36 She sent Ronald Reagan a message, ‘asking whether he was aware of the Signals intelligence that we had just received’. David Omand, Nott’s private secretary, was sent to see if the material from GCHQ had yet been forwarded to NSA. ‘At this early stage it had not.’37 Just before the meeting broke up, Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord, arrived outside the Prime Minister’s room asking to see Nott.

Presenting himself to Margaret Thatcher as an honest broker, he had been subjected to a severe tongue-lashing by the Prime Minister, in which she made ready comparisons between the military dictators in Buenos Aires and Adolf Hitler. Despite her obvious vexations at American attempts to play the honest broker, Thatcher entered into the diplomatic exchanges in good faith. Rather to her relief, on 19 April the Argentinean government rejected Haig’s latest peace plan. Ronald Reagan now reluctantly terminated Haig’s mission, declaring American support for Britain. Britain announced a two-hundred-mile Exclusion Zone around the Falklands. On 1 May the RAF launched the first long-range Vulcan bomber raid on Stanley airport. On the same day, Sea Harriers attacked Goose Green and three Argentinean aircraft were brought down.

After US fighters attacked Libyan missile batteries and patrol boats, Gaddafi demanded that his secret services retaliate, and on 4 April Libya organised the terrorist bombing of La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, killing two American servicemen. NSA had intercepted the message from the head of the Libyan secret service ordering terrorist attacks throughout Europe, and newspapers had already revealed that Libyan communications were being read, so President Ronald Reagan decided there was nothing to be lost by using sigint publicly and in some detail to underline the fact that Gaddafi was the culprit. Three days later, Bill Odom was told by Reagan’s CIA chief, Bill Casey, that the President ‘wants to go public with SIGINT on Libyan activity in Berlin – [CIA Deputy Director] R[obert] Gates will work out “text” ’.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

In that sense Mrs Thatcher’s premiership was distinct from that of Edward Heath, and indeed that of Harold Wilson. Mrs Thatcher was an enthusiastic Cold Warrior. She attempted to force a British boycott of the Moscow Olympics following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, supporting President Carter’s action. Globally famous as the ‘Iron Lady’, she was personally close to Ronald Reagan (in office from January 1981) and supportive of his strong anti-left actions across the world. That implied support for many brutal regimes of the right. But the USA could still treat the UK with contempt, as over the invasion of the Commonwealth nation of Grenada in 1983. The humiliation was not that, as claimed, it came out of the blue, but that London was aware from its diplomats in the Caribbean that US action was likely; indeed they reported troop build-up.

London told Washington of its opposition to military action: Margaret Thatcher expressed the gravest concern to Reagan, by telephone, before the invasion went ahead anyway.16 Mrs Thatcher was quick to recognize that the new Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (from 1985) wanted change and helped thereby to bring a sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War in 1989. Yet this had potentially dangerous consequences for her. One of her concerns was that the United Kingdom would have to get rid of its nuclear weapons as a result of a US–Soviet deal. Mrs Thatcher was roused to fury by Ronald Reagan: ‘He nearly gave away the store,’ she told Boxing Day guests at Chequers, by which she meant he had nearly given away the nuclear weapons the United Kingdom oversaw.17 This had the merit of exposing the repeated argument that the United Kingdom had nuclear weapons in order to trade them away, the idea that the British state was fully in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament.

POLICIES The Thatcher government came in at a very inauspicious moment – a new Great Depression, comparable to that of the 1930s, had hit the world. Yet this crisis of capitalism, global as it once again was, far from discrediting capitalism, as had happened in the 1930s, actually strengthened it ideologically, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA, where Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 on a very economically liberal agenda. One important reason for this shift was that there were no cases of apparently radically better economic performance by non-capitalist countries. Indeed, what was very obvious in the 1970s and 1980s was the poor recent performance of the Soviet bloc and its satellites.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

At the same time—and Karmal had an almost unique ability to destroy each new political initiative with an unpopular counter-measure—he warned that his government would treat “terrorists, gangsters, murderers and highwaymen” with “revolutionary decisiveness.” For “terrorists,” read “guerrillas” or—as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come—“freedom fighters.” Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up.

Comparatively few had any experience of the Carter administration—except for the knowledge that Carter refused to deport the Shah to Iran. Few of the students outside the embassy gave much thought to the long-term outcome of the embassy occupation, to the possibility that it might result in the election of Ronald Reagan, who would take a much less tolerant interest in world affairs and now a much greater enthusiasm for Iran’s external enemies. Iranian reaction to the smaller “Satanic” powers was almost quixotic. At the British embassy, still daubed with paint from earlier demonstrations, a crowd arrived to express its satisfaction that Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last prime minister, had not been given asylum in the United Kingdom.

The Iraqi pilot, he said, “apparently didn’t care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at.” But there America’s criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddam Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse— and long before the U.S. Navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack—President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. “We’ve never considered them hostile at all,” he said of the Iraqis. “They’ve never been in any way hostile.” The Gulf was an international waterway. “No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they’re delighted with what has just happened.”54 Listening to Reagan’s words, one might have thought that Iran had started the war by invading Iraq in 1980, that Iran had been using chemical weapons against Iraq, that Iran had initiated the maritime exclusion zone in 1984 which started the tanker war in the Gulf—of which the Stark was indirectly a victim.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Second, he is credited with almost single-handedly devising the financial rescue package that saved New York City from bankruptcy in 1975, standing tall against President Gerald Ford and his incendiary refusal to help. With these matters resolved satisfactorily, Felix became Hamlet, the lone voice, the Democrat in exile during the fallow years of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, exhorting the party faithful to action through his regular dispatches in the tony pages of the New York Review of Books, creating what became nothing less than the Rohatyn Manifesto. He courted the great intellectuals and leaders of the day in his genteel salon on Fifth Avenue and at his annual Easter egg hunts at his Southampton manse.

Indeed, some believe he had wanted the post as early as the Carter administration. Had Jimmy Carter been able to win another presidential election and had Felix been less critical of Carter in his writings, speeches, and interviews, he might have had a shot. But in 1980, Carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. So Felix had waited stoically through the two Reagan terms and that of the first Bush for the return of a Democrat to the White House. His moment had finally arrived, along with Clinton's, in November 1992. Felix vigorously lobbied for the Treasury secretary post, through the clandestine channels that exist for such genteel advocacy and by manipulating the levers he had pulled for years with the dexterity of a maestro: his legendary orchestration of the notoriously fickle troika of corporate chieftains, New York society, and the press was the envy of every investment banker and corporate lawyer on the planet.

There was no one catalyst for this, of course, as his reputation as a deal maker had been acknowledged for years. And his role as chairman of MAC allowed him to claim, with justification, a good measure of the credit for helping New York solve its fiscal problems and establish an institutional mechanism for preventing a recurrence. The tipping point for Felix, though, was the election of Ronald Reagan, an unabashed conservative ideologue whose policies and rhetoric reintroduced the politics of polarization to the national debate, a schism that exists to this day. From the inauguration of 1981 on, and for the next eight years, Felix became something of an unguided political missile, a prominent card-carrying member of the political opposition--albeit without portfolio.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

We have the best economic ideas, so we say, aligned with constitutional liberty and the American Dream. The economy is in trouble, and after two terms of President Barack Obama the Democrats are mostly to blame. After a crash like the 2008 financial debacle, the U.S. economy typically takes off on a seven-year boom. “Seven fat years” was the harvest of President Ronald Reagan, who entered office in the face of Cold War setbacks and sky-high interest rates, inflation, “malaise,” unemployment, and poverty.1 Pursuing similar policies in faint rhetorical disguise and correcting Reagan’s second-term hike in capital gains tax rates, Bill Clinton delivered a seven-year echo boom of his own.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

For these reasons, solar-energy capture is advancing on an exponential curve. With that advance, we are heading into an era of practically unlimited, clean, almost free energy. Ramez Naam explains the trend very well in his book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet: When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, average retail electricity costs in the United States were around 5 cents a kilowatt hour (in today’s dollars). Electricity produced from wind power, on the other hand, cost around ten times more, at 50 cents a kilowatt hour. And electricity from solar power cost 30 times more, at around $1.50 per kilowatt hour.


The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Governments throughout the West began to embrace neoliberalism, which, like its laissez-faire predecessor, celebrated economic freedom for individuals and corporations and prescribed a limited role for government in the economy. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Britain in 1979, and then Ronald Reagan president of the United States in 1980, it was clear that the economic era inspired by New Deal ideas and policies had come to an end. Over the next two decades, governments pursued neoliberalism's core policies of deregulation, privatization, spending cuts, and inflation reduction with increasing vigor.


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

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

.฀ The฀ disappearence฀ of฀ the฀ USSR฀ was฀ an฀ unprecedented฀event,฀since฀it฀fell฀without฀a฀defeat฀in฀a฀war฀or฀an฀ internal฀ rebellion.฀ Its฀ worst฀ enemies฀ on฀ the฀ American฀ right฀ had฀ demonised฀it฀as฀the฀Great฀Satan฀but฀did฀not฀imagine฀that฀it฀could฀ fall฀apart฀so฀quickly.฀(Though฀they฀did฀in฀retrospect฀claim฀credit฀ for฀ Ronald฀ Reagan฀ and฀ his฀ aggressive฀ stance฀ for฀ having฀ achieved฀ this฀ goal.)฀ Their฀ detractors฀ on฀ the฀ left฀ –฀ the฀ myriad฀ Trotskyist฀ factions฀–฀were฀predicting฀an฀uprising฀by฀the฀working฀class฀of฀the฀ ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀  USSR฀to฀correct฀the฀mistakes฀of฀the฀original฀revolution.฀When฀the฀ Soviet฀Union฀collapsed,฀the฀working฀class฀hardly฀raised฀a฀finger฀at฀ home฀or฀abroad.


pages: 190 words: 53,409

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

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

Many tax cuts were adopted in the hope that they would stimulate economic growth by enough to prevent a decline in overall tax revenues, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the effect of the George W. Bush tax cuts was to reduce federal revenue by $2.9 trillion between 2001 and 2011. And in a widely cited New York Times article, Bruce Bartlett, a senior economic advisor in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, argued that the actual revenue shortfall caused by the Bush tax cuts was considerably larger.5 If Bartlett is right, that shortfall would have been enough to eliminate our current estimated infrastructure backlog. TABLE 6.1. MAXIMUM MARGINAL TAX RATES ON INDIVIDUAL INCOME Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers; International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation *Hong Kong’s maximum tax (the “standard rate”) has normally been 15 percent, effectively capping the marginal rate at high income levels (in exchange for no personal exemptions).


pages: 208 words: 51,277

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler

clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, longitudinal study, market design, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

At the exact moment when Tyson was trying to acquire Holly, the RJR Nabisco deal went through, the Philip Morris Companies offered $. billion for Kraft, and Grand Metropolitan PLC, a British beverage and food giant, was attempting to take over Pillsbury at a cost of $. billion. Part of what was fueling merger mania was politics. Ronald Reagan was leaving office, and no one expected the next president— Republican or Democrat—to be as merger-friendly. Part of it was also cyclical. Food companies, especially ones with familiar brand names, are attractive during periods of market uncertainty.21 Tyson next proposed $ a share, an offer that Holly also promptly rejected.22 In fact, four days later, Holly dropped a bombshell.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan, who scoffed at conservation and told them it was “still morning in America.”49 Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers. Marx was surely right when he called capitalism, almost admiringly, “a machine for demolishing limits.” Both communism and capitalism are materialist Utopias offering rival versions of an earthly paradise.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

When William Buckley began his highly successful magazine National Review, giving an intellectual patina to the utterances of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Burnham contributed a regular column entitled ‘Third World War’, in which he urged Americans to understand that they were involved in a global life-or-death conflict with atheist Communism. This third world war, he maintained, had already begun. It began at Christmas 1944, when British soldiers opened fire on a Communist demonstration in the central square of newly liberated Athens. Shortly before his death in 1987, Burnham was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan, as the godfather of anti-Communism. Orwell did not live to see McCarthyism (and he had been sharply critical of the British policy in Athens, which he saw as imposing an unwanted reactionary monarchy on the Greeks). But he disliked and distrusted James Burnham’s grand theories from the very beginning, and quite evidently drew upon them for his bleak prediction of a tripolar and militarized world in Nineteen Eighty-Four.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!” speech, June 12, 1987. demand the construction of walls Donald Trump, speech, Phoenix, August 31, 2016. 41. In 1945, when Vannevar Bush imagined the “memex,” on which computers were based Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945. Similar tensions are rising in India, Malaysia, and Sudan Kevin Roose, “Forget Washington.


pages: 225 words: 189

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

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

(In per­ ceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite—notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.) When, in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kissinger argued for military force against Saddam Hussein. The legitimate order in the Gulf had been disrupted by a revo­ lutionary chieftain; to react merely with sanctions would consti­ tute appeasement, and Kissinger said as much. Kissinger's response to Munich and Nazism in A World Re­ stored is pellucid.


End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Carter will have to be assured that, if you are reappointed, you will not continue to publicly criticize everything that is near and dear to him.” 1 Sadly for Burns, the courtship failed. Even more sadly for the country, the courtship wrecked the dollar further. It also wrecked the Carter presidency, as he dealt with the worst bout of price inflation in more than a century. Finally, the inflation backfired even against the Democrats and brought Ronald Reagan to power. Such is the lagging effect of shortsighted efforts to manipulate the political environment to benefit particular Fed governors and banking interests. Despite his sympathy for the gold standard, Reagan did nothing about the issue. His advisers successfully kept him quiet on this issue, fearing that he would be seen as crazy or kooky.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Blinder suggested that tax policy, trade policy, and environmental policy might be delegated to independent technocratic agencies, with only minimal congressional control.4 In 2019, Cass Sunstein, who had been the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012, during the Obama administration, suggested that the US was afflicted by excessive “partyism,” for which the cure “lies in delegation, and in particular in strengthening the hand of technocratic forces in government.”5 Economic activities that could not be insulated from democratic meddling by transferring them to technocratic government agencies could be transferred wholly to private sector elites by privatization and marketization. In the United States, Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, was the first president of the post–New Deal neoliberal era. Beginning with Carter’s presidency, a number of industries that had been regulated during the New Deal were deregulated by Congress: airlines (1978), rail (1980), trucking (1980), busing (1982), telecommunications (1996, 1999). While deregulation improved performance in some industries, in others, like home mortgage lending and finance, deregulation led to widespread abuses that helped to inflate the asset bubbles that burst in the Great Recession.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

And the economic facts of the years between the early 1970s through the early 2000s were that growth continued, but became more uneven, yet people’s expectations of how their lifestyle should compare to their peers did not change. 7. The boom resumes, but it’s different than before. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” ad declared: It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

The freedom it champions is very different from Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.” The conservative movement began to dominate the Republican Party in the 1970s, and then much of the country after 1980 with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It uneasily wove together several strands of thought. One was traditionalist, a reaction against the utopian plans and moral chaos of modern secular civilization. The traditionalists were sin-fearing Protestants, orthodox Catholics, southern agrarians, would-be aristocrats, alienated individualists—dissidents in postwar America.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Most people are forbidden to disembark, and must remain in the parked aircraft, trusting that its cooling system will survive the punishing afternoon heat. But I had left Honolulu that morning with a permit to land, issued by a forward outpost of the U.S. Army. For Kwajalein is an army base. Since the 1960s it has operated as a center for mid-ocean rocketry, and it is currently the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. Few are allowed to get off the plane, fewer still to linger on the atoll, because the site is festooned with a costly array of ultrasecret high-technology apparatus, and is peopled with hundreds of high-technology staff, soldiers, and scientists, who are performing clandestine tasks with the equipment, all officially bent on helping keep America safe from whatever are deemed currently the world’s most dangerous threats.

See also Easter Island Ratliff, Smiley, 218n rats, 357n, 362 RCA, 113 Réard, Louis, 43 Red Guards, 196 Redondo Beach, 135–37, 140 Red Sea, 343, 346 Reed Tablemount, 396 refugees, 298–303 Regency TR-1 radio, 105, 107 Riddiford, Charles, 153 Rifleman Bank, 396 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 356 Ring of Fire, 313, 315, 333, 378, 389 RMA (revolution in military affairs), 415n, 416 Roaring Forties, 309, 356 Robert Island, 396 Robeson, Paul, 285 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 19 Robinson family, 375 Rockhampton, Australia, 349 Rodney, Lord, 167 Roi-Namur Islet, 15 Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site (Kwajalein), 12 Rongelap Atoll, 52, 60, 64, 65, 70, 73–77, 78 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 46, 64–65 Roosevelt, Theodore, 367, 386, 411, 415 Rose Atoll, 367 Rosenbluth, Marshall, 71–72 Rossby waves, 262 Royal Charlotte Reef, 396 “Royal Sport, A” (London), 121, 133 Rusk, Dean, 154 Russia, 116, 190, 337, 362, 401n, 415, 416, 421n.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Why have the rich got a bigger share? The return of the rich over the last four decades has been closely associated with developments in capitalism. Most important has been the rise of a new political economic orthodoxy, called neoliberalism.26 Initiated aggressively by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, it was consolidated with more stealth by their successors, New Labour as well as Conservative, Democrat as well as Republican. Now, after the crash of 2007–08 and in the ensuing recession – exactly when it has most clearly failed – it is being imposed with renewed vigour. It has three key features. 1.

For a while, with a still-strong labour movement, many workers could continue to win wage rises to keep up with inflation but, as unemployment rose in the old industrialised countries, the post-war balance of power between capital and organised labour crumbled as deindustrialisation hit union membership. At the end of the decade, leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan seized the moment to attack the unions and weaken employment legislation. In effect they declared class war on organised labour, which was blamed for the high inflation. In both the US and the UK, the governments raised interest rates, making their currencies strong and hence making business difficult for export industry, as it drove up the prices of exports relative to those of goods from other countries.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

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

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

And just as China has expanded its influence to its north across Russian Siberia, it is also reaching east toward another Arctic country—Canada—quietly becoming its second-largest trading partner and jointly building a $2 billion pipeline to transport oil extracted from Alberta’s oil-rich tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia. America always seeks an external enemy. Ronald Reagan’s myth-making about the Soviet Union included claims that it planned to organize Asia’s hordes and even the people of Latin America—after which America’s fall would be all but automatic.13 Some now see China as this nefarious force, exploiting Latin America’s mineral resources and promoting high-level ties among defense officials.14 They further worry that just as the United States has ceased to support Latin military dictatorships, China’s presence could undermine America’s human rights and democratization agenda, while contributing to another round of volatile natural-resource dependency.15 For Latin Americans, China represents a new way of doing business outside of America’s thicket of codes and regulations, one that imposes no political conditionality whatsoever other than lobbying Latin American countries to rescind their recognition of Taiwan, which for years had purchased diplomatic loyalty across the region, particularly in Central America, and received market economy status in their trade relations.

Most significantly, Gaddafi’s sponsorship of the PLO and IRA, his complicity in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, and his blatant attempts to acquire nuclear weapons technology have all contributed to making Libya a founding member of America’s “state sponsors of terrorism” watchlist. President Ronald Reagan labeled him a “mad dog” and launched a missile attack on Tripoli in 1986 (as payback for the Berlin disco bombing that killed three American servicemen) that ended up killing Gaddafi’s adopted infant daughter. Libya could long ago have become an Arab version of Norway, but Gaddafi’s delusions of grandeur invited sanctions that took advantage of the country’s isolated geography, making the movement of goods other than via the arduous land and sea routes virtually impossible.


pages: 669 words: 150,886

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

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

On 13 August every year the West Berlin assembly would lay wreaths here, joined by international representatives, while for the left, such ceremonies became rituals of the Cold War. The West Berlin authorities also erected viewing platforms at regular intervals, from which visitors could peer over the Wall. It became part of the itinerary of visiting schoolchildren and overseas tourists to ascend these scaffolds, including John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Ronald Reagan in 1987. Throughout its existence, the Wall was a ready-made piece of anticommunist propaganda. One of the earliest museums to the Wall had also accompanied it almost from the start, the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, set up in 1963 under Rainer Hildebrandt, a tireless campaigner against the GDR.

The East German government had soon realized, however, the marketability of the Wall, setting up VEB Limex-Bau in spring 1990, an import–export company. In August Eppelmann then ordered the sale of its remnants. Elements with prominent graffiti were auctioned off as works of art at Monte Carlo, reaching art-house prices of up to $300,000 apiece. Other pieces were donated to statesmen or institutions, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush; the Vatican; the Imperial War Museum in London; and CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Private souvenir hunters, so-called ‘wallpeckers’—including myself, I must confess—also joined the fray. This act of appropriation turned what had been a symbol of oppression into a symbol of freedom, however naively.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

He had already been courted by Moscow to join the Warsaw Pact, and there were thousands of Soviet military advisors and many Soviet weapons in Tripoli. One more nudge might just tip him over the edge. The risk of an international belligerent gaining full Soviet backing was just too dangerous to contemplate. And then President Ronald Reagan stepped onto the stage. Gaddafi greeted his new sparring partner with characteristic acidity, assuming he could maintain his anti-imperialist credentials publicly, while quietly keeping the petro-dollars flowing. ‘How could he become president of the greatest state on earth?’ mocked Gaddafi, ‘What a comedy – the comedy of the twentieth century, the absurdity of the twentieth century, the triviality of the twentieth century.’10 Reagan was almost as ideologically unyielding as Gaddafi.

In May 2001, top officials from Riggs Bank wrote to Obiang thanking him ‘for the opportunity you granted to us in hosting a luncheon in your honour here at Riggs Bank’. The letter went on to say that Riggs had ‘formed a committee of the most senior officers of Riggs Bank that will meet regularly to discuss our relationship with Equatorial Guinea and how best we can serve you’. At one point a Riggs Bank board member invited Obiang to visit the Ronald Reagan Library in California. In turn, the bank’s chairman, president and six other senior Riggs officials enjoyed a week-long business trip on the tropical beaches of Malabo. We know all this because a US Senate committee reported into Riggs Bank and its non-compliance with money-laundering laws in 2004.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

The students actions were soon sanctioned by Iran’s revolutionary government, and a standoff developed between the United States and Iran over the issue of the 52 captive American diplomats. The standoff lasted for almost two years before the hostages were released in January 1981 (Inauguration day for Ronald Reagan). Few events in modern history were more thoroughly covered in the news media than the hostage crisis in Iran. Still, someone at the NSA decided—more than twenty years after the fact—that mentioning the episode publicly would do “exceptionally grave damage to national security.” That is the legal standard for a Top Secret classification under Executive Order 13526.

Outside the United States, the NSA’s operations were considerably less constrained. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not apply to collection abroad unless it deliberately targeted an American using equipment based inside the United States. There were other rules and regulations based on Executive Order 12333, a directive signed by President Ronald Reagan. Insiders pronounced it Twelve Triple Three. The standards set in that executive order were more permissive, implemented in classified regulations and seldom subject to oversight outside the executive branch. “Look, NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole,” John Schindler, a former NSA analyst who taught at the Naval War College, told me.


Discover Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bartolomé de las Casas, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, food miles, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban decay, urban sprawl

South of the airport, True Blue is a relaxed corner of the island with some nice top-end hotels, good eateries and multiple yacht marinas. Crowning the peninsula enclosing True Blue Bay, St George’s Medical School (SGU) is a sprawling campus inhabited almost exclusively by young Americans seeking offshore medical degrees (notoriously, President Ronald Reagan said he was defending these students when he ordered the American invasion in 1983). Beaches Pingouin Beach Beach (Pink Gin Beach; ) Pingouin Beach is a lovely swath of powdery white sand with warm blue waters, good snorkeling and wonderful views over to St George’s. It’s close to the popular Beach House restaurant, north of the airport.

Timeline 1493 Columbus returns on his second voyage, sighting and naming much of the Eastern Caribbean. 1595 By 1595 the famous English privateers Sir Francis Drake and Jack Hawkins were using the Virgin Islands as a staging ground for attacks on Spanish shipping. 1651 Mass suicide by Caribs in Grenada who preferred to jump off a cliff than be subjugated by the Spanish. 1685 The French Code Noire gives slaves legal protection from murder but also allows for floggings. 1776 Sint Eustatius honors an American rebel warship, thus making the Netherlands the first to recognize the US. 1780 A hurricane kills 22,000 from Barbados to St Lucia. 1805 Beaten by the British in Dominica, the French burn Roseau to the ground and flee. 1815 The Treaty of Vienna restores Guadeloupe and Martinique to France. 1834 Britain abolishes slavery throughout its empire; the Dutch follow suit in 1863. 1878 Sweden gives Saint Barthélemy to France, ending its little-remembered colonial ambitions in the Caribbean. 1916–24 US occupation of the Dominican Republic; also occupies Haiti from 1915–34. 1937 Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo orders Haitians be killed in retaliation for cattle rustling; 20,000 perish. 1959 Cuban Revolution triumphs, which ripples across the Caribbean. Puerto Rico welcomes many new casino owners. 1967 Anguillans force the Royal St Kitts Police Force off the island for good, declaring independence. 1983 After President Ronald Reagan orders an invasion, 70 Cubans, 42 Americans and 170 Grenadians die. 1986 Aruba leaves the Netherlands Antilles and becomes an autonomous entity. 1994 Lester Bird continues the ruling dynasty started by his father, VC, in 1981. 2004 Hurricane Ivan sweeps through the Caribbean, devastating Grenada. 2008 Presidential candidate Barrack Obama criticizes US companies using the Cayman Islands as a tax dodge.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The bad feeling between the French and American scientists was exacerbated by an ill-considered press conference in April 1984 at the US Department of Health and Human Services at which Gallo announced that he had isolated the virus of AIDS and followed up that announcement with four further papers in Science in which he named the virus HTLV-III.† In 1986, the dispute appeared to have been settled when the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses renamed the virus HIV and, soon afterwards, Ronald Reagan and Frédéric Mitterrand, who was then the president of France, announced that both groups of scientists deserved equal credit for the discovery, only for the dispute to be reopened in 1990 by new genetic tests suggesting, wrongly as it turned out, that Gallo had misappropriated samples forwarded to his laboratory from the Pasteur Institute in 1983.

This indifference was due partly to ignorance and partly to prejudice about a disease that was thought to affect only homosexuals. As long as AIDS was framed as a disease of gay lifestyles, and therefore not a problem for “straight” society, it could be safely ignored by mainstream politicians. Instead, Ronald Reagan’s administration, backed by the Republican-controlled Senate, starved AIDS researchers of funds, forcing scientists at the NIH and CDC to beg and steal money from other programs. Indeed, for the first three years of the epidemic, Reagan refused to mention the “A”-word, only referring to AIDS in public for the first time in the fall of 1985.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Right now, we are not making it.”46 The idea of a demographically induced gap between current and necessary economic growth received the administration’s stamp of approval in the 1962 Economic Report of the President, which CEA member James Tobin called one of the agency’s two “economic manifestos” (the other came under Ronald Reagan).47 The impression that the demographic bubble forced the economy to work harder just to stand still was thus an important weapon in the push for an aggressive full-employment policy, which culminated in major Keynesian-inspired tax cuts in 1964. managing the great society’s population growth 143 The aggregate-demand camp’s emphasis on the sluggish macroeconomy did not run counter to SPK.48 The community of economists surrounding the Kennedy and Johnson administrations maintained that, given the state’s ability to spur prosperity and full employment, population growth was a neutral economic variable—and hence the regulation of population growth proposed from various quarters could proceed.

Although many of the report’s specific projections (e.g., those regarding deforestation and species loss) have proven accurate, conservatives commonly deride it for epitomizing the Chicken Little mentality of population doomsayers as well as the general malaise of the Carter years.5 The report did not produce any policy ripples. Ronald Reagan’s optimistic and wellreceived declaration of “morning in America” indicated that the Malthusian epoch—much longer than a moment—was long gone. Thereafter, the US government formally renounced Malthusianism. In 1984, the Reagan administration’s delegation to the UN International Population Conference in Mexico City called population growth a “neutral phenomenon.”6 In spite of the prevailing optimistic rhetoric, few policy makers have welcomed rapid population growth in the poorest nations (especially in 246 epilogue sub-Saharan Africa).


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

In part, he said, “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.” Two months later, Governor Ronald Reagan, a longtime member of the NRA and supporter of gun owner rights, signed the Mulford Act into law. Much of the violence attributed to the Black Panther Party was caused by infiltrators on the FBI’s payroll. Only one year after Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the party and released its 10-Point Program, in 1967, FBI director J.

Chapter 51 The Ends of Justice Would the loss of Herman finally tip the scales of sanity against me? Would this be the year of justice and freedom or another year of the same? My habeas case was before a three-judge panel of the most conservative judges on the Fifth Circuit. Two of them were appointed by President Ronald Reagan. The third was appointed by President George W. Bush. I didn’t have a lot of hope for justice and freedom. But I was feeling the support of the people. I was receiving thousands of letters from people through Amnesty International. And that gave me strength. I wanted to write back to each and every person who wrote to me, but it wasn’t physically possible.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

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

In October 1981, the group of officers was profiled in English in Peace Courier, the journal of the World Peace Council, with brief statements from some of its members.35 The U.S. intelligence community was quick to label the generals as what they were, an “ad hoc front group.”36 But it took about a year for the group to receive mainstream press coverage in the United States. President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981. For the first time in history, the inaugural ceremony was held at the West Front of the Capitol, instead of the East. The speech contained several oblique references to the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and the ideological superpower confrontation. “Above all,” Reagan told the crowd assembled on the National Mall, “we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”

Markus Wolf, Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Ullstein, 2002), pp. 342–45. 23.  Anonymous former HVA officer, in conversation with Thomas Rid, by telephone, July 18, 2019. 24.  Rüdiger Steinmetz and Tilo Prase, Dokumentarfilm zwischen Beweis und Pamphlet: Heynowski & Scheumann und Gruppe Katins (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag, 2002), pp. 128–36. 25.  Ronald Reagan, “Remarks in Columbus to Members of Ohio Veterans Organizations,” October 4, 1982. 26.  “President Says Foes of U.S. Have Duped Arms Freeze Group,” The New York Times, October 5, 1982, p. A22. 27.  Tom Wicker, “Enough Is Enough,” The New York Times, October 8, 1982, p. A31. 28.  “The Freeze, the KGB…” The Washington Post, November 21, 1982, p.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

To help get the job done, Congress authorized $97 million to support Iraqi opposition groups.67 Regime change does not get much more overt than that. Even paramilitary operations come in both covert and overt varieties. The CIA launched covert operations to assassinate Castro and Lumumba. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan ordered air strikes that narrowly missed killing Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi.68 Reagan went on national television just to make sure everyone knew the strikes were retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored terrorist attack in West Berlin that had targeted American service members.69 In recent years, the United States has tried to roll back suspected nuclear weapons programs by using covert cyber operations against Iran70 and by openly declaring war against Iraq.

Yet despite these differences, every president from Truman to Trump has authorized covert action, even the “dark corner of the room” variety. If you had to bet which presidents would embrace covert action, you’d probably put your money on hawkish Republicans. And you would be wrong. Well, not entirely wrong. Ronald Reagan increased the use of covert action in the 1980s.74 But Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both Democrats who made averting wars and promoting human rights mainstays of their foreign policy agendas, turned to covert action as much as or more than their Republican predecessors. In 1976, Carter ran for president against the national disgraces of “Watergate, Vietnam, and the CIA” and vowed never to “do anything as President that would be a contravention of the moral and ethical standards that I would exemplify in my own life as an individual.”75 He initially slashed covert action budgets.76 But the Iranian hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed his mind.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment includes careful directions for filling vacancies in the presidency (Section 1) and the vice presidency (Section 2). Section 3 of the amendment empowers the president to transfer his or her powers provisionally to the vice president in the event of a temporary disability, a provision that has been invoked numerous times since 1967, most of them relating to the famous presidential colon. When Ronald Reagan underwent colorectal cancer surgery, he transferred the powers of his office to Vice President George H. W. Bush and resumed them when the anesthesia wore off. Several other presidents have temporarily transferred their powers over to their VPs prior to a colonoscopy, as when George W. Bush turned them over to Dick Cheney.

Well, it was true that there was no well-developed body of precedent defining constitutional incitement to violent insurrection, because it had never before occurred to any president of the United States of America—from George Washington to John Adams, to Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, to James Monroe, to Abraham Lincoln, to Jimmy Carter, to Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush, to Barack Obama—to incite a violent insurrection against his own government. So it was true that Trump had blown the doors of history off the hinges with his incitement to insurrectionary political violence and that the Senate would have to stand up for the very first time to define his unprecedented and original constitutional crime as a high crime and misdemeanor.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

CHAPTER TWO Taking On the Establishment Before the 2018 mid-term elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party. Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bid for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges. Intraparty conflicts consumed these failed campaigns through much of the election year. This major distraction didn’t allow them to run a campaign against their general election opponent until late summer.

When Trump appeared on the White House balcony after his return from Walter Reed, NBC News’s presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted, “In America, our Presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes—that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”61 While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’s fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times—once with communist dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.62 * * * While President Trump was still recovering, the vice-presidential debate between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence took place on October 7.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

64 The Genentech sale, which occurred as the US economy was again mired in recession, heralded a new period on the US stock market. Investors and speculators flocked to make a fast buck through the twin novelties of personal computing and genetic engineering and the stock market soared, buoyed up by the election of Ronald Reagan in November and the prospect of good times to come, for the rich. For the president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1980 was ‘probably the most profitable year in the history of Wall Street’.65 Two months after the Genentech IPO, the far more reliable prospect of the Apple Computing Company – already turning a tidy profit – followed suit.

In total, 2,422 products were developed by these licensees, generating over $35 billion in sales.13 The total revenue from the patent was around $255 million; each university received $90 million, with Boyer and Cohen sharing the rest. ✴ The financial impact of Diamond v. Chakrabarty was reinforced by a second key US legal event of 1980: a law that was enacted by President Jimmy Carter shortly before handing Ronald Reagan the keys to the White House. Earlier in the year, Democrat senator Birch Bayh and his Republican colleague Bob Dole had sponsored a brief amendment to the Patent and Trademark Act with the aim of forcing the US government and recipients of governmental research funds, such as NIH grant-holders, to take out patents on their discoveries and to license those patents.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

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

However, by the end of that century, all such efforts were so thoroughly discredited by their actual results, in countries around the world, that even most communist nations abandoned central planning, while socialist governments in democratic countries began selling off government-run enterprises, whose chronic losses had been a heavy burden to the taxpayers. Privatization was embraced as a principle by such conservative governments as those of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. But the most decisive evidence for the efficiency of the marketplace was that even socialist and communist governments, led by people who were philosophically opposed to capitalism, turned back towards the free market after seeing what happens when industry and commerce operate without the guidance of prices, profits and losses.

Harding’s administration was 11.7 percent.{704} Yet Harding did nothing, except reduce government spending as tax revenues declined{705}—the very opposite of what would later be advocated by Keynesian economists. The following year unemployment fell to 6.7 percent, and the year after that to 2.4 percent.{706} Even after it became a political axiom, following the Great Depression of the 1930s, that the government had to intervene when the economy turned down, that axiom was ignored by President Ronald Reagan when the stock market crashed in 1987, breaking the record for a one-day decline that had been set back in 1929. Despite outraged media reaction at his failure to act, President Reagan let the economy recover on its own. The net result was an economy that in fact recovered on its own, followed by what The Economist later called 20 years of “an enviable combination of steady growth and low inflation.”{707} These were not controlled experiments, of course, so any conclusions must be suggestive rather than definitive.

As the Federal Reserve tightened money and credit in the early 1980s, in order to curb inflation, unemployment rose while bankruptcies and business failures rose to levels not seen in decades. During this process, Federal Reserve System chairman Paul Volcker was demonized in the media and President Ronald Reagan’s popularity plummeted in the polls for supporting him. But at least Volcker had the advantage that Professor Burns had not had, of having support in the White House. However, not even those who had faith that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy was the right one for dealing with rampant inflation had any way of knowing how long it would take—or whether Congress’ patience would run out before then, leading to legislation restricting the Fed’s independent authority.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In fact, the city has the largest homeless population in the United States, with wanderers attracted to the city for its temperate weather and reputation as a liberal center, with little of the harsh policing tactics used in other big cities to sweep the streets. Laws reforming the mental health-care system signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in the 1970s contributed to the large number of mentally ill living on the streets of San Francisco, and together with those struggling with drug addiction or alcoholism, and the indigent living in decrepit hotels on SoMa’s Sixth Street, the sheer volume of people competing both for loose change and for social services has contributed to a culture of desperation and poverty along Sixth Street and the Tenderloin.

Full-scale battles were fought almost daily here at one point, on the campus and on its surrounding streets, and there were times when Berkeley looked almost on the brink of revolution itself: students (and others) throwing stones and gas bombs were met with tear-gas volleys and truncheons by National Guard troops under the nominal command of Governor Ronald Reagan. Such action was inspired by the mood of the time and continued well into the 1970s, while during the conservative 1980s and Clinton-dominated 1990s, Berkeley politics became far less confrontational. But despite an influx of more conformist students, a surge in the number of exclusive restaurants, and the dismantling of the city’s rent-control program, the progressive legacy has remained in the city’s independent bookstores (see box, p.308) and at sporadic political demonstrations, particularly those inspired by the growing resistance to George W.

Since then, the Bay Area – and the world – has never been the same, and even with the Internet industry implosion in 2000, the green of Silicon Valley has far from faded. While many small businesses went under during the first two years of the millennium, the Big Players have regrouped successfully, and business is once more brisk if not booming. The university, whose reputation as an arch-conservative thinktank was enhanced by Ronald Reagan’s offer to donate his video library to the school (Stanford politely declined), hasn’t always been an entirely boring place, though you wouldn’t know it to walk among the preppy future-lawyers-of-America that seem to comprise the majority of the student body. Ken Kesey came here from Oregon in 1958 on a writing fellowship, working nights as an orderly on the psychiatric ward of one local hospital, and getting paid $75 a day to test experimental drugs (LSD among them) in another.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

Kennedy governed in a lucky economic time when technology and trade did not strongly favor one skill group over another, and when economic growth raised incomes for most workers, even in the short run. Today, politicians still invoke Kennedy’s language, but that language no longer applies. As we have seen, the forces of economic growth now increase demand for highly skilled workers while they reduce demand for less skilled workers. In Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product grew by 23 percent while the earnings of the average thirty-year-old male high school graduate fell by almost onesixth and the college/high school earnings differential grew from 20 to 45 percent. During Bill Clinton’s first term, the earnings of high school graduates fell still more.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

The runaway costs of acquiring social capital are why so many are so pessimistic about their children’s life prospects. When people lose faith in the future they are less likely to invest in the present. That sense of personal stagnation – and the gnawing fear you may even be sinking – casts an enervating pall over the human spirit. Ronald Reagan once said, ‘Progress is our most important product.’ He was speaking of General Electric, for whom he worked. But he also meant America. Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said, ‘economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies’.


pages: 225 words: 55,458

Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose

blue-collar work, centre right, confounding variable, creative destruction, delayed gratification, digital divide, George Santayana, income inequality, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, new economy, Ronald Reagan, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Another way to explain away inequality—one that has a long history in the United States and is still very much with us—is the moral argument. People are at the lower end of the economy because of a failure of character; they engage in counterproductive behavior, lack a work ethic, don’t complete things, and so on. They are a drain on the system, gaming it, on the dole. Since Ronald Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” invocation, conservative political discourse has been brimming with such imagery, as the 2012 GOP primaries demonstrated. There is both a theory of the social order and good, old-fashioned prejudice at play here— and both are enhanced by the social isolation of the rich from the poor.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS PART 1: INNOVATION ON THE FRINGE Introduction Chapter 1: The Misfit Philosophy PART 2: UNLEASHING YOUR INNER MISFIT Chapter 2: Hustle Chapter 3: Copy Chapter 4: Hack Chapter 5: Provoke Chapter 6: Pivot PART 3: THE MISFIT REVOLUTION Chapter 7: Walking the Misfit Path Conclusion Acknowledgments About Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips Notes Index Part 1 INNOVATION ON THE FRINGE INTRODUCTION “AM I TALKING TOO MUCH?” Sam Hostetler, an Amish farmer in Miller, Missouri, asks for the third time before continuing the story of how he, an exotic-animal aficionado, started milking camels. Hostetler was born to devout Christian parents in Tampico, Illinois, “the same town [where] Ronald Reagan was born.” When he was nine years old, his family moved to a farm in Buffalo, Missouri. His father set up a building business and became a bishop in the community church. Sam and his brothers were raised to be moral, observant, and open-minded people. He married his wife, Corlene, when he was twenty-one years old, “after knowing her forever,” he says, laughing.


pages: 169 words: 56,555

Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer

Burning Man, Gene Kranz, Joan Didion, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan

It was like Whitman’s ‘Song for Occupations’ in an entirely military setting (with a special emphasis on avionics): a vision of a fulfilled and industrious America, each person indispensable to the workings of the larger enterprise, no friction between the person and the task. Which made me think: why not name an aircraft carrier after Whitman? And why stop at Walt? Why not re-brand all the carriers and give them the names of poets? Show me one good reason why the USS Ronald Reagan shouldn’t be called the USS Emily Dickinson. * * * * I have recorded what I saw and heard, and my impressions of what I saw and heard. For an investigation of sexual abuse in the US military see Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War. 7 On a boat where everyone worked hard, everyone acknowledged that no one worked harder than the guys operating and maintaining the catapults.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

In this turning point, as with the next, the crisis provided the opportunity for sweeping reforms, part of the ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein, 2008) of neoliberalism. In the UK, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dealt a serious blow to the trade union movement by defeating the miners’ strike (one of the world’s largest ever strikes that resulted in defeat for the workers). In the US, Ronald Reagan defeated the air traffic control workers. For both, this was followed with a programme of reforms that has come to characterize neoliberalism: attacking workers’ terms and conditions, the rolling back of the welfare state and sectoral subsidies, and increasing privatization and use of market forces (Harvey, 2007: 12).


The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

And since identity and performativity are now pivotal to public discourse, climate change too has become enmeshed with the politics of self-definition. When American and Australian politicians speak of climate change negotiations as posing a threat to ‘our way of life’, they are following the same script that led Ronald Reagan to speak of the reduction of the use of oil as an assault on what it means to be American. The enmeshment of global warming with issues of an entirely different order has given a distinctive turn to the politics of climate change in the Anglosphere. Instead of being seen as a phenomenon that requires a practical response, as it largely is in Holland and Denmark, or as an existential danger, as it is in the Maldives and Bangladesh, it has become one of many issues that are clustered along a fault line of extreme political polarization.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

Admittedly, James and other advocates of a strict hierarchy in secondary education conveniently ignored Eliot’s caveat that ‘the prospect of a society ruled and directed only by those who have passed certain examinations or satisfied tests devised by psychologists is not reassuring’, but Eliot’s staunch defence of the culture of the governing elite, even if in his own mind it was not a grammar-school elite, was clearly grist to their mill.13 It was not only the culture wars that left one visitor cold during the winter of 1948/9. For almost four months the American film star Ronald Reagan spent his working days at Elstree Studios, making an instantly forgettable movie, The Hasty Heart, set in a hospital compound in Burma. ‘You won’t mind our winter outdoors – it’s indoors that’s really miserable,’ an Englishman had helpfully warned him, and – wearing either pyjamas or shorts for the entire picture – Reagan froze most of the time.

Five years later, Blakemore’s Pennine experience was made all the more striking by the fact that it was a Sunday, in other words the ‘stale haze was the residue of the previous working week’. London – itself with a still notably strong manufacturing base – could suffer, too. ‘The streets were like those of Dickens’ murky London by day and like Dante’s Inferno by night’ was how the writer Mollie Panter-Downes described the 114 continuous hours of late-November fog endured by poor Ronald Reagan in 1948. Britain’s rising consumption of coal, the cause of all this smoke pollution, had been inexorable for two centuries: some five million tons of it being burned in 1750; 50 million tons by 1850; and 184 million tons by 1946, with more than a quarter of that last total being consumed on the open domestic grate.

Leavis, The Great Tradition (Peregrine edn, 1962), p 10; John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), pp 270, 281; T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), pp 31, 48, 99, 101–2, 106–7, 108; Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940–1990 (1991), pp 126–9. 14. Ronald Reagan, My Early Life (1981), pp 208–10; Edmund Morris, Dutch (1999), pp 270–71; Rev. Oliver Leonard Willmott, The Parish Notes of Loders, Dottery and Askerswell, Volume 1 (Shrewsbury, 1996), Jan–Mar 1949. 15. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 19 (1998), pp 435–44; Godfrey Hodgson, ‘The Steel Debates’, in Sissons and French (eds), Age of Austerity, p 297; Headlam, p 568. 16.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The task-force would be ready to sail within forty-eight hours and the islands could be retaken by force. She told him to go ahead. She would decide later whether to authorize it to actually try to re-invade the islands. Could some kind of deal be done? A part of the Falklands story not revealed at the time was the deep involvement, and embarrassment, of the United States. Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had already begun to develop a personal special relationship. But the Argentine junta was important to the US for its anti-communist stance and as a trading partner. The United States began a desperate search for a compromise while Britain began an equally frantic search for allies at the United Nations.

Western politics echoed with arguments over weapons systems, disarmament strategies and the need to stand up to the Soviet threat. Moscow had early and rightly identified Thatcher as one of its most implacable enemies in the West and when, eighteen months after her election victory, she was joined by a new US President, Ronald Reagan, she had a soul-mate in Washington. Reagan may have been many things Thatcher was not – sunny, lazy, uninterested in detail and happy to run huge deficits. But like her he saw the world in black and white terms, a great stage where good and evil, God and Satan, were pitched in endless conflict.

In the Thatcher years its staff grew sevenfold and its budget, twentyfold. Back in the mid-eighties she did, to be fair, have other things on her mind. Personal relationships matter as much in modern diplomacy as they did in the Renaissance, and the Thatcher–Gorbachev courtship engaged her imagination and human interest. She was becoming the closest ally Ronald Reagan had, in another international relationship which was of huge emotional and political significance to her. In these years she had become an international diva of conservative politics, feted by crowds from Russia and China to New York. Her wardrobe, coded depending on where an outfit had first been worn, told its own story: ‘Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black’.26 Meanwhile she was negotiating the hard detail of Hong Kong’s transitional status before it was handed over to Communist China in 1997.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

The Asian tigers seemed to have achieved high growth rates and unprecedented poverty reduction with free-market policies and an outward orientation. As free-market proponents, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics had great influence on the policies and thinking of the US President, Ronald Reagan, and the UK’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The policies that ensued (Reaganomics and Thatcherism) bore all the hallmarks of an economic revolution, and there was little room for compromise; so too in Africa, where these free-market polices were packaged and sold as the new development agenda.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Also, volunteer programs like the one at Cotton, which I had helped design and lead, would have to be radically rethought to have any real impact. The frustration with the prevailing government-dependent approach to tackling social problems came to a head in the early 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan gave it voice, famously pronouncing in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That started the so-called “Reagan Revolution” that sought to put the power and responsibility of society into the hands of individuals and organizations.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Another major illustration of the crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal system is the strong recognition that the state is a central player in solving the crises brought about by unfettered markets, and it will remain a key actor in the develop189 The Global Financial Crisis ment process, whether in developed or developing countries. Some may recall former US president Ronald Reagan’s assertion in the 1980s that the state was ‘part of the problem, not of the solution’. This signalled the era of massive deregulation and the assault on the state and public service and ownership. It opened the door to some of the most sweeping and devastating structural adjustment policies in Africa.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Reducing your point to that single word demands discipline and forces clarity. Choose the proper word, and the rest can fall into place. For example, in his 2012 reelection campaign, President Barack Obama built his entire strategy around one word: “Forward.” Its use yields an important lesson for your own pitch. One. 2. The question pitch In 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States in a grim economy. Unseating an incumbent, even one as vulnerable as then president Jimmy Carter, who’d been elected in 1976, is never easy. So Reagan had to make the case that Carter’s poor stewardship of the economy required the country to change leadership.


pages: 180 words: 61,340

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

The Commerzbank chairman, Klaus-Peter Müller, actually works in Berlin, inside another very German kind of place. His office is attached to the side of the Brandenburg Gate. The Berlin Wall once ran, roughly speaking, right through the middle of it. One side of his building was once a field of fire for East German border guards, the other a backdrop for Ronald Reagan’s famous speech. (“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) From looking at it you would never guess any of this. “After the wall came down we were offered the chance to buy it back,” says Müller. “This building had been ours before the war. But the condition was that we had to put everything back exactly the way it was.


pages: 204 words: 63,571

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Michael Ian Black

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, life extension, placebo effect, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, upwardly mobile

Not a big deal, but Martha promised me she would do it. That was the deal before I agreed to get the hamster in the first place. I remind her of her promise. “I never said that,” she says. “Yes you did,” I respond. “If I did, I don’t remember.” It is a devastatingly effective response. I seem to remember Ronald Reagan saying something similar regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and that guy is a goddamned American hero. So there I am, week after week, hauling garbage bags filled with urine-soaked wood chips to the trash. Each time I do, I seethe with resentment at my lying wife. This goes on for eight months.


pages: 226 words: 52,069

Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat by Heather Lauer

British Empire, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, if you build it, they will come, index card, Ronald Reagan

ENHANCED BY BACON ~ 139 SOME GUYS WHO REALLY LIKE BACON Most frequent fliers will admit they have a weakness when it comes to how they spend their time at the airport. Some people can’t resist the seductive aroma that emanates from Cinnabon. Others take refuge in the nearest cocktail lounge. For some of us, our weakness is meatrelated. Tucked away in a corner of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport’s Terminal C is an unusual slice of airport heaven called Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Five Guys is not the kind of food you would expect to encounter at an airport terminal (that is, it doesn’t suck). Five Guys is a fast-food restaurant chain created in 1986 in nearby Arlington, Virginia, by Janie and Jerry Murrell and their five sons (hence the “Five Guys”).


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

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

This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility. Today’s classical liberals continue to advance this settlement as not only acceptable but worthy of celebration. Centuries after Locke, John F. Kennedy summarized this wager with the promise that “a rising tide raises all boats”—echoed often by Ronald Reagan—suggesting that even the flimsiest and cheapest boat could benefit from tsunami-sized differences for those at the top and the bottom. A vital element of this prosperity was the aggressive conquest of nature, particularly the intensive extraction of every potentially useful resource as well as the invention of processes and methods that would increase immediate value, regardless of future costs and consequences.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Sun intuited: if you want to get rich, build yourself a manufacturing industry. It is worth noting that this advice is very different from what mainstream development institutions have been dispensing to poor countries for the past two generations. In the 1980s and 1990s, expert advice converged around the Washington Consensus. Influenced by the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher push for bigger roles for markets and smaller roles for government, the Washington Consensus advocated a sharp curb on government spending and involvement in shaping markets. Its pillars included ensuring macroeconomic stability, cutting subsidies, deregulating markets, privatizing national companies, and liberalizing trade—as Rodrik summarizes it: “Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize.”4 International financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a large role in crystallizing this package into mainstream orthodoxy and guaranteeing its implementation, often by making much-needed economic assistance to developing countries conditional on their agreement to these prescriptive reforms.


The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival by Dr. Stephen R Palumbi Phd, Ms. Carolyn Sotka M. A.

California gold rush, clean water, glass ceiling, land tenure, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration

Cars backed up for miles in every direction. David Packard’s favorite music rose from a grandstand. Turk Murphy’s San Francisco Dixieland Jazz Band played all day. Two mayors (Monterey’s and Pacific Grove’s) helped cut the ribbon, along with Julie. There was a speech by David Packard and a prepackaged proclamation from President Ronald Reagan. And then it was time to open the doors. Too early. It turned out that the speeches had finished 20 minutes ahead of time. Inside the doors, the animals and tanks were ready, but the cash registers and ticket booths were not. The aquarium was an educational 162â•… â•… The Death and Life of Monterey Bay tour de force, but it also was a business, and the business side was not quite ticking along yet.


pages: 285 words: 61,929

150 Movies You Should Die Before You See by Steve Miller

Ronald Reagan, Tipper Gore

Betcha Didn't Know This was Charlie Sheen's first screen appearance, and the first major film role for Jennifer Grey. This was the first film released with a PG-13 rating. Trivia Quiz What real-world documents inspired the storyline of the film, according to John Milius? A: Speeches by President Ronald Reagan B: Memoirs of French and Danish WWII freedom fighters C: A report by the CIA and Army War College D: The writings of Nostradamus Answer: C. A report by the CIA and Army War College. In the early 1980s, the CIA and the Army War College released a study that described a possible invasion through Mexico by Soviet and Cuban troops.


pages: 218 words: 61,301

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

anti-communist, Danilo Kiš, index card, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as “freedom fighters.” Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States backed in Angola’s civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 500,000 dead. President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola, although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross–run factory making artificial legs for victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival’s wife and children to death. The mayhem and blood-letting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And how, after a couple months, you eventually saved enough money and got it? Yeah, let’s operate like that. FOREIGN POLICY When it comes to foreign policy, we need a strong military. Period. This is simply the best way to achieve peace. It may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s very much in line with President Ronald Reagan’s “Peace through Strength” Cold War strategy. People think that just because you’re for a strong military it means that you’re pro-war. But, actually, it’s quite the opposite. I want our military to be universally feared so that we don’t engage in more conflict. This back-to-front logic is technically known as reverse psychology, which is a term coined by German philosopher Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, back in 1970.


pages: 200 words: 64,329

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

The Falklands was Britain as Fortinbras, who will ‘find quarrel in a straw/When honour’s at the stake’. It was not Britain as Hamlet, agonized by existential questions of purpose and meaning. And there was no one else to play the required role of invader – even the ramping up of the Soviet threat by Ronald Reagan and Thatcher was curiously ineffective, not least because the danger of nuclear war was too hugely existential to serve as a microcosmic metaphor. The Falklands War, for all its grotesque elements, might have been a moment of release, a way of getting all the dark fantasies of invasion and heroic resistance out of England’s system once and for all: this time we really were invaded by Nazis and we won.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

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

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

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE FINANCIALLY MAXIMIZED In 1970 the most famous economist in the world introduced financial maximization to the mainstream. His name was Milton Friedman. He was a star lecturer at the University of Chicago, a future Nobel Prize winner, and future adviser to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He was and remains one of the most influential economists and thinkers in the world. Nothing Friedman had shared before caught the attention of the business community quite like his 1970 op-ed in the New York Times that made the case for financial maximization. At the time, the United States was mired in Vietnam.


pages: 192 words: 62,439

The Weed Runners: Travels With the Outlaw Capitalists of America's Medical Marijuana Trade by Nicholas Schou

facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan

Secondly, it says a lot about how careful Smith has been to distance himself from the likes of Moen and other dispensary operators who are foolhardy enough to drive around with large amounts of weed and/or cash in their own cars. Meanwhile, to understand Smith’s unyielding approach toward both law enforcement and his fellow marijuana activists, it helps to know a little bit about his pedigree. Smith’s uncle, Leighton Hatch, was a California Supreme Court justice appointed by Ronald Reagan. Along with well-known drug-reform advocate and former Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, both his parents—Dr. Clark Smith, a prominent Anaheim physician, and Katherine Smith, an Anaheim Union High School District board member—were signers of the 1993 Hoover Resolution, which called for a reform of US drug policy to focus less on incarceration and more on treatment and prevention.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

Countries likely to engage in exploration of the moon and beyond, which remained unified in their rejection, typically shared an antipathy to rules that would subject their activities in space to international law. In the United States, President Car­ter’s favorable attitude ­toward the treaty was replaced by Ronald Reagan’s negative one ­a fter he became president in 1981. The ensuing de­ cades, which saw only modest innovations in lunar exploration, brought increasing awareness of the possibilities of non-­state actions in space. THE UNITED STATES SPACE ACT The past de­cade of legislative and executive action in the United States has demonstrated the weakness of the Outer Space Treaty in ­actual regulation of activities in space.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

In fact, although the Obama team never stressed it and the press mostly missed it, the Congressional Budget Office projected that 16 million Americans who were going to get insurance under the new law by 2019 were going to get it from Medicaid—that is, poor people getting something for free—rather than through the exchanges. That was 50 percent more than the 10.6 million Americans receiving federal welfare when Ronald Reagan ran against welfare in 1980, or the 10.9 million getting welfare checks in 1997 when President Clinton compromised with the Republicans and reformed the program. Put simply, between the subsidies and Medicaid expansion, Obamacare was a massive income redistribution program providing health insurance to those who could not pay for it—something Democrats in a different time might have been proud, rather than afraid, to acknowledge.

The usually more moderate chief justice John Roberts offered the similar spin that approving the individual mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance would be like allowing a requirement that people had to buy cell phones so that they could reach first responders quickly in the event of any emergency. Justice Anthony Kennedy—a Ronald Reagan appointee thought likely be the swing vote in tight cases because he was seen as sitting in the middle between the Court’s Republican-appointee conservatives and Democratic-appointee liberals—complained to the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, that “you are changing the relationship of the individual to the government.”


pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

In 1979, Blue Plains underwent a $1 billion upgrade, which added new technologies such as BNR, or biological nutrient removal, which uses bacteria and other organisms to consume sewage. (It was such a success that over a hundred other treatment plants around the bay were also upgraded.) The clean water laws of the 1970s had clearly defined criteria, with deadlines and enforcement penalties spelled out. But in 1981, Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of deregulation and a massive reduction in funding for the EPA. Under Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, and his EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, regulatory oversight was sharply curtailed, and the EPA relied on industry to voluntarily police itself—in what has been called a “grand experiment.”

But since then, the nation’s attention has drited, and many important hydrologic lessons have been forgotten or no longer apply. Laws designed to protect drinking supplies have become outdated, and the agencies responsible for enforcing them have been marginalized. Since 1981 (at least), when President Ronald Reagan named James Watt as his secretary of the interior and Anne Gorsuch as his administrator of the EPA—both of whom were antiregulation and business-friendly—presidential administrations of both parties have weakened environmental protections. The EPA has been underfunded, politicized, and demoralized.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

Globally, the ‘free market’ Washington Consensus was barely contested throughout the 1990s. The financial crash of 2008 and the epochal economic crisis it triggered discredited that orthodoxy, which was seen to have failed in the most spectacular and destructive fashion. A model of capitalism that Thatcher had borrowed from the Chilean dictator General Pinochet – and, along with Ronald Reagan, came to symbolize – was only rescued from collapse by the largest state intervention in history. That didn’t stop governments across the western world, including David Cameron’s Tory-led coalition in Britain, from using the crisis to try to reconstruct and entrench it further through austerity and yet more far-reaching privatization.

These were the Russian visitors with the unmistakable calling cards, members of NTS, the CIA-backed Russian émigré organization once described by Yuri Andropov, the one-time KGB chief and Soviet party leader, as ‘enemy number one’. Their host was the NTS’s man in London, George Miller, who in the early 1980s had organized a bizarre CIA-financed demonstration in Moscow in collaboration with Brian Crozier – the freelance MI6 agent and confidant of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and CIA director Bill Casey. Crozier arranged the cash subsidy directly with Casey. Miller provided eight days’ ‘training’ in a London ‘safe house’ for the two young Tories who went to the Soviet Union to stage an anti-peace-movement stunt.58 In October 1990, fresh from his propaganda successes in the Scargill Affair, Miller travelled to the Ukraine with David Prendergast and Neil Greatrex of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and Eric Hammond of the maverick right-wing electricians’ union to attend what would become the founding congress of the breakaway ‘independent’ Soviet miners’ union in the mining town of Donetsk.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The interest on credit cards, when they became widely available, could be deducted as well. 252 CHAPTER SEVEN Until 1986, that is. Congress passed a tax reform law that phased out the interest deduction on all forms of consumer borrowing except for mortgages. Wrapped up in the tax reform act that Ronald Reagan called the “second American revolution,” was a provision to end the long-standing interest deduction for nearly all types of consumer credit.136 Other features of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 received more attention at the time—the top marginal tax rate was dropped from 50 percent to 33 percent while the lowest tax rate increased from 15 percent to 18 percent— but leaving consumers only able to deduct the interest on their home borrowing, radically altered the terrain of consumer credit, transforming the relationship between home equity loans and other forms of consumer credit, as well as making debt absolutely more expensive.

Johnston Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley by Margaret Pugh O’Mara 378 SERIES LIST Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America by Zaragosa Vargas More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Meg Jacobs Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam by David Farber Defending America Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade by Donald T. Critchlow The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South by Matthew D. Lassiter White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution by Joseph Crespino The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles by Scott Kurashige Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War by Carl J.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

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

Since the term “capitalism” has acquired so many pejorative connotations over the years, it has recently become a fashion to speak of “free-market economics” instead; both are acceptable alternative terms for economic liberalism. It is evident that there are many possible interpretations of this rather broad definition of economic liberalism, ranging from the United States of Ronald Reagan and the Britain of Margaret Thatcher to the social democracies of Scandinavia and the relatively statist regimes in Mexico and India. All contemporary capitalist states have large public sectors, while most socialist states have permitted a degree of private economic activity. There has been considerable controversy over the point at which the public sector becomes large enough to disqualify a state as liberal.

The different branches of government were seen as avenues for the advancement of powerful ambitions, but the system of checks and balances would ensure that these ambitions canceled each other out and prevented the emergence of tyranny. An American politician could harbor ambitions to be a Caesar or a Napoleon, but the system would allow him or her to be no more than a Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan—hemmed in by powerful institutional constraints and political forces on all sides, and forced to realize their ambition by being the people’s “servant” rather than their master. The attempt of liberal politics in the Hobbes-Locke tradition to banish the desire for recognition from politics or to leave it constrained and impotent left many thinkers feeling quite uneasy.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Urban antiliberalism had deep roots in a simmering politics of race and neighborhood defensiveness that divided northern cities well before George Wallace began his first speaking tours in the Snowbelt, well before Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, well before the long, hot summers of Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit, and well before affirmative action and busing began to dominate the civil rights agenda. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Detroit whites fashioned a language of discontent directed against public officials, blacks, and liberal reformers who supported public housing and open housing. The rhetoric of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan was familiar to the whites who supported candidates such as Edward Jeffries, Albert Cobo, and Thomas Poindexter.19 The “silent majority” did not emerge de novo from the alleged failures of liberalism in the 1960s; it was not the unique product of the white rejection of the Great Society. Instead it was the culmination of more than two decades of simmering white discontent and extensive antiliberal political organization.

Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” in Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 254. 18. Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 77. Similar views pervade the scholarly and popular literature on the 1960s. See also Frederick F. Siegel, The Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), esp. 152215; Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York City (New York: Norton, 1990); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Edward G.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

He turned to the nation’s most accomplished shaper of economic policy, a man who’d been a civil servant under four presidents and played a crucial role in remaking the international financial system earlier in the decade, including at Nixon’s Camp David retreat during the summer of 1971. It was a personnel decision that would shape the world economy for decades to come—and help ensure Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 reelection campaign. Paul Adolph Volcker was a six-foot-seven giant of a man, hired for a giant job. Carter picked him to be Fed chair because, at a time when world financial markets were fast losing confidence in the U.S. economic system, Volcker, then president of the New York Fed, offered something no other candidate could: instant credibility.

CHAPTER 18: ESCAPE VELOCITY “I find the activism at the Fed right now a major turnoff”: Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, transcript of hearing, July 14, 2011, CQ Transcriptions. “I would fire him tomorrow”: Transcript of September 7, 2011, debate of Republican Presidential Candidates at Ronald Reagan Presidential Libary, Federal News Service. “The euro-area crisis has had more dramatic moments”: Speech by Mervyn King at the Mansion House, June 14, 2012, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/speech587.pdf. “The fact that we’re not in the euro area”: Mervyn King, Quarterly Inflation Report Q&A, May 16, 2012, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/inflationreport/conf120516.pdf.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

It was the SSMEs, which periodically blew up in ground tests, that we feared most. The Thiokol and NASA SRB engineers were buoyed when STS-3’s boosters returned with no O-rings damaged. It was full speed ahead with the shuttle program. And the program shifted into overdrive on July 4, 1982. It was then that President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady celebrated Independence Day at Edwards AFB by personally welcoming Ken Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield back from space after their successful STS-4 mission. Reagan called attention to the latest orbiter to join the shuttle fleet,Challenger. Fresh from the nearby Rockwell factory, that vehicle was mounted atop its 747 carrier aircraft ready to take off for Florida as soon as the president finished his comments.

Clearly her VIPs were her children and grandchildren. She spoke of her philosophy of life: “In your old age you will never regret the contract never signed, the trip never taken, the money never earned, but you will definitely regret it if your children turn out poorly because of neglect.” She used Ronald Reagan as an example. “He’s a wonderful man but he has four children who won’t speak to him.” Maybe she was giving us the unsolicited advice because she could see in our eyes how driven we were. If there was ever a collection of men vulnerable to neglecting their families, it was astronauts. We sat for tea and cookies and she told us stories about some of the people she had met and unusual places she had traveled.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

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

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

The one thing that the most successful politicians in recent decades have in common is their faith in Michael Young’s neologism. Margaret Thatcher regarded herself as a revolutionary meritocrat, engaged in an epochal struggle with languid establishmentarians in her own party and thuggish collectivists on the left. Ronald Reagan pronounced that ‘all Americans have the right to be judged on the sole basis of individual merit, and to go just as far as their dreams and hard work will take them’. Bill Clinton declared that ‘all Americans have not just a right but a solemn responsibility to rise as far as their God-given talents and determination can take them’, a formula reiterated by Barack Obama.1 Tony Blair repeatedly identified New Labour with meritocracy.2 David Cameron declared that Britain is an Aspiration Nation and that his government was on the side of ‘all those who work hard and want to get on.’3 Boris Johnson praised meritocracy for ‘allowing the right cornflakes to get to the top of the packet’.4 Such praise for meritocracy is hardly surprising: opinion polls repeatedly show that large majorities of people are deeply opposed to interfering with the meritocratic principle.

In Britain, Enoch Powell anticipated many of the themes of Brexit with his warnings against the European Union, rising immigration and a transnational elite that was willing to compromise British identity in pursuit of quick profits.6 In America, the radical right dreamed of sawing the Eastern Seaboard off and letting it float into the Atlantic Ocean. During Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan criss-crossed the country denouncing the idea that ‘a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves’. Richard Nixon condemned ‘feminine intellectuals’ who betrayed core American values. Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, aided by silver-tongued speech-writers such as William Safire and Pat Buchanan, launched a fusillade of alliterations against the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’, ‘pusillanimous pussyfooters’ and ‘hopeless hysterical hypochondriacs’.7 In 1995, the historian Christopher Lasch published The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, which argued that America’s elites were storing up trouble for the future.


pages: 605 words: 169,366

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

What’s more, he had no apparent desire to leave the world of private banking in which he had spent more than three decades; when he was first sounded out for the World Bank, he responded that he had no public-sector experience and no urge to acquire any. But Carter was determined to find somebody who, while acceptable to fellow Democrats, would pass muster with Republicans as well; the polls strongly suggested that the White House would soon be occupied by Ronald Reagan. In August 1980, McNamara traveled to California to persuade Clausen to think again, and two months later Carter announced the selection of this traditional banker to run an outfit that was a bank only in name.2 From the time Clausen took up the post in July 1981, the world’s premier spokesman on development was a newcomer to the subject.

Wolfowitz was part of this “Team B” exercise, and it delivered more than Bush had bargained for: A report that asserted that the Soviets were far more dangerous than the CIA believed, not least because they were building a new generation of weapons. In another premonition of the Iraq war, these claims of a sinister arms program turned out later to be false. But they were influential even so, serving as justification for Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup. Team B was not the only exercise in which Wolfowitz challenged establishment thinking. As a defense planner in Jimmy Carter’s Pentagon, Wolfowitz attended a seminar given by a young academic named Geoffrey Kemp who argued that the United States was insufficiently prepared for a Soviet invasion of the Persian Gulf.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

By 2006, as Musk and his SpaceX team were getting ready to fire off the first Falcon 1, things had gotten so bad that NASA began to consider whether it should shut the once glorious Ames down. The NASA director at the time was Michael Griffin, who had known Worden for decades. Both men had experience working on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during the Ronald Reagan years. Dubbed “Star Wars,” SDI proposed to fill space with a variety of futuristic weapons designed to take down enemy missiles before they could reach the United States. Like Worden, Griffin had a fondness for doing weird stuff in space and an appreciation of the Silicon Valley start-up ethos.

Markusic and Weeks flew from Alabama to Hawaii and then hopped aboard another plane and headed out to the middle of nowhere—to Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. The main hotel on Kwajalein looks like an army barracks, and that was where Markusic set down his luggage and stacks of management books. The rest of the surroundings were anything but Huntsville. Ronald Reagan–era military complexes and top secret weapons systems. Japanese pillboxes from World War II. Sharks. It was more of a scene than Markusic was prepared to deal with. “It was just a wild place,” he said. “I’m sitting there on the beach praying ‘Be one with nature. Be one with nature.’” Each day, Markusic and Weeks boarded a catamaran and sailed to Omelek, the island in the atoll where SpaceX had set up its operations and built a launchpad.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

My mother, the Sanskrit scholar, and I always enjoyed examining the definitions and philosophies behind Eastern and Western words, which often expose crucial differences between the ways of thinking embedded in these two cultures. The Sanskrit word vishvasa communicates trustworthiness and reliability. Another Sanskrit word is shraddha, which connotes a religious sense of faith, trust, and belief—but rather than a blind faith, it is a faith reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s famous line, “Trust but verify.” In any case, in both English and Sanskrit, trust, like so many words, is a Venn diagram with many overlapping meanings. In either context, for me, trust is a sacred responsibility. As a computer engineer, I find it helpful to express complex ideas and concepts according to the schemas or algorithms we would use if we were writing a computer program.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

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

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

Since then, the scale and complexity of IP law have exploded even as, with the rise of the information economy, the relative importance of IP-intensive industries has soared. From entertainment to software to pharmaceuticals, leading sectors of the US economy now operate in a much more densely regulated world than they did before the election of Ronald Reagan, which we usually think of as ushering in an era of deregulation. What did we get in return for this surge in regulation? II THE ELUSIVE BENEFITS OF THE IP REVOLUTION Of the various arguments that the advocates of the transformation of IP make, the utilitarian case for restrictions on competition in the production and sale of creative works and inventions is the most superficially powerful one.


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

It is no coincidence that the MIT $100,000 business plan competition, and dozens like it around the country, has a steadily growing number of entrants each year. Student-led entrepreneurial teams clamor to submit business plans in the hopes of winning a little seed money and a lot of notoriety. I can only conclude that, in the minds of the graduates of American business schools, it is always “morning in America” (thank you, Ronald Reagan) and that our entrepreneurial economy is forever a city on a shining hill (thank you, John Winthrop), even when there is economic upheaval. In fact, now more than ever, the entrepreneurial economy is an appealing destination for top talent around the world. IT’S NOT (PRIMARILY) ABOUT THE MONEY One thing you do not hear these graduates talk about, at least not directly, is the money.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts…With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure.’162 In his younger days on the Cypherpunks mailing list, Szabo was outspoken and strongly libertarian. He used to attend libertarian meetings in the early 1990s. On his website he has a link to famous Ronald Reagan quotes. He seemed to soften a little with age, but from 2007 he began to grow vocal again. He wrote a piece, entitled ‘Ten ways to make a political difference’.163 Most importantly, ‘Be prepared to vote with your feet,’ he suggested. ‘Add interstate and international diversity to your personal and business networks’ so that if you want to move somewhere else, ‘the exit costs will be low…Grow interpolitical roots so that no single polity can chop down your tree’.


pages: 206 words: 70,924

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

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

In addition to his legacy as one of the originators of the CAPM, Treynor inspired another Nobel Laureate in a way remarkably similar to the inspiration that Harry Markowitz offered William Sharpe. He was hired by Merrill Lynch in 1966 by Donald Regan, who would eventually go on to become the USA’s 66th Secretary of the Treasury and then President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in the 1980s. Before moving from Arthur D. Little, Treynor overlapped there with a young Fischer Black for a year. His colleague Black continued the research agenda he began with Treynor after the latter’s departure, and co-authored three academic papers with Treynor in 1972, 1973, and 1976.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

The exception to that rule is at the top, where a single player can have the power to change the system’s goal. I have watched in wonder as—only very occasionally—a new leader in an organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in, enunciates a new goal, and swings hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly intelligent, rational people off in a new direction. That’s what Ronald Reagan did, and we watched it happen. Not long before he came to office, a president could say “Ask not what government can do for you, ask what you can do for the government,” and no one even laughed. Reagan said over and over, the goal is not to get the people to help the government and not to get government to help the people, but to get government off our backs.


Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Howard Zinn, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan

By the late 1960s much of the public was opposed to the war on principled grounds, unlike elite sectors, who kept largely to “pragmatic” objections of cost (to us). This component of the “crisis of democracy” was considered severe enough to merit a special designation—the “Vietnam syndrome,” a disease with such symptoms as dislike for war crimes and atrocities. When Ronald Reagan sought to emulate Kennedy in the first weeks of his term, preparing the ground for a direct attack on “aggressive Communism” throughout Central America, the media went along as usual, but public protest quickly induced the Administration to back down in fear that its more central programs would be prejudiced; press critique of Administration fabrications followed some months later.


pages: 257 words: 68,383

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick

Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, John Snow's cholera map, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley

No matter how good water-quality standards are—and we’ve seen that they are, at best, full of loopholes for bottled water—trouble is bound to arise if we don’t regularly test and monitor. And we don’t. The deeper we look into how bottled water is tested and monitored, the more concerned we should be. Contaminated by Crickets You won’t find what you don’t look for. As Ronald Reagan used to say with regard to arms control negotiations, “Doveryai, no proveryai,” or “Trust, but verify.” This maxim holds true for arms control and it holds true for contaminants in water. At first glance, there seem to be far fewer problems with bottled water quality in the United States and elsewhere than with the quality of tap water.


pages: 282 words: 69,481

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Governor Jerry Brown, whose term preceded Deukmejian’s, strongly advocated transportation choice and opposed bigger freeways. Yet “more than twice as many new miles of freeways were built during the eight years of the ‘antifreeway’ Brown administration . . . as during the ‘profreeway’ Deukmejian administration.” During this period in California, the cost of freeway widening skyrocketed during the 1960s when Ronald Reagan was elected governor and continued to be pro-hibitively high during the Brown and Deukmejian administrations. Deukmejian widened fewer freeways than Brown not because he opposed bigger freeways and Brown supported them—indeed, the opposite was the case. Instead, freeway widening was determined by finances, not ideology.


pages: 222 words: 70,559

The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself-and Profit-from the Coming Energy Crisis by Stephen Leeb, Donna Leeb

Alan Greenspan, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, currency risk, diversified portfolio, electricity market, fixed income, government statistician, guns versus butter model, hydrogen economy, income per capita, index fund, low interest rates, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit motive, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond

If you’re made of tougher stuff, a construction worker or a corporate executive, you know that it’s oil that makes the world go round. This dichotomy was perhaps best symbolized by the actions of two presidents. Jimmy Carter, he of the professorial-like cardigan sweaters, installed solar panels in the White House. Ronald Reagan, the cowboy president, ripped them out. Today, however, the issue of energy alternatives is catching up with us. We’re running out of time, and as oil production peaks, we no longer will have the luxury of treating alternative fuels as a matter of politics or style or as something we can leave for a later generation.


pages: 235 words: 65,885

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Corporate leaders backing the Republicans had managed to make common cause with the burgeoning Christian fundamentalist movement and the anti-Communist fringe; Nixon had perfected the strategy of bringing social conservatives from the old Confederacy into the Republican Party; and the party had found its perfect pitchman — a former movie actor and ex-spokesman for General Electric. Ronald Reagan and the Republican PR machine pushed all of the right buttons, even resorting to an “October surprise” to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis to their benefit. Reagan and George H. W. Bush (who, during the mid-1980s, may have been the de facto president) were the last US leaders of the World War II generation, their cohort’s final gift to the nation.


The Data Journalism Handbook by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business intelligence, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, eurozone crisis, fail fast, Firefox, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, game design, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Julian Assange, linked data, machine readable, moral hazard, MVC pattern, New Journalism, openstreetmap, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, social graph, Solyndra, SPARQL, text mining, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Data visualizations—and the aesthetic associations they engender—can even become cultural touchstones, such as the representation of deep political divisions in the United States after the 2000 and 2004 elections, when “red” Republican-held states filled the heartland and “blue” Democratic states clustered in the Northeast and far West. Never mind that in the US media before 2000, the main broadcast networks had freely switched between red and blue to represent each party, some even choosing to alternate every four years. Thus some Americans’ memories of Ronald Reagan’s epic 49-state “blue” landslide victory for the Republicans in 1984. But for every graphic that engenders a visual cliché, another comes along to provide powerful factual testimony, such as The New York Times’ 2006 map that used differently sized circles to show where hundreds of thousands of evacuees from New Orleans were now living, strewn across the continent by a mixture of personal connections and relocation programs.


pages: 207 words: 64,598

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

The writer who put in the nose-scratching detail might have responded, “Look, I spent hours with that guy and I saw him scratch his nose more than once.” Fine, but that doesn’t change the way the detail was applied, as mechanical colorization. Even more problematic is when the nonfiction author takes us into the subjects’ minds. Remember the justifiable flak Edmund Morris received when he wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan that included an interior monologue of young Ron sitting on a park bench. It’s not that difficult to invent (i.e., picture in the mind’s eye) shallow scenes and glibly play out possible interior monologues in your head: the fact that you can imagine something clearly doesn’t make it validly literary.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Bush or Barack Obama. In 1980, the United States was the world’s largest creditor nation. By 1987, it was the world’s largest debtor nation, with a trade imbalance that soared to $170 billion. Republicans will blame the Democratic Congress of that period. Democrats will counter that President Ronald Reagan never once presented the Congress with a balanced budget. Neither side is wrong. Successive presidents and Congresses of both parties have allowed government spending, especially on entitlements, to spiral out of control. America can recover its strength. Its economy will be the world’s largest for years to come, and access to American consumers will remain a powerful attraction for the economies of many established and emerging states.


pages: 274 words: 70,481

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

said Al, a triumphant glint in his eye. “Never heard of him!” Judy agreed. “He’s a psychologist,” I said. I exhaled to indicate that I felt the same way he presumably did about psychologists. Al pointed toward a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeb Bush, as if to say, “Those are men I have heard of!” “So, that list . . . ?” said Al. He looked suddenly intrigued. “Go ahead,” he said. “Let’s do it.” “Okay,” I said. I pulled it out of my pocket. “Are you sure?” “Yeah, let’s do it.” “Okay.


pages: 255 words: 68,829

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

Expertise and experience no longer are primary values. What counts is the ability to join in projects. 33. Another remarkable example of euphemism. 34. Delaporte, “Le clin deuil de France Telecom à ses salariés.” 8. AT SCHOOL WITH POWERPOINT? 1. Who inspired the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. 2. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1992. 3. “The main aim of the framework is to support Member States in further developing their educational and training systems. These systems should better provide the means for all citizens to realize their potentials, as well as ensure sustainable economic prosperity and employability.”


pages: 212 words: 70,224

How to Retire the Cheapskate Way by Jeff Yeager

asset allocation, car-free, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, FedEx blackjack story, financial independence, fixed income, Pepto Bismol, pez dispenser, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Zipcar

Roosevelt) “We’re entering an age when average Americans will live longer and live more productive lives. And these amendments adjust to that progress. The changes in this legislation will allow Social Security to age as gracefully as all of us hope to do ourselves, without becoming an overwhelming burden on generations still to come.” (Ronald Reagan, signing the Social Security Amendments of 1983) “They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program.” (George W. Bush) “In 2016 we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2033 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted and there will be enough money to pay only about 75 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.


pages: 238 words: 68,914

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

, served as ambassador to China, headed the CIA, and eventually rose to the presidency. Should anyone begrudge him his rich man’s toy, his high-speed cigarette boat? When I thought about it, much of my family was settled into politics and finance. My uncle ran for president the year I turned ten. He lost to Ronald Reagan in the primaries and served as Reagan’s vice president for the next eight years, and then as the president for the following four. Two of his sons, who later got into politics, were in real estate and oil. But I came from a different branch of the family. My father, also Jonathan, a younger brother of the first President Bush, was the showman of the family.


pages: 197 words: 67,764

The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song by Dylan Jones

Donald Trump, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

Because if, with his voice, he had once been able to weaponise sadness, with this kind of tabloid behaviour all he had managed to do was encourage pity. In 1981, for instance, he became embroiled in such a heated argument with a member of the Indonesian government on a long-haul flight that he promised to ‘call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta’. After his years of substance abuse, it perhaps wasn’t any great surprise that Campbell would eventually find religion – obviously such a well-worn stepping stone on the Nashville path to redemption – and because of this he developed some particularly unsavoury opinions, notably involving the pro-life movement.


Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

gentrification, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, microapartment, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

Jasmine's strong features buckle with fright and my finger pushes the shutter button and a portrait of Jasmine is created: a portrait that will be seen by her grandchildren and the one that they will remember her by--a portrait of Jasmine, facing the world as she does at this point in her life, utterly frightened by a monster entirely of her own carving. 5 My memories begin with Ronald Reagan--thoughts and ideas and remembrances like an explosion of white birds released upon the coronation of the king. Of the times before Reagan I remember little: fleeting, ghostly webs of images, the strange, undeniably dreamlike phantasms of a gray era: rocks as pets . . . underwear you ate . . . rings that told you how you felt.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

The Falklands was Britain as Fortinbras, who will ‘find quarrel in a straw/ When honour’s at the stake’. It was not Britain as Hamlet, agonized by existential questions of purpose and meaning. And there was no one else to play the required role of invader – even the ramping up of the Soviet threat by Ronald Reagan and Thatcher was curiously ineffective, not least because the danger of nuclear war was too hugely existential to serve as a microcosmic metaphor. The Falklands War, for all its grotesque elements, might have been a moment of release, a way of getting all the dark fantasies of invasion and heroic resistance out of England’s system once and for all: this time we really were invaded by Nazis and we won.


They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000) by Howard Rheingold

Ayatollah Khomeini, clockwork universe, Easter island, fudge factor, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, junk bonds, Kula ring, Lao Tzu, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, The Home Computer Revolution, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

When you have to tell somebody (or yourself) that doing nothing is the most significant option from a range of alternatives, don't forget to wei-wu-wei. qualunquismo (Italian) Attitude of indifference to political and social is.wes. [noun] Many people are under the impression that the president of the United States is elected by a majority of qualified voters. In fact, only 29 percent of the eligible voters voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. These figures mean that the "landslide victory" of 1984 was created by a small proportion of the population. There is no conspiracy, except a conspiracy of ignorance, that determines whether or not a few people determine how everybody is governed. This growing indifference to the political process might become the most deadly political threat of the 20th century.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

When Donald Trump, Jr., was quoted as saying “A border wall is like a zoo fence protecting you from the animals,” the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota retorted, “The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind.” In the recent past, Washington was a friendlier place. President Ronald Reagan used to invite both Democrats and Republicans to the White House for drinks, “just to tell jokes.”43 Democrats and Republicans used to carpool from their hometowns to D.C., driving all night and taking turns at the wheel. “We’d argue like hell on the floor of the House of Representatives,” said Dan Rostenkowski, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, “but we were out playing golf that night.”43 When Reagan called Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill after a particularly heated exchange, Tip said, “Old buddy, that’s politics—after six o’clock we can be friends.”44 That kind of Congress got things done.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

Their solution: the government should end banking as we know it. A government ban on banks sounds like a lefty dream. But lots of economists who love the free market and are wary of government intervention have argued for forcing private banks out of the business of creating money. Milton Friedman, whose crusade for free markets inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, suggested ending banking as we know it. John Cochrane, a contemporary economist at the (conservative) Hoover Institution and (libertarian) Cato Institute, has called banks a “huge, crony-capitalist nightmare.” Banks are private companies that create and destroy a public resource—money.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But 1986 was also the high point of Tory Europeanism, the year of the Single European Act, which set Europe on the path to a single market, and was driven and crafted by Margaret Thatcher and her allies. Before this point, the crusade for ‘free markets’ was an ideological rallying cry for the New Right backers of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher – a soaring ambition that could only be brought to fruition by brave leaders in their mould. Now it would become a technocratic and regulatory project, overseen by bureaucrats and lawyers. With the demise of state socialism three years later, capitalism no longer needed the Conservative Party.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

The mindfulness movement took shape under neoliberal leadership. It began in 1979 with the founding of Kabat- Zinn’s Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This was the same year that Margaret Thatcher became the prime minister of the UK, to be joined soon after by Ronald Reagan as US president. Both advanced a neoliberal program — “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul,” Thatcher said.5 Could mindfulness be doing something similar, rewiring us to serve the requirements of neoliberalism? The mindfulness industry’s market-friendliness should make us suspicious.


ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet by Ecovillage 1001 Ways to Heal the Planet-Triarchy Press Ltd (2015)

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, do what you love, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, intentional community, land tenure, low interest rates, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, young professional

They’re a free, privileged scholar class that can study what they want. They’re like young princelings. It’s really been an upscale movement, in a way, except for when it broke through. And when it broke through was when it was the most revolutionary and really scared the Establishment, because hippies bond across cultural, religious, and class lines.” Ronald Reagan described a hippie as a person who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheeta”. Even today popular culture stereotypes hippies as long-haired, unwashed, unkempt drug users with leftist political leanings. Those who moved to The Farm did so because of shared values and visions.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

“I remember the last time Laura moved her fingers and hands and feet and legs. Now she doesn’t feel any kisses, doesn’t feel any hugs, doesn’t feel anything.”37 Through their work, Lightner and Lamb were able to dramatically shift the discussion around drunk driving in the United States. Under pressure from MADD and associated groups, President Ronald Reagan established a commission on drunk driving and in 1984 compelled states to raise the legal drinking age to twenty-one. In many ways, the work remains unfinished. MADD never successfully took on the primacy of the automobile in American life and the lack of practical alternatives to driving in much of the United States.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

But his day job was flackery in the private sector, having begun a 17-year stint at Edelman in 1989. Although Dach’s politics were far to the left of Scott’s, Dach was no stranger to joining ranks with those who held different values. At Edelman, he had worked hand in hand with Michael Deaver, who’d molded Ronald Reagan’s political persona. Dach and Scott were also kindred spirits in enough ways that they came to appreciate one another. “I’m a troublemaker, and he’s a troublemaker,” Dach said. “He’s sarcastic, and I’m sarcastic. He’d give me shit, and I’d give him—you know, respectful shit.” Although there was a playful element to all of this, Dach became an asset in no small part because he would shoot straight with Scott in ways that some at Walmart wouldn’t.


pages: 216 words: 70,341

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Ken Thompson, Ronald Reagan

More and more of the classes he took addressed such pressing social issues as racism and world hunger and inequities in the distribution of wealth. But despite his aversion to money and conspicuous consumption, Chris’s political leanings could not be described as liberal. Indeed, he delighted in ridiculing the policies of the Democratic Party and was a vocal admirer of Ronald Reagan. At Emory he went so far as to co-found a College Republican Club. Chris’s seemingly anomalous political positions were perhaps best summed up by Thoreau’s declaration in “Civil Disobedience”: “I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least.’” Beyond that his views were not easily characterized.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

From the beginning, missile defense—basically anti-aircraft on steroids—has long been a powder keg of controversy between the United States and Russia. Before exploring cables detailing US-Russian discussions on the subject, some background is required on why missile defense both rattles Russia and is considered destabilizing to the nuclear-weapons balance. In 1983 President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, presciently ridiculed as “Star Wars” at the time because it sounded like as much of a fantasy as it does to this day. Patriot missiles were deployed in the Middle East during the first Gulf War and, while they achieved little success, the idea of missile defense, at least against smaller nuclear arsenals, caught on.

The WikiLeaks cables, in both their content and timing, reveal what the US was orchestrating in order to attempt to control the events unfolding on the ground. To regain control of the situation, on May 6, 2004, George W. Bush appointed John Negroponte as the first US ambassador to Iraq, where he served until 2005. Negroponte quickly brought in retired colonel James Steele, whom he had worked with closely when Negroponte was Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras during the early 1980s. Negroponte’s and Steele’s covert actions in mobilizing death squads and conducting operations that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths across Central America are now well documented, including their extreme abuses of human rights.4 When it became clear to the Bush administration that it was rapidly losing control of Iraq, these two men were placed in Baghdad to resume their classic colonial strategy of divide and conquer, otherwise referred to as “counter-insurgency.”5 Less than two years after their implementation by Negroponte and Steele, death squads were ravaging and terrorizing Baghdad on a daily basis.6 Iraqis living in the capital city were seeing the reality of sectarian-based civil war by the spring of 2006.7 As a result of the death squads, sectarian violence exploded.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Be prepared for extreme weather, as Baikonur can reach –40°F (–40°C) in winter and 113°F (45°C) in summer. 45.9650000 63.305000 KYRGYZSTAN Kyrgyz National History Museum BISHKEK Kyrgyzstan’s National History Museum is probably the only place in the world where you can find a ceiling mural of a naked Nazi in a horned helmet emerging from a wall of flames astride a demonic horse. It is definitely the only place you’ll see a mural of Ronald Reagan in a skull mask, American flag T-shirt, and khaki cowboy hat riding a Pershing missile in front of a bunch of antinuclear demonstrators. The museum, established in 1927, contains Kyrgyzstani cultural relics dating back to the Stone Age, such as armor, jewelry, coins, and weapons. The second and third floors became shrines to the legacy of the Soviet Union.

Scavenged and sun-bleached, they are a rare visual reminder of Cuba’s presence in Grenada from 1979 to 1983. Pearls Airport, the island’s first airstrip, was replaced by Maurice Bishop International Airport in 1984. The construction of the newer airport was a catalyst for the US invasion of Grenada: Ronald Reagan cited its extralong, military-aircraft–friendly runway as evidence that Cuba and the USSR planned to fly in a stockpile of weapons and endanger American citizens. It is now understood that the airport was built solely for civilian aircraft. Pearls Airport and its two Soviet planes were abandoned following the US invasion in 1983.


pages: 626 words: 181,434

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Conway, John von Neumann, language acquisition, mandelbrot fractal, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publish or perish, random walk, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, Turing machine

And yet, for such readers, I would still have numerous questions, such as the following:How is it determined exactly how many dollops (or fractional dollops) of Consciousness get attached to a given physical entity? Where are these dollops stored in the meantime? In other words, where is the Central Consciousness Bank? Once a certain portion of Consciousness has been dished out to a recipient entity (Ronald Reagan, a chess-playing computer, a cockroach, a sperm, a sunflower, a thermostat, a leaf pile, a stone, the city of Cairo), is it a permanent allotment, or is the size of the allotment variable, depending on what physical events take place involving the recipient? If the recipient is in some way altered, does its allotment (or part of it) revert to the Central Consciousness Bank, or does it just float around forevermore, no longer attached to a physical anchor?

What about people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — are they still “just as Conscious” as they always were, until the moment of their death? What makes something be “the same entity” over long periods of time, anyway? Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist? And what about Consciousness for fetuses (or for their growing brains, even when they consist of just two neurons)?


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Not until the end of the Cold War and the adolescence of the Internet (yet another Department of Defense project) were we able to get our hands on the coolest gadgets ahead of the generals. By then, firms that had gotten started building aircraft had long since moved on to missiles, spy satellites, and spaceships. George Lucas’s Star Wars had less of an impact on California’s fortunes than did Ronald Reagan’s real-world remake a few years later. You can see their legacy along the southern border of LAX, where blue-collar suburb El Segundo boasts installations of Hughes, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, and the headquarters of DirecTV (a Hughes spin-off). The first neighborhood adjacent to the airport, Westchester, was built during the war years to house Hughes employees.

In the afternoons, passengers could hear their own footfalls echoing off the vaulted ceiling of Eero Saarinen’s main terminal. And still no one had thought to make any provisions for what should and what shouldn’t be built beyond the perimeter, because even in the year following Sputnik, no one could foresee what would happen next: Ronald Reagan’s blank checks for Star Wars and the contractors who cashed them would conspire to plow under the hillsides and erect the prototypical edge cities that redefined our urban landscapes. Dulles would be the anchor. The airport’s saving grace was its size, nearly four times the landmass of LAX, and more than all of greater LA’s airports combined.


pages: 564 words: 182,946

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

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

The notion of ‘convergence’ had originally, in the 1960s, been intended as a kind of slow and subtle route to self-determination for all Germans, but by the 1980s the means had become all, and the end had been largely forgotten. The only major political figure to challenge this increasingly relaxed attitude towards the Wall was the same man who, in 1978, had attracted 396 / THE BERLIN WALL the attention of the Stasi observers at Checkpoint Charlie: Ronald Reagan. Now more than half-way through his second term as president of the United States, the 76-year-old had lost none of his fierce and occasionally undiplomatic anti-Communist drive. In June 1987 he arrived in West Berlin to join the city’s 750th-anniversary celebrations. ‘General Secretary Gorbachev,’ Reagan thundered in front of the Brandenburg Gate, ‘if you seek peace-if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe-if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate, Mr Gorbachev, open this gate.

On 2 May, the Hungarian government, now in the hands of pluralistically minded reform Communists, astonished the world by beginning to dismantle their hitherto fortified border with Austria. President George H.W. Bush, on a visit to West Germany, was presented with piece of barbed wire from Hungary’s demolished border fence. ‘Let Berlin be next,’ Ronald Reagan’s successor proclaimed. The results of the Hungarians’ action were sensational. It took a while for the significance of the change to sink in, but by 1 July more than 25,000 East Germans who had decided to ‘vacation’ in Hungary, somehow ended up in Austria. Erich Honecker’s subjects had found a way around his Maginot Line.


pages: 812 words: 180,057

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

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

He held his position as commander of American forces in the Gulf War because of Powell. When the post of commander of Central Command (Centcom), the American military headquarters for the Middle East, opened up in 1988, it was, according to a fairly recent tradition, the Navy’s “turn” to fill it. But Powell, by then Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, believed that the position should go to someone familiar with ground forces—that is, from the Army or Marine Corps—rather than an admiral. He intervened with his old friend and mentor Frank Carlucci, then secretary of defense. “And that,” Powell stated, “is how Norm Schwarzkopf came to obtain the command that would propel him into history.”

., Inner Circles: How America Changed the World (Warner, 1992), 19. Over the next three decades, Haig would continue to display a knack for showing up in the middle of interesting situations, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to the White House staff during the Watergate crisis and then again during the hectic aftermath of the near assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. “one man who could read my thoughts”: William Dean with William Worden, General Dean’s Story (Viking, 1954), 25. “You have to remember”: Dean, General Dean’s Story, 145. “I didn’t see any generals”: Lewis Sorley, Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command (University Press of Kansas, 1998), 97.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

It was convenient, but not much more than that until some other unintended consequence came to be mixed into it. Now Phase Two, the Internet. It had been set up as a resilient military communication network device, developed by a research unit of the Department of Defense called DARPA and got a boost the days when Ronald Reagan was obsessed with the Soviets. It was meant to allow the United States to survive a generalized military attack. Great idea, but add the personal computer plus Internet and we get social networks, broken marriages, a rise in nerdiness, the ability for a post-Soviet person with social difficulties to find a matching spouse.

You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others. Even Napoleon was personally exposed to risks; his showing up during a battle was the equivalent of adding twenty-five thousand troops. Churchill showed an impressive amount of physical courage. They were in it; they believed in it.


pages: 645 words: 190,680

The Taking of Getty Oil: Pennzoil, Texaco, and the Takeover Battle That Made History by Steve Coll

business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, financial innovation, interchangeable parts, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, jitney, North Sea oil, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks

The trouble was that no one on the Pennzoil board knew Gordon personally, except perhaps by reputation, and so Liedtke was concerned that he would have to work through Gordon’s lawyers, which he did not want to do. One of Pennzoil’s directors, William Wilson, who was the American ambassador to the Vatican and a longtime California friend of Ronald Reagan, told Liedtke that he might be able to reach Gordon through a friend of a friend in San Francisco. On Tuesday, when the Pennzoil offer was announced, Wilson went to work on the telephone. Just before noon the next day, Liedtke received a message at Pennzoil headquarters in Houston that Gordon would be willing to take his call.

Texaco, 423–424, 427–435, 451 in Pickens takeover meeting, 116 in self-tender proposal, 269–273 in sole trusteeship challenge, 87–100 in standstill agreement, 215–224 in supermajority plan, 171–178, 182–185 in takeover press release preparations, 324, 327 Tara Getty lawsuit and, 233–237 ultimatum proposal and, 192 Wulff study and, 110, 111 Woodhouse, Tom, 25, 64 at emergency takeover directors meeting, 288 Goldman study and, 102–106 in handcuffs issue, 165–166 LBO proposal and, 142, 143, 153–168 in Liedtke/Getty summit, 276 in London meetings, 198–209 in Pennzoil takeover attempt, 266 Siegel and, 213–215 in supermajority plan, 172–178 in Texaco negotiations, 362, 363, 367 Wulff, Kurt, 53, 109–111, 113, 127, 136, 148 Xerox, 55 Zapata Petroleum, 245 About the Author Steve Coll is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and the bestselling author of seven books. Previously he served as president of the New America Foundation and worked for two decades at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a four-part series on the Securities and Exchange Commission during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The award-winning series became the basis for Eagle on the Street (1991), coauthored with David A. Vise. Coll’s other books include New York Times Notable Book The Deal of the Century (1998); Ghost Wars (2004), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; The Bin Ladens (2009), winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and Private Empire (2012), winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

The 1980s have been a banner decade in the dissemination of the Silicon Valley myth. That year Steve Jobs of Apple appeared on the cover of Time as part of a story on Valley entrepreneurship. Pac-Man also made a huge splash, as Atari became one of the colloquialisms of the era. In his State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan mentioned the role of the electronics industry—notably the Valley—in maintaining America’s competitive edge against foreign economic threats. Silicon Valley, which had once chafed at not being recognized for its importance, now found itself the center of world attention—to its chagrin. Now, every bad quarterly earnings, every inadequate product, every scandal became front-page news.

There was also the respect given to the Valley’s leaders whenever they went east to talk to the Wall Street boys or to Congress, or the attention given to every utterance of one of the Valley’s congressmen, Ed Zschau, founder and former president of Systems Industries. It was apparent, too, in the enormous influence David Packard had among the world’s leaders at the annual Bohemian Club outings, on the Trilateral Commission, in Ronald Reagan’s kitchen cabinet, and during the visit by the Queen of England. The success of Silicon Valley was also apparent in the many electronics trade shows, like the Western Computer Conference, the SemiCon shows, the Consumer Electronics Show (which drew everyone from computer companies to porn film distributors), and Comdex, the computer distributors show.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

After 9/11, however, the nation-building fiascos in Afghanistan and, most critically, in Iraq greatly tarnished the perceived effectiveness and legitimacy of American democracy-promotion efforts.41 In the years before COVID-19, however, the biggest challenges to America’s ability to stand up for democracy around the world—and serve as a “shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say—were much closer to home. Even before Donald Trump became president, hyperpartisanship, polarization, growing inequality, and the outsized role of money in politics had made the nation increasingly unrepresentative and dysfunctional. Trump’s win in 2016 made this all the more apparent.

In November 2020, Laurie Garrett, the veteran American global public health expert who had warned of a global pandemic since the mid-1990s, observed that throughout her career she had made one catastrophic analytical mistake. In all of the scenario planning exercises she designed and took part in, she never once considered the possibility that the White House would be the primary source of obstruction and disinformation. She understood that they might be ill-prepared and slow to respond, as Ronald Reagan was during the AIDS epidemic, but not that the president would be an active saboteur.25 Trump’s denialism and public statements full of disinformation convinced tens of millions of Americans that COVID-19 was not a serious disease, even as the infection rate and death toll spiraled to record highs.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The era may have seen the rise of yuppies, power-dressing and the creed of ‘greed is good’, as articulated by Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street, but for many the experience was very different. It was a decade that started and ended with devastating recessions, and which seemed to lurch from one apocalyptic fear to another: the Cold War rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher and American president Ronald Reagan was matched by dire warnings about environmental destruction – whether centred on acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer or global warming – while the arrival of AIDS threatened a health crisis of proportions not seen for decades. For those who came of age in the early Thatcher years, those born in or around 1960, these were not reassuring times.

Daniel Finkelstein (1997) In August 1992, during John Major’s glorious summer between the landslide election vote and the disaster of Black Wednesday, nineteen Tories, both MPs and officials from Conservative Central Office, flew out to America to attend the National Convention of the Republican Party in Houston, Texas. There was something of a valedictory tone to the gathering, with a final appearance by Richard Nixon, the most controversial president of recent times, and the last-ever speech by Ronald Reagan, the man who had – with Margaret Thatcher – dominated western politics in the previous decade. Many feared that it might also prove a farewell for the incumbent president. With an election just ten weeks away, George Bush was trailing in the opinion polls, some considerable distance behind his younger, more charismatic Democrat rival, Bill Clinton.

After their dreadful drubbing in the 1993 election, the Canadian Conservatives had staged a comeback in the middle of the decade by adopting the slogan ‘the common sense revolution’, repositioning themselves as the party of low taxation and individual responsibility, fighting the incompetent bureaucracy of government. The policies were largely drawn from the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and resulted in a major victory in the Ontario election of 1995. Now, having tried out various options including ‘kitchen sink Conservatism’ and ‘compassionate Conservatism’, Hague revived the same slogan. By experimenting with the inclusive New Labour model, and accepting the social and cultural changes in the country, he had failed to make any headway, and he felt that something new was needed.


Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series) by Noam Chomsky

active measures, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, centre right, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, information security, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, public intellectual, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman

It began to appear, quite visibly, in the late 1960s. In fact, it was always reasonably clear. I recall personal incidents reflecting this antagonism in 1953, when I lived for a time in a kibbutz in Israel. Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds 222 for Ronald Reagan, according to electoral analyses here. The leadership is particularly disliked. While 30% of the electorate support the Alignment, only 4% support its leader, Shimon Peres, “a shocking attitude.” Among Oriental Jewish workers from the development towns who are employed in the kibbutzim, 70% voted for Likud, as compared with a 60% Likud vote in the Oriental community as a whole, a reflection of the “servant-master” relation between the Oriental Jewish proletariat and “the two socialist institutions that serve as the showwindow of the Labor party,” the Histadrut and the kibbutzim.

It is probable that the occasional show of displeasure by the President was one of the means selected to solve the problem of the shaky domestic consensus. Knowledgeable Israeli observers did not take this display very seriously—nor should they, as long as the diplomatic support is steady and aid continues to flow. “Ronald Reagan played his Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Peace for Galilee 376 part well,” the Labor Party journal Davar wrote, commenting on the visit to the U.S. by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that ended with a photograph at the White House with Reagan looking somber instead of smiling at his guest, a symbolic “message” that elicited much commentary by Washington watchers in the U.S. media—the counterpart of Kreminologists who pore over pictures of Soviet rulers to try to determine who is in favor today.

“Beirut’s moderate Moslems pleaded for some response from Washington.” The Prime Minister said: “We are waiting, the whole world is waiting.” “The Moslem leadership was infuriated... Saeb Salaam, the elder statesman who had worked closely with the United States on the plan that led to the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, sent President Ronald Reagan a personal letter, saying, ‘We urge you to halt the Israeli army and to protect the population of Beirut’.” Both Salam and Prime Minister Wazzan stated that Washington had assured them “that Israel would not invade West Beirut and would not bother Palestinians in the refugee camps once Yasser Arafat and his forces had left Beirut,”49 assurances that they apparently believed, with startling naivete.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Biases / The results are unequivocal: Just as in group deliberation, investors in a market are subject to predictable heuristics and biases. For example, psychologists have found that people overestimate the likelihood that their own preferred candidate will win an election, a form of optimistic bias.63 At a certain point in the 1980 campaign, 87 percent of Jimmy Carter’s supporters believed that he would win, and 80 percent of Ronald Reagan’s supporters believed that their candidate would win.64 Obviously, at least one side greatly overestimated its candidate’s probability of victory (Carter’s, as it happened). Is it shocking to hear that some gamblers in New York are particularly likely to bet on the New York Yankees?65 IEM traders show the same bias.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Preposterous was also the main reaction of the audience at Columbia University’s venerable Russian Institute after the presentation delivered by Randall Collins in spring 1980. The outsider sociologist calmly told the gathering of Sovietologists that, according to his mathematical model, the dark object of their professional interests would disappear in their lifetime. America was still reeling from Vietnam, economic stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the presidency on the claim that the United States had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union in nuclear armaments and needed a massive arms buildup to contain the communist menace around the globe. And here was Randall Collins, himself son of a career American diplomat, suggesting nuclear disarmament and the continuation of détente.


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

You wouldn’t want to put your kids through that. You’d just shoot them.’ But that wasn’t the whole story. In Liverpool you had Frankie Goes to Hollywood encouraging us to party as if it was, well, 1984, but to go out bloody fighting, just like the city they came from. ‘Two Tribes’ had a video which featured lookalikes of Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader, Konstantin Chernenko, alternately wrestling and snogging in a boxing ring surrounded by baying men in suits. The producer of ‘Two Tribes’, Trevor Horn, recorded the song in a dozen different mixes, each on a separate 12-inch single. The cover of our copy, bought from the Woolies in Chelmsley precinct, featured a statistical breakdown of the nuclear arms race: the number of nuclear-enabled warheads held by the US and USSR, the number of ICBM tests conducted by the two superpowers.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

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

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

Benefits were streamlined and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional. Simultaneously, the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between 1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs.


pages: 265 words: 74,807

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Manufacturers believed that the first-generation jets, the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8, could be operated safely by two pilots, but they were required by the FAA to include the third man (the military version of the 707, the KC-135, a nearly identical aircraft, had no flight engineer). Statistical studies about whether the third man improved safety were inconclusive. In 1980, President Ronald Reagan appointed a panel to study the problem. They concluded that jet transports with two pilots were safe, that the third pilot did not increase safety, and that the new Boeing 757, 767, and Airbus A-310, then on the drawing boards, could be safely operated by two pilots because of their computerized, “glass” cockpits.


pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

By bestowing attention, the Seductive Narcissist makes his target feel so good about herself that she wants even more contact. Despite herself, she may want to submit. Some memorable American politicians have possessed this same quality, and it has helped them to inspire loyalty. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have both been described as charismatic leaders. People who have met Bill Clinton, even those predisposed to dislike him, come away from contact impressed with his personal magnetism. When asked to account for Clinton’s charisma, observers often cite the fact that he “gives everyone he meets his full, undivided attention.”1 They bring up the intense eye contact, the way Clinton makes them feel that nobody else in the world matters just then.


pages: 265 words: 79,896

Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, From Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens

Apollo 11, computer age, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Skype

Unfortunately for sci-fi enthusiasts, early lasers were big and bulky, and not nearly powerful enough to live up to their exalted image. The laser would turn out to have a myriad of lower-power uses, from the grocery-store bar-code reader to the stimulus in DVDs and computer drives. High-power lasers remained mostly in laboratories and military research, spurred on particularly by Ronald Reagan’s call for Star Wars missile defenses in the 1980s. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the US military had a laser powerful enough to shoot down missiles under the right conditions. The biggest laser project of all time, the National Ignition Facility at Livermore Lab, used nearly 200 lasers in a building the size of three football fields to initiate nuclear fusion, harnessing up to 500 trillion watts.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

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

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

It was at this juncture that Keynesian theories lost ground not only in academia but also in politics. The 1970s saw the rise of politicians of the right who were dedicated to cutting the money supply and restraining state spending as a way of curing the problems of stagflation. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl sounded the death knell of the Keynesian consensus. It was in this decade that the ideas of Hayek came back into fashion. There was also a revival of Marxian notions. Not so much in academia as in popular debate. Marxists had been marginalized because Keynes was reputed to have cured capitalism of its recurring crises.


pages: 168 words: 9,044

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi

non-fiction novel, Occam's razor, place-making, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, zero-sum game

It's unlikely that Easterbrook will find much traction for this outrage up on the Hill, since just about every politician up there who has published a book has used a ghostwriter for it. And if Easterbrook wants to get exercised about Clinton, he'll also need to get exercised about JFK, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage was probably written by Theodore Sorenson, and Ronald Reagan, who reportedly said of his own autobiography that he had heard it was a great book and that he should read it sometime. With politicians there's the accepted fact that their words are written for them all the time—they have speech-writers. When a president goes up and gives a State of the Union address, no one in his right mind believes that he's written that speech himself (this is particularly the case with the current resident of the White House).


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

The tacit assumption is that no country has a right to defend civilians from U.S. attack. The doctrine, which reigned challenged, is an interesting one. It might be illuminating to seek counterparts elsewhere. The pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, Ronald Reagan, finding “that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat,” arousing no ridicule.27 Others react differently. In response to John R Kennedy’s efforts to organize collective action against Cuba in 1961, a Mexican diplomat explained that Mexico could not go along because, “if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.”28 Enlightened opinion in the West takes a more sober view of the extraordinary threat to national security.


pages: 280 words: 75,820

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

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

Particularly in times of social and economic turmoil, we’re reminded that not only as individuals but also as members of a society we choose to focus on certain targets and suppress others: risky profits or steady savings; McMansions or “green” homes; multilateralism or unilateralism; SUVs or mass transit; celebrity or character. As the nation faces crises in the economy, the environment, international affairs, and other vital areas, we can no longer afford to indulge in the kind of collective ADHD that’s symbolized by President Ronald Reagan’s removal of the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter had installed in the White House during an energy crisis thirty years ago. In short, it has perhaps never been more important for Americans to join together in choosing our goals wisely and staying focused on them over time. CHAPTER 7 Productivity: Work Zone As Freud said, “Love and work . . . work and love, that’s all there is,” and attention is as essential to productivity as it is to relationships.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

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

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

THE MIDDLE CLASS’S LONG MARCH TO THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF From 1945 to the 1970s, a period characterized by widespread economic prosperity, the wealthiest Americans grew richer at a rate almost identical to that of America’s lower and middle classes.11 From factory employees to chief executives, Americans experienced a doubling of income.12 By the end of the 1980s, however, things had changed drastically, with the income of the wealthy skyrocketing while the rest of the country lagged far behind.13 What happened? Did middle-class Americans lose their mojo? Or had rich Americans unexpectedly come upon the economic equivalent of the Fountain of Youth—a Fountain of Wealth? They had, but rather than Ponce de León, it was Ronald Reagan who led the income-boosting expedition, marching into Washington under the banner of lowering the taxes of America’s moneyed elite.14 But, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was about more than shifting the tax burden—it was about shifting the way America looked at itself. In short order, government was no longer seen as a solution—it was fingered as the problem.


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

The majority of the group supported the strong-field magnet that would require a ring about fifty-two miles in circumference, as opposed to the weak-field design that would necessitate a ring up to a hundred miles long. It would be hard enough to find enough land to support the smaller ring. By late 1986, the SSC design had been submitted to the DOE and the major labs were united in their support. Because of the projected multibillion-dollar cost for the project, to move forward the approval of President Ronald Reagan, the American leader at the time, was required. On the face of it, that would seem to be a hard sell, given that the federal budget was already stretched through various military and scientific programs. Expensive projects at the time included the Strategic Defense Initiative (more commonly known as “Star Wars”) for developing missile-interception systems and a program to establish an international space station.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

Nobody likes being coerced, least of all newly powerful local elites that are hypersensitive about sovereignty and see their gravy trains threatened. Conditionality turned out to be a paper tiger: governments discovered they only needed to promise to reform, not actually do it. Meanwhile, the Western left, locked in its domestic struggle with U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, conflated the limited reforms being urged on the governments of the bottom billion with the neoliberal savaging of the state they were fighting at home. As a result, reforms that should have been popular with all except corrupt elites became toxic in the media both within and outside Africa.


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Have we latched so tightly onto central bank-issued currency, in electronic or tactile form, that it’s now the only kind of currency we can conceive of as being legitimate? What we can legally do with, or to, U.S. currency is rather confusing. Overt satire is usually fine. On the streets of Washington, D.C., you can buy spoof greenbacks, bills with Bill Clinton’s picture on the “sex dollar” ($6) note or a smiling Ronald Reagan on the $10,000,000 bill. These slips usually only have (bad) art on one side, and they clearly aren’t intended to defraud. U.S. Secret Service says: you’re good to go. Not always, though. In the early 1970s, a novelty manufacturer in Massachusetts decided to start selling a coffee mug festooned with a caricature of President Nixon on a $3 bill.


pages: 287 words: 77,181

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Chekhov's gun, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Norman Mailer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, stem cell

I said it not by mistake, but certainly without thinking—without, as Mandelstam wrote of God, having thought to speak. A little more than one month earlier, Eid had fallen on the second of October, the same evening Joe Biden braved Sarah Palin in the vice-presidential debate—the night Palin quoted Ronald Reagan as having said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we’re gonna find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

The flag also featured on Bruce Springsteen’s most successful album, Born in the USA; theories abounded as to the intentions behind the album artwork and what political message it conveyed. As Springsteen said in a Rolling Stone interview: ‘The flag is a powerful image, and when you set that stuff loose, you don’t know what’s gonna be done with it.’ On the political front, the flag was used to tremendous effect in Ronald Reagan’s seminal TV ad campaign of 1984, ‘Morning in America’. Towards the end of the fifty-nine-second commercial, the voiceover delivers its killer line: ‘It’s morning again in America’, and then Uncle Sam’s future – young children – gaze in admiration as the Stars and Stripes goes up into a new day, a day of hope.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

In this version the sheriff of Nottingham runs a ruthless realm of plunder and political correctness, ransacking the homesteads of honest peasants for money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats. In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jacob Rees-Mogg. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1,000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with eleven children, living in a luxury house on the public purse.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Martin Bronfenbrenner deemed Marx "the greatest social scientist of all times" (1967: 624).1 Marx and Communism Yet, like Cain in the Bible, Marx is cursed with a black mark in history. His name will forever be associated with the dark side of communism. A specter is haunting Karl Marx—t he history of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and the millions who died and suffered under the "evil empire," as Ronald Reagan called it. Apologists say Marx cannot be held accountable 1. I think German sociologist Max Weber deserves this honor. See Skousen (2001), chapter 10. for his communist followers' atrocities and even assert that Marx would have been one of the first to be executed or sent to the Gulag. Perhaps.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

According to its advocates, any other form of ‘governance’ would be inefficient for the economy and would threaten individual liberties. After the end of the Second World War, Keynesianism was the dominant economic policy paradigm until the appearance of stagflation (stagnation + inflation) in the mid 1970s in most major economies of the developed world. This is when the ‘neoliberal turn’ started. Under the stewardship of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism moved from the status of doctrine to that of economic policy programme: its keywords were market deregulation (the labour market and capital markets especially), privatisation of public enterprises and withdrawal of the ‘welfare state’. The same principles were applied in developing countries in the framework of the ‘conditionalities’ attached to structural adjustment programmes conducted under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF.


Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M. D., Keith Ferrazzi

Abraham Maslow, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, index card, Jeff Bezos, Leonard Kleinrock, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Ronald Reagan, zero-sum game

At that instant, instead of trying to get the better of each other, you “get” each other and that breakthrough can lead to cooperation, collaboration, and effective communication. The Cold War, in fact, may have ended on just such an empathic tipping point. In a now-legendary moment, President Ronald Reagan’s talks with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be at a standstill when Reagan looked behind his adversary‘s stubborn face to see a leader who truly loved his people. In a moment of brilliant simplicity, he invited Gorbachev to “Call me Ron” (as opposed to “Let’s keep fighting president-to-president, digging our heels in and getting nowhere”).


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

It amazed me how a diverse perspective utterly changed the meaning of every significant event in the world. For instance, when Run-D.M.C.’s Hard Times album came out, with its relentless bass drum, it sent an earthquake through the football team, but not even a ripple through my calculus class. Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was considered an outrage among young scientists due to its questionable technical foundation, but those aspects went unnoticed at football practice. Looking at the world through such different prisms helped me separate facts from perception. This ability would serve me incredibly well later when I became an entrepreneur and CEO.


pages: 288 words: 73,297

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis Phd

behavioural economics, deep learning, delayed gratification, helicopter parent, impulse control, language acquisition, meta-analysis, no-fly zone, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

Three descriptor terms were fed into the network model as “input.” Our task, as grad students, was to come up with a quick answer to the question “Who are we talking about?” and then compare that answer to the “output” provided by the network. The three terms were “movie star,” “politician,” and “intelligent” and the answer that came to everyone’s lips was “Ronald Reagan.” The network spat out the same answer. “But you see,” our typically left-leaning professor said with a grin, “one-third of the information is false!” It pays to remember that brains make decisions based on biased, convoluted, and often just-plain-mistaken input. Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes thirty years of progress through which psychologists (and students of behavioural economics) have come to recognize how biased and irrational our thinking can be.


pages: 289 words: 77,532

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

At forty-seven he worried he was aging out of some of the higher-ranking opportunities in government, so if he wanted another significant crack at law enforcement, this would have to be it. He convinced his family that the job was important to him, and vowed to be back in Westchester as often as the job would allow so that he wouldn’t miss out on too much of their lives. Early in January 2011, Meister took a late-Sunday shuttle from La Guardia to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to report for his first week of work. He attended Gensler’s weekly 9 A.M. senior staff meeting, then scheduled an all-enforcement personnel gathering for the next day. He was concerned about making a solid initial impression on his 175 employees, many of them career government attorneys whom he presumed might be tempted to dismiss him as a fast-talking jerk lawyer from New York.


The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

Other financiers cottoned on, and by 1982 the syndicated-loan market had ballooned to about $46 billion.4 Virtually all those loans used Libor to calculate the interest charged. Soon, the rate was adopted by bankers outside the loan market who were looking for an elegant proxy for bank borrowing costs that was simple, fair and appeared to be independent. In 1970, the financier Evan Galbraith, who would go on to be U.S. ambassador to France under President Ronald Reagan, is said to have come up with the idea of pegging the first bond to Libor—known as a floating-rate note. As London’s financial markets took off, they became increasingly complex. Within a few years, Libor had morphed from being a tool to price individual loans and bonds to being a benchmark for derivatives deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars.


pages: 232 words: 71,965

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

If somebody tries to tell you that they know something special about a given stock or the wider financial markets, they’re probably either (a) doing something illegal or (b) trying to scam you. Either way, you would be a fool to follow their advice. I’m not saying you should always ignore stock tips, even from untrustworthy sources like institutional salesmen. But you have to remember Ronald Reagan’s famous adage—trust, but verify. My boss forgot that crucial second step. He let those salesmen schmooze him into believing that they knew something about those stocks that nobody else knew. Money managers have wised up a great deal since the 1980s when it comes to relying on advice from broker-dealers like Montgomery.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

This fiscal crisis of State gathered pace from the end of the 1970s and affected economies at both the core and the periphery of the developed world as post-war Keynesianism came up against economic stagnation, rising prices and wage demands. The stage was set for a major ideological reformation in the advanced economies as the social democratic compromise that prevailed since 1945 gave way to renewed liberalisation. The elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981 signalled a shift in economic policy that would engulf most overdeveloped countries for the coming decades. The consequence was increased financial liberalisation coupled with reduced taxes, particularly on wealth, combined with reductions in social expenditure. The era of neoliberalism was born.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

By the end of the 1970s, there was a general feeling that the old system of economic policy had failed. Governments had tried to micromanage the economy but in their attempts to keep down unemployment, they had merely achieved stagflation: high inflation and unemployment. Right-wing politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher argued that state intervention in industry had stifled the economy, concentrating resources in sunset industries such as coal and steel, and starving the growth sectors of the economy such as technology. Inflation was eventually brought to heel with the help of very high interest rates, which also prompted massive job losses in those sunset industries.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

The high costs of their suits and shoes were miniscule in comparison with the amount of money under the scope of the legislation: the Tax Reform Act cut the top individual tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, closed loopholes valued at $100 billion, subjected labor and capital to the same tax rates, and slashed the tax burdens of the poorest Americans, all during the presidency of the famously tax-hating Ronald Reagan. Importantly, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was intended to be revenue-neutral (not reducing tax revenues), distributionally-neutral (not shifting tax burdens among groups in the income distribution) and non-partisan. In the end, the bill cleared the Senate Committee on Finance unanimously, and it passed the Senate 97-3!


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

The UK became an international centre for foreign exchange with a flood of foreign banks opening up in London and the growth of the ‘euro-dollar’ market* which had begun to develop in the 1960s.108 The oil crises of the 1970s and rapid inflation helped usher into power the free-market-oriented governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the UK and USA, respectively, who, influenced by neoclassical free-market economics, began to further dismantle state controls on bank credit, including interest-rate caps. UK Conservative finance ministers Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson oversaw the abolition of all controls over consumer credit together with the deregulation of housing finance in the ‘Big Bang’ reforms of 1986.109 Compulsory liquidity reserve ratios were gradually reduced from the 12.5 per cent set in 1971, until eventually they were made voluntary (Figure 8).


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

‘You basically got the free-market Friedmanites as an economic model, and then you have a theory of zero latency engineering.’ Bell is referring to the ultra-free-market reasoning that grew out of the Chicago School of Economics – a school of thought that came to dominate the world and influence the economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. This economic theory reasoned that markets were the best source of information and of value, and so obstacles to them – regulation, competition policy and other barriers – were usually impediments to that. In big tech, Bell says, this economic orthodoxy – even if it is masked with a socially liberal culture – is fused with a technological mindset of zero latency, or moving as fast as you can and fixing things as you go along.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

One might be tempted to concur given the clues that had accumulated in the years before 9/11. Al Qaeda had broken its religious taboo on suicide bombing as early as 1993. Bin Laden, a Saudi-born son of a wealthy businessman, constantly cropped up in raw intelligence reports about Arab terrorist groups. Richard Clarke, a former National Coordinator for Security under Ronald Reagan, said: ‘There seemed to be some organizing force and maybe it was he. He was the one thing that we knew the terrorist groups had in common.’ Bin Laden publicly declared war on the United States on 2 September 1996, saying in a recorded message that he wanted to destroy the ‘oppressor of Islam’.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s, Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs. These included a vitamin company and a seminar company, both of which paid him seven figures for permission to use his likeness as a mascot and to rebrand as the Trump Network and Trump Institute.


Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis) -University Of Chicago Press (2011) by Sally Smith Hughes

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, barriers to entry, creative destruction, full employment, industrial research laboratory, invention of the wheel, Joseph Schumpeter, mass immigration, Menlo Park, power law, prudent man rule, Recombinant DNA, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley

If unassuming Herb—just a guy from Pittsburgh, as a colleague observed—could found a successful company with all the rewards and renown that entailed, why couldn’t they? The media reinforced Boyer’s image of the astoundingly successful 162 CHAPTER SIX scientist-entrepreneur. In 1981 he was one of four runners-up to President Ronald Reagan in Time magazine’s man of the year.117 Two months later Boyer’s portrait appeared on a Time cover, accompanied by the byline, “Shaping Life in the Lab—The Boom in Genetic Engineering.” 118 His beaming face and mop of unruly curls fading into a background of DNA helixes suggested his close and lucrative link with the genetic substance.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

For the most part, the seeping of work into the home was intentionally instigated by managers and employers in the decades between World War II and 2010. So let’s pick up our historical timeline in the year 1980. A quick reminder of what was happening at that time: The Iran-Iraq War began with an invasion in September, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in November, and John Lennon was shot and killed in December. Reagan’s counterpart in the United Kingdom was Margaret Thatcher, who had become prime minister the previous spring. During the Reagan/Thatcher era, the working world was transformed once more, not as extensively as was seen during the Industrial Revolution, but through an aggressive heightening of the attitudes toward labor that had been evolving for more than a hundred years.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

Free-market conservatives, though, consider unions cartels that restrain trade and raise wages above market rates. They’ve been at war with the labor movement since just after World War II, when a wave of strikes led to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed the closed shop, making so-called “right-to-work” laws possible. Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers in 1981 was considered the most decisive signal that the federal government would henceforth take the side of employers rather than unions. Collective bargaining is inimical to the conservative ideal of the rugged individual. The labor movement, whose byword is solidarity, seemingly has less of a place in modern America, which is a more individualistic society than it was during the heyday of unions.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

The Human Development Index, which he helped devise, is the one that has come closest to dethroning GDP. And, as we shall see in this chapter, Haq wouldn’t have been able to do it without UNDP, or without its US-appointed Silicon Valley venture capitalist administrator, William H. Draper III. In 1985, when Ronald Reagan was at the start of his second term as president, Republican Party grandee Bill Draper was preparing to retire from his job as chairman of America’s Export-Import Bank and much looking forward to returning home to California and retaking the reins of his venture capital business. And then, as he told me in an interview in May 2013, he received a call from the White House.


pages: 243 words: 73,134

Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher

East Village, Joan Didion, Ronald Reagan

The girl had been wearing a very see-through dress, and she had also been present the night Suzanne started her affair with her second actor. TV was filled with memories for her, a liquid scrapbook. Maybe if she watched long enough, she thought, her whole life would flash slowly in front of her eyes. Now the girl she knew was playing with herself on a bus. She reached for the clicker again and watched Ronald Reagan getting off a helicopter and waving. He cupped his hand to his ear and shrugged his shoulders while his wife was dragged ahead of him at the end of a dog’s leash. You can see why he has her, Suzanne thought. She’s angular. With that pointed head and all those sharp edges, she finishes him off in a way, so he doesn’t just bleed into the rest of the big picture.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

It’s a timeline of the last forty years, showing who was the Fed chair at the time, and stock market returns over the entire period. There’s also a shaded section showing periods when the US economy was in recession. “I’ll start with Paul Volcker, who died yesterday and who is the first one I can remember from my childhood. He was chairman of the Fed under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from ‘79 to ‘87, back when you could work for both a Democratic and Republican boss. It was a messy time. America was dealing with oil shocks, the fallout from the Vietnam War, the end of the Bretton Woods system, and then massive tax cuts. Inflation spiked when Nixon decided to leave Bretton Woods, the gold standard.


pages: 261 words: 72,277

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Dozens of high-profile rankings have been performed over the past fifty years, but certain names often bubble to the top. Famous presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln consistently rank high on the list. Along with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, these high-achieving leaders had a significant influence on the course of history. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton also often do well. These presidents did well in public opinion polls, even if they don’t rank as highly among presidential scholars. The bottom of the list often includes names like Warren G. Harding and James Buchanan. Harding appointed campaign contributors and allies to prominent political positions that they milked for personal gain.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

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

The triple crisis (economic, social, political) of the 1970s catalyzed a broad shift in ideas about how to regulate and grow capitalism.16 The New Deal assumption that the government should take an interventionist role to protect stakeholders from business overreach and malfunctioning markets lost sway, and a new legitimating framework emphasizing shareholder value, efficient markets, and deregulation came to the fore. Ronald Reagan epitomized these values, promising to get the government “off the backs of the people.” Companies in all sectors began to get a lot more breathing room through tax breaks, decreased oversight, watered-down environmental laws, and defunded federal regulatory agencies. At the same time, corporate mergers began to be viewed with a much less skeptical eye.17 There have been exceptions of course.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

Their common refrain was that the recent wave of victims found themselves at loose ends “through no fault of their own.” Still, the millions who had lost their jobs found themselves confronting overburdened bureaucracies whose governing mandate was to treat everyone applying for benefits as a potential fraudster, and to minimize outlays. Ronald Reagan excelled at creating a narrative that shamed victims. Running against Gerald Ford in 1976 for the Republican presidential nomination, Reagan regaled crowds with tales of women who gamed the welfare system by having more babies. These were “welfare queens.” They raked in enough to drive Cadillacs and eat at fancy restaurants—all while many of his supporters struggled paycheck to paycheck.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats.”5 Over the final years of the twentieth century, Friedman’s dictate found its way into corporate thinking as well as the political class. It helped pave the way for the rise of free market politicians like Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, and the rise of corporate raiders and buyout firms that attacked companies with complacent and underperforming leadership. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Friedman’s doctrine seemed to be the rule of the land. The business of business was business. Companies existed for the benefit of their shareholders.


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

“If we let the fiefdoms to their own devices, the economy will disintegrate, followed by political disunity and secession,” Chen wrote. The overtones of what happened in the Soviet Union are not hard to miss. In the West, believers in the free market were in the ascendant following the 1980s tenures of President Ronald Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. The IMF and the World Bank were telling developing countries to open up their markets and reduce the role of government. Despite the storyline told at the time by foreign pundits that China’s state-controlled economy was going the way of the dodo, the reality was far more complex.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Big sticks, gun boats and dollar diplomacy were instruments of a Yankee policy to curtail socialist politics, especially the military oligarchies of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. In 1979, the rebellious Sandinistas toppled the American-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Alarmed by the Sandinistas’ Soviet and Cuban ties, fervently anticommunist President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1981, decided it was time to intervene. The Cold War arrived in the hot tropics. The Contra war escalated throughout the 1980s. Reagan began funding the counter-revolutionary Contras, operating out of Honduras and eventually out of Costa Rica as well. Soviet and Cuban military and economic aid poured in for the Sandinistas.

After the USA pressured the government to hold elections, a civilian, Dr Roberto Suazo Córdova, was elected president. Real power arguably rested with the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Gustavo Álvarez, who supported an increasing US military presence in Central America. US military involvement in Central America had increased dramatically following Ronald Reagan’s election as US president. The USA funneled huge sums of money and thousands of US troops into Honduras as it conducted provocative maneuvers clearly designed to threaten Nicaragua. Refugee camps of Nicaraguans in Honduras were used as bases for a US-sponsored covert war against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, known as the Contra war.

Trying to salvage what it could of its influence over the country, the US (under President Jimmy Carter) authorized US$75 million in emergency aid to the Sandinista-led government. However, by late 1980 it was becoming concerned about the increasing numbers of Soviet and Cuban advisors in Nicaragua and allegations that the Sandinistas were beginning to provide arms to leftist rebels in El Salvador. The Contra War After Ronald Reagan became US president in January 1981, relations between Nicaragua and the US took a turn for the worse. Reagan suspended all aid to Nicaragua and began funding the counterrevolutionary military groups known as Contras, operating out of Honduras and eventually out of Costa Rica as well. Most of the original Contras were ex-soldiers of Somoza’s Guardia Nacional, but as time passed, their ranks filled with disaffected local people.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

“Cultural Aspects of Drinking Patterns and Alcohol Controls in China,” Ian Newman, Globe, 2002 Issue 1, online at www.ias.org.uk/resources/publications/theglobe/globe200201/gl200201_index.html. 35 MESSAGES 453 “easily crosses the placenta”: “Liquor and Babies,” Time Magazine, July 14 1975. 454 “She’s very, very small”: “An argument That Goes Back to the Womb: The Demedicalisation of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992,” Janet Golden, Journal of Social History 33 (1999) 269-98. 454 “the dangers of drinking during pregnancy”: Ibid. 454 “eight to ten drinks or more per day”: Ibid. 455 The actual drinking habits of American: Ruth C. Engs, and David J. Hanson, “The Drinking Patterns and Problems of College Students: 1983,” Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. 31(1):65-84, 1985. 456 “We’ve lost more than a quarter of a million”: Ronald Reagan, Radio Address to the Nation on Drunk Driving, December 17, 1983; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=40875. 456 “Now, some feel that my decision”: Ronald Reagan, speech, June 20, 1984 River Dell High School, Oradell, New Jersey. 458 “More and more it seems”: “The Evolution of U.S. Temperance Movements Since Repeal: A Comparison of Two Campaigns to Control Alcohoic Beverage Marketing, 1950s and 1980s,” Pamela Pennock, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20 (2005) 14-65. 459 “a climate in which dangerous attitudes”: “Alcohol Advertising: A Call for Congressional Action.”


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

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

Throughout the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower was seriously interested in bringing American forces home and forcing the Western Europeans to defend themselves against the Soviet threat.146 Indeed, this impulse explains the forceful U.S. support for European integration in the early Cold War. Furthermore, there was strong sentiment in the U.S. Senate in the late 1960s and early 1970s to reduce, if not eliminate, America’s continental commitment. Even during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, influential voices called for significant reductions in American troop levels in Europe.147 But buck-passing was not a serious option for the United States in the bipolar world that existed between 1945 and 1990. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the United States pursued a tough-minded balancing policy against the Soviet Union that achieved remarkable success.

Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1991), p. 81. 13. Quoted in Brian R. Sullivan, “Mahan’s Blindness and Brilliance,” Joint Forces Quarterly, No. 21 (Spring 1999), p. 116. 14. John Lehman, who was secretary of the navy in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, frequently asserted that, in the event of war with the Soviet Union, American aircraft carriers would move close to the Soviet mainland, specifically the Kola Peninsula, and strike important military targets. But hardly an admiral could be found to support that idea. Adm. Stansfield Turner wrote that Lehman “advocates a strategy for the Navy of ‘maneuver, initiative, and offense.’


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

The struggle over Angola, where a civil war raged between Marxist and anti-Marxist factions, revealed howquickly such a ‘proxy war’ could embroil a whole subcontinent.87 In the Horn of Africa, large-scale Soviet aid to Ethiopia’s Marxist leaders was countered by American help to its neighbour, Somalia.88 But direct action was even more alarming. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 was seen in the West as the opening salvo of a ‘new’ Cold War, a fresh advance by the ‘evil empire’ (Ronald Reagan’s memorable phrase) that was ruled from Moscow. Containment had failed, the Secretary of State told the American Senate in June 1983. ‘Soviet ambitions and capabilities have long since reached beyond the geographical bounds that this doctrine took for granted.’89 Far from heralding a ‘world of nations’, decolonization’s unexpected course seemed to have set the scene for newkinds of empire.

Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (London, 1990), p. 509. 86. For an account of this K. Dawisha, ‘The Soviet Union in the Middle East’, in Feuchtwanger and Nailor (eds.), The Soviet Union and the Third World, pp. 123–6. 87. See C. Legum, After Angola: The War over Southern Africa (London, 1976). 88. The Times, 10 October 1980. 89. P. Lettow, Ronald Reagan and his Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005), p. 127. The speaker was George Shultz, Secretary of State 1982–9. 90. Military spending in sub-Saharan Africa was0.7 per cent of GNP in 1960, but five times higher by 1990 (The Times, 28 June 1993, p. 42). For a more general discussion, W.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

By 1927, when Mike, who’d graduated from Phillips Exeter and Harvard, became president of the company at twenty-four, the Register and Tribune was Iowa’s leading newspaper. Mike, who got his nickname because his father thought he looked Irish and thought the name sounded Irish, along with his brother John, began expanding the company, buying radio stations (he gave Ronald Reagan his first radio-announcing job in Des Moines), then more newspapers in Minneapolis (which John ran), and, after consulting polls conducted by George Gallup, a graduate student he’d hired, decided to launch a national picture magazine. Although Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, announced a similar venture, Life, after Look was conceived, he got it to newsstands first in 1936.

“No sooner did we move in than the hot water quit and the boiler broke down,” says French’s then-wife, Sally Phelps. “They parked a boiler in the street like in Harlem, chugging all winter. Rand Araskog was all upset. He said maybe he’d run too tight a ship and not spent enough.” Kravis knew the Frenches; like him, they were major supporters of Ronald Reagan. Kravis also likely knew he was going to have trouble getting into the building. “Henry wouldn’t have gotten in,” says a neighbor. “They were trying to keep a balance. Araskog, Speight, Dyson, and Rynne didn’t want it to get too Jewish. It wasn’t anti-Semitic. They felt it would detract from the value of the building.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

After all, the very mention of “retirement” risks summoning the stereotype of the “greedy geezer”: a boogeyman conjured by critics of Social Security at the turn of the twenty-first century, foremost among them ex–U.S. Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming. The “greedy geezer” spends his golden years in affluent leisure while draining the lifeblood from younger generations. He’s a geriatric vampire, a septuagenarian version of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Except that she drove a Cadillac, and the caricature Alan Simpson described drives a Lexus. Simpson also famously railed against the “Pink Panthers,” a pro–Social Security lobbying group that does not actually exist; he invented it as a straw man—or straw woman?—to make an argument.


pages: 283 words: 82,161

Momma and the Meaning of Life by Irvin D. Yalom

Internet Archive, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley

But no agency had the authority to provide twenty dollars for a room; and since the emergency room physician could not be certain— that is, medically-legally certain—that John would not make a serious suicide attempt if he were forced to sleep in the shelter, he spent many nights a year sleeping soundly in a five-hundred-fifty dollar-a-day hospital room, courtesy of an inept and inhumane medical insurance system. The contemporary practice of brief psychiatric hospitalization works only if there is an adequate post-hospital outpatient program. Nonetheless, in I972, Governor Ronald Reagan with one bold brilliant stroke, abolished mental illness in California by not only closing the large state psychiatric hospitals but also eradicating most of the public aftercare programs. As a result the staff were forced, day after day, to go through the charade of treating patients and discharging them back into the same noxious setting that had necessitated their hospitalization.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Now there may be some correlation between looks and skills (someone who looks athletic is likely to be athletic), but, conditional on having had some success in spite of not looking the part, it is potent, even crucial, information. So it becomes no wonder that the job of chief executive of the country was once filled by a former actor, Ronald Reagan. Actually, the best actor is the one nobody realizes is an actor: a closer look at Barack Obama shows that he was even more of an actor: a fancy Ivy League education combined with a liberal reputation is compelling as an image builder. Much has been written about the millionaire next door: the person who is actually rich, on balance, but doesn’t look like the person you would expect to be rich, and vice versa.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

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

Most of the controls imposed on natural gas markets in the 1970s were phased out by the mid-1980s, but many remain and continue to hamper the natural gas market. DEREGULATION: THE RETURN TO CAPITALISM In 1980, facing another government-induced energy crisis, President Jimmy Carter finally began the deregulation of oil and gas prices, and President Ronald Reagan accelerated the process the next year. Not surprisingly, deregulation ended the energy crisis: a sharp turn in the direction of free-market capitalism was all that was needed. Economics teaches that price controls usually cause prices to be higher than they otherwise would be in the long run because they stifle supply, and this is exactly what happened with the oil and gas price controls the U.S. government imposed in the 1970s.


pages: 317 words: 87,566

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

According to the most respected measure of income inequality, Britain has never been more equal than it was in 1977.7 But at the same time, the case for market deregulation was becoming increasingly credible, urged on by corporations that felt that they had become victimized by regulators, unions and consumer pressure groups.8 Persistently high inflation had led a number of governments, including Britain’s, to experiment in ‘monetarism’, an attempt to control the amount of money in circulation but which also threatened economic growth and jobs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were waiting in the wings to usher in the era that would become known as ‘neoliberalism’. One way of understanding neoliberalism is to examine how things progressed from there: the spiralling executive pay, the unprecedented levels of unemployment, the growing dominance of the financial sector over the rest of the economy and society, the expansion of private sector management techniques into all other walks of life.


pages: 249 words: 87,445

Dispatches by Michael Herr

air freight, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

At the top of the stairs there was a large poster of Lenny Bruce, and beneath it, in a shrine effect, was a low table with a Buddha and lighted incense on it. “Lenny,” Davies said. Most of one wall was covered with a collage that Davies had done with the help of some friends. It included glimpses of burning monks, stacked Viet Cong dead, wounded Marines screaming and weeping, Cardinal Spellman waving from a chopper, Ronald Reagan, his face halved and separated by a stalk of cannabis; pictures of John Lennon peering through wire-rimmed glasses, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown; coffins draped with American flags whose stars were replaced by swastikas and dollar signs; odd parts clipped from Playboy pictures, newspaper headlines (FARMERS BUTCHER HOGS TO PROTEST PORK PRICE DIP), photo captions (President Jokes with Newsmen), beautiful girls holding flowers, showers of peace symbols; Ky standing at attention and saluting, a small mushroom cloud forming where his genitalia should have been; a map of the western United States with the shape of Vietnam reversed and fitted over California and one large, long figure that began at the bottom with shiny leather boots and rouged knees and ascended in a microskirt, bare breasts, graceful shoulders and a long neck, topped by the burned, blackened face of a dead Vietnamese woman.


pages: 237 words: 82,266

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Donald Trump, Donner party, Exxon Valdez, Future Shock, Joan Didion, Mahatma Gandhi, open immigration, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Yogi Berra

“Isn’t it enough that there are wars around the world and gang violence in our neighborhood middle school; do we really need our kid to be wielding a toy gun?” I pleaded with my spouse when Ezra was a toddler. “Good luck with that!” was the only support Jeff was willing to offer in my war against warfare. “Trust but verify.” If it was good enough for Ronald Reagan, surely the Gurkahns could carry out this policy? When Ez was little, I requested that friends and family forgo giving Ezra toys that came with guns, guns that turned into toys, or toy guns. As it turns out, the only thing harder than getting on the same page with your partner is trying to tell your extended community that you are following a style of parenting that’s unfamiliar.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Ask the human to perform a calculation, and he’d be much slower, not to mention more error prone, than the computer. Even so, there are still some situations that bots struggle with. When playing Jeopardy! Watson found the short clues the most difficult. If the host read out a single category and a name—such as “first ladies” and Ronald Reagan—Watson would take too long to search through its database to find the correct response (which is “Who is Nancy Reagan?”). Whereas Watson would beat a human contestant in a race to solve a long, complicated clue, the human would prevail if there were only a few words to go by. In quiz shows, it seems that brevity is the enemy of machines.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Today’s gigantic fortunes seem to be less a reflection of the innovative genius of current billionaires, and more a reflection of how exceptionally adept they’ve been at elbowing their way to the front of the trough. ‌3 ‌Paying For a Civilized Society The most reliable applause line for politicians in recent decades has been calling for lower taxes. Since anti-tax sabre-rattling became all the rage with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the Anglo-American countries have slashed their taxes deeply. Meanwhile, another group of developed economies, led by the Nordic countries, has maintained high tax levels. So we have two groups of developed countries with very different approaches, creating what could be considered almost a laboratory for testing the impact of high and low tax levels.


pages: 305 words: 79,356

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren C. Steffy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shock, peak oil, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh

He was “a man of considerable standing to undertake that investigation,”2 but also someone who, as a prominent Texas lawyer and perennial political appointee, understood the oil business. Baker is the walking definition of a tall Texan and is a longtime friend of President George H. W. Bush. He served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and later as treasury secretary, and Bush named him secretary of state in 1989. Baker also became a key operative in Republican party politics, earning the nickname “the Fixer.” When there was a problem, Baker could find a solution. He oversaw George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign and led the fight for the Florida recount that ultimately got Bush elected.


pages: 287 words: 81,970

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

As individuals seek to protect themselves from the destructive effects of the command economy, new measures are taken to prevent them from doing so. It is these new measures that are the focus of this chapter. Wage and Price Controls It was a moment of that self-deprecating humor that people found endearing in Ronald Reagan. During a televised debate in the 1980 presidential campaign as inflation raced along at double-digit rates, a reporter asked about invoking wage and price controls. Reagan answered that wage and price controls don’t work, and they didn’t work in ancient Rome when the emperor Diocletian tried them.


pages: 219 words: 15,438

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

We are the beneficiaries as well of the abundant array of material and psychic perks that flow to the heads of corporations. Under such idyllic conditions, we don't expect shareholders to ante up loads of compensation for which we have no possible need. Indeed, if we were not paid at all, Charlie and I would be delighted with the cushy jobs we hold. At bottom, we subscribe to Ronald Reagan's creed: "It's probably true that hard work never killed anyone, but I figure why take the chance." We made a sizable acquisition in 1991-the H.H. Brown Shoe Co.[,] ... the leading North American manufacturer of work shoes and boots, and it has a history of earning unusually fine margins on sales and assets.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

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

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

As an example of the problems with objectivity, let’s take the coverage of a scripted event by two reputable newspapers that lean the same way politically: In 2004, Ted Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, delivered a much-anticipated speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, in his home town of Boston.21 The front-page report in the Boston Globe began: The second night of the Democratic National Convention featured harsher criticism of the Bush administration, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy accusing the president of making the world a more dangerous place for Americans.22 After a paragraph quoting Teresa Heinz, the article notes that Ronald Reagan’s son spoke, and Barack Obama “offered a glimpse of . . . what may be the future of their party.” The next six paragraphs are devoted to Kennedy’s speech, highlighting his stirring call “to take up the cause.” The front-page coverage at the Washington Post began without even a mention of Kennedy’s speech: On the second night of its national convention, the Democratic Party introduced two newcomers to the nation to set the themes that John F.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

But this God’s-eye view is illusory, as it also serves to block out and erase other private and state activities, from the private jets of oligarchs and politicians to covert surveillance flights and military manoeuvres.25 For everything that is shown, something is hidden. Source: Flightradar24.com. Screenshot of Flightradar24.com, showing 1,500 of 12,151 tracked flights, October 2017. Note Google ‘Project Loon’ balloons over Puerto Rico, following Hurricane Maria. In 1983, Ronald Reagan ordered that the then-encrypted Global Positioning System (GPS) be made available to civilians, following the shooting down of a Korean airliner that strayed into Russian airspace. Over time, GPS has come to anchor a huge number of contemporary applications and become another of the invisible, unquestioned signals that modulate everyday life – another of those things that, more or less, ‘just works’.


pages: 302 words: 80,287

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

As a teenager with his home life deteriorating, Hughes was busted multiple times for drugs and then shipped off to the CEDU institute in the San Bernardino Mountains to get clean. There, he befriended a staff member, whom he would accompany on the center’s fund-raising trips to the ritzier parts of Los Angeles, like Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. On one such trip, the young Hughes coaxed $500 out of California’s governor at the time. His name was Ronald Reagan.11 Then, on April 27, 1975, when Hughes was just nineteen and still at CEDU, his mother died from an overdose. Hughes told people she was thirty pounds overweight and had tried every quick fix in the book before reverting to diet pills, which had killed her. It would have been a heartbreaking story—had it been true.12 The official toxicology report showed Jo Ann Hartman had a deadly level of the painkillers Darvon and Percodan in her system.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

“It was world-making,” because it justified “specific visions and theories of political and socioeconomic organization” that Cold War planners advocated. The infrastructure concept catapulted from policy jargon into popular American discourse in the 1980s, when, perhaps surprisingly, President Ronald Reagan said his foreign policy objective was to help developing countries foster “the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way.” Today, the word “infrastructure” usually makes us think of what engineers and policy makers refer to as hard or physical infrastructure: large-scale systems for transit, electricity, gas, oil, food, finance, sewage, water, heat, communications, and storm protection.


pages: 280 words: 85,091

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

The goal, after all, was to get the show on the road. In the event, it proved disastrous. Inquests revealed, as the villains of the piece, not just the O-rings, but another, more viral, more insidiously carcinogenic culprit: a musty, asphyxiating psychology. The Rogers Commission, a dedicated task force set up by then President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident, confirmed the nagging, unspoken fears of social psychologists the world over: that NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes had played a significant role in the lead-up to the tragedy. Pressure to conform, discounted warnings, sense of invulnerability.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The social media boom—which was called, for a while, Web 2.0, and closely followed Google’s massive 2004 initial public stock offering—was going strong for more than a decade by the time I met Ghazi. Some things hadn’t changed since he first arrived in the Valley. It ran on the same old mix of government-subsidized research, cheap labor, and a regulatory outlook inherited from the Ronald Reagan era that permitted corporations to unload the costs of doing business on customers, employees, taxpayers, and the ecosystem. But some things had changed, Ghazi said. Silicon Valley had grown more volatile, more ruthless and ravenous for the blood of virgin entrepreneurs. “The machine is so efficient now, spinning so fast, that either you get crushed or you get in and are connected to everything all at once,” he told me.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Milton Friedman Stole Your Pension Friedman was an economics professor at the University of Chicago and probably the most influential economist of the late twentieth century. He was a libertarian and free-marketeer, and he admired the ideas of Ayn Rand, the nutty novelist who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. He served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan, as well as other world leaders. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel prize. He trained generations of economists who spread his ideas to other universities and business schools. In his famous essay in the New York Times magazine, Friedman argued that people who manage companies should have only one goal, which is to make as much money as possible for their investors.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Millions listened to Coughlin’s tirades, but millions more ignored him. His efforts to defeat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election came to nothing. Forty years after the Japanese internment, a federal commission called the incarceration a “grave injustice” motivated by “racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership.”348 President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology, and the federal government provided each survivor with twenty thousand dollars in compensation. In his memoirs, Warren—who went on to become one of the United States’ greatest chief justices of the Supreme Court—said he “deeply regretted” the removal order. “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken.”349 And after each backlash dissipates, the flood resumes.


pages: 290 words: 84,375

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

According to an anonymously written column published on the front page of the People’s Daily in mid-2016, widely assumed to have been written by Xi’s closest economic adviser, supply-side reform is to be “the lifeline that saves China from the middle-income trap.” At first blush, it seems an odd school of economic thought to be embraced by China’s Communists. After all, supply-side economics is most closely associated with Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan, supply-side economics—alternatively labeled “trickle-down” or “voodoo” economics—meant stimulating the economy by cutting business taxes. Orthodox economic theory holds that growth is stimulated by transferring wealth to the demand side of the economy—that is, to households and individuals—so that people consume more.


pages: 309 words: 85,584

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

Arthur Laffer, the American extreme right-wing economist, once drew on a Washington restaurant napkin a curve purporting to demonstrate that lower taxes would rake in more revenue for the Reagan administration. What they actually did was contribute to the vast increase in defence spending that swelled the budget deficit, but Ronald Reagan had a Teflon quality and a broad smile, and he got away with things a Democrat would have found difficult. As Reagan once quipped, ‘The deficit is big enough to look after itself.’ It certainly looked after the Cold War. The increase in defence spending under Reagan was enough to convince the Soviets that they could no longer compete – a development I referred to in my book The Spectre of Capitalism (1992), which covered the reasons for the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

In one particularly important policy change, individual Americans were limited to five years of welfare benefits for their whole life. Those who have exhausted this limit have nothing to fall back on. As part of this trend, anti-union laws were passed at the state and federal levels with President Ronald Reagan a notable champion of this policy. Labor market regulations were relaxed, union membership declined, and many aspects of the social safety net were weakened in the name of pro-market, business-friendly reforms. FROM UPHEAVAL TO BACKLASH The Globotics Transformation is playing with fire around a powder keg of discontent—especially in the US where the safety net is set far too low to be of help to many Americans who have borne the brunt of the disruption that the Services Transformation injected into the system since 1973.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

Then, in 1967, she was unexpectedly recalled to active duty by the navy, where she served for another 19 years—long past the mandatory retirement age, by special approval of Congress. She helped wrestle the Department of Defense into updating its computing infrastructure, and she eventually became one of the first women in navy history to attain flag rank. At her promotion to commodore in 1983, her words as she shook the hand of President Ronald Reagan were “I’m older than you are.” She finally retired for good in 1986, at the age of 79. Hopper died in 1992, but her legacy lives on. Over the years she’s had many things named after her, including a navy ship, a Cray supercomputer, and Grace Hopper College, at Yale University. She was posthumously honored with a Google Doodle in December of 2013, and with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in November of 2016.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

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

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

He devised a simple trick for estimating how long the Berlin Wall would stand. He did the math in his head and announced his prediction to a friend, Chuck Allen. The wall would stand at least two and two-thirds more years but no more than twenty-four more years, he said. Gott went back to America. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” From 1990 to 1992 the wall was demolished. That was twenty-one to twenty-three years after Gott’s prediction and within the range he announced. Gott called his secret the “delta t argument.” “Delta t” means change in time. It’s also known as the Copernican method, after Nicolaus Copernicus, the great Polish astronomer of the Renaissance.


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

Progressives regarded Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as beacons of hope for mankind—and this precisely because they were considered expressions of nationalism, promising national independence and self-determination to enslaved peoples around the world. Conservatives from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower likewise spoke of nationalism as a positive good, and in their day Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were welcomed by conservatives for the “new nationalism” they brought to political life. In other lands, statesmen from Mahatma Gandhi to David Ben-Gurion led nationalist political movements that won widespread admiration and esteem as they steered their peoples to freedom.1 Surely, the many statesmen and intellectuals who embraced nationalism a few generations ago knew something about this subject, and were not simply trying to drag us back to a more primitive stage in our history, to war-mongering and racism.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

This idea allied naturally with new economic analysis led by the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, that the freedom to pursue self-interest, constrained only by competition, produced superior results to what could be achieved through public regulation and planning, and formed the intellectual foundations of the policy revolutions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. While the new ideologies of left and right presented themselves as being diametrically opposed to each other, they had in common an emphasis upon the individual, and a fondness for meritocracy: the morally meritocratic elite of the left vied with the productively meritocratic elite of the right.


Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, East Village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Live Aid, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, University of East Anglia, young professional

should be allowed to take place, if at all possible. We had been determined to bring back reports of a thriving society with which to deflect the ‘Evil Empire’ cliché current in the West in the mid-1980s, but blimey, they didn’t make it easy. If the authorities had actually been in league with Ronald Reagan they couldn’t have done much more to undermine our idealistic faith in the possibility that the Soviet Union was A Good Thing. The whole trip was more or less a joke. We played gigs to rooms full of middle-aged party officials, went on sightseeing trips with clearly censored and near-mute translator-guides, were followed round our hotel and in the streets by anonymous-looking, green-suited men and were fed an enervating diet of watery cabbage.


pages: 263 words: 81,542

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

Most of the time, he says, “it was one of the things you knew about in terms of handling papers—‘Oh, no, this is not the time to get him to sign these.’”268 Many of the people closest to Nixon only realized how much he had been torn apart by his drinking when it was too late—in his final days as president. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger, who eventually served under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, was shocked when the president turned to Kissinger for help with the emotional price of his resignation. After a long, teary, and drunken conversation—Nixon sobbed and Kissinger insincerely reassured him—Nixon hung up. Later he officially called Kissinger on the phone to tell him that he had decided to resign.


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

Tens of thousands of American riders of "Harleys" wear the manufacturer's logo tattooed on their arms and refuse to ride robot-produced Japanese replicas, despite the fact that the Japanese bikes are lower priced and technologically far more sophisticated. To them, a Harley is more than a motorcycle; it is a symbol of the American ethos. Even free-trade advocate Ronald Reagan seemed to acknowledge this when, in 1983, without obvious economic or military reasons, he authorized whopping tariffs to protect the Harley-Davidson company and its 1,400 employees. Third, deindustrialization of the United States in particular has frightening implications both for the world economy and for Japan.


pages: 273 words: 86,821

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio J. Mendez, Matt Baglio

Ayatollah Khomeini, disinformation, false flag, Ronald Reagan

On January 21, 1981, the fifty-two remaining American hostages were finally released. Jimmy Carter flew to Germany to meet with them personally, but by this time the damage to his political career was irreversible. His failure to resolve the crisis caused him to be seen as a weak and ineffective leader, and Ronald Reagan had easily defeated him in the 1980 presidential election. Rubbing salt into the wound, the Iranians had chosen the date of Reagan’s inauguration as the day they would hand over the hostages. In all, the hostages had spent almost fifteen months in captivity with the United States government unable to do anything to effect their release.


pages: 266 words: 86,324

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

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

The socialist historian Richard Henry Tawney, for example, put it like this: “Historians give an appearance of inevitability…by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up.”5 And the historian Roberta Wohlstetter, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, said it this way: “After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.”6 In some sense this idea is encapsulated in the cliché that hindsight is always 20/20, but people often behave as if the adage weren’t true.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Von Mises argued that as a result, the social welfare states then emerging in places like France or England, let alone Denmark or Sweden, would, within a generation or two, inevitably lead to fascism. In this view, the rise of bureaucracy was the ultimate example of good intentions run amok. Ronald Reagan probably made the most effective popular deployment of this line of thought with his famous claim that, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” The problem with all this is that it bears very little relation to what actually happened.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

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

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

We may well increase some gaps in coverage, such as refusing to cover particular individuals (immigrants) or refusing to cover particular procedures (knee and back surgery, perhaps, until they become more effective). But the total expenditures on the health of the elderly will rise both in absolute and per capita terms, not fall. That is the general trend of Western societies since the late nineteenth century and no reformers, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, have really taken on entitlement spending through government and beaten it back. It’s simply too popular. Through all these programs, our altruism will remain intact or probably expand in terms of its absolute magnitude. That said, aid from the government will increasingly fall short of a growing set of demands, so unequal treatment will be more explicitly recognized as the norm.


pages: 281 words: 79,958

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

In the United States, as many as ten million people were exposed to DES by 1971, when it was pulled from the market. “DES Daughters,” as they came to be known, are at increased risk for several types of cancer, as well as structural abnormalities of the reproductive tract, complications with pregnancy, and infertility. Fear builds far more easily than it dissipates. Ronald Reagan once famously claimed that the “nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” If anyone needed a reminder of how far our faith in science had fallen by the end of the twentieth century, Vioxx demonstrated that five other words could prove just as frightening: “Trust me, I’m a scientist.”


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

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

But this connection between political ideology and empathy is not as strong as it might first appear. For one thing, even the stereotypes are more nuanced. Some prominent liberal politicians—Michael Dukakis comes to mind, perhaps Al Gore as well—are seen as, and present themselves as, rational technocrats, careful problem solvers. And some more conservative politicians—such as Ronald Reagan—are remarkably good at presenting themselves as empathically connected to others. More to the point, it is too crude to associate liberal policies with empathy. Consider that many policies associated with liberalism are also endorsed by libertarians, who are, by standard empathy measures, the least empathic individuals of all.


How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers by Richard Cohen

Anton Chekhov, Bonfire of the Vanities, colonial rule, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Joan Didion, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, University of East Anglia

One day the young prince, wandering around the palace, sees a tapestry in which a lion features. He strikes the featured beast with his fist, gashes his skin on a nail beneath the tapestry, and dies of gangrene. An unusual example of situational irony came in 1981, when John W. Hinckley, Jr., attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and every one of his shots missed. However, a round ricocheted off the bulletproof presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Thus a vehicle made to protect the president from gunfire was partly responsible for his being shot. — So why is irony so vital to what writers do? For me, the best answer comes from a surprising source.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Who would have guessed that a tool that many thought would empower free speech might force us to pass laws to limit that speech? About the only thing we can say with assurance about the future of our government is that it will have to design new rules to adapt. We believe that there is a very real risk that it might take a Hobbesian, authoritarian turn. It is essential that this not happen. Perhaps the words of Ronald Reagan best summarize our responsibilities to the future: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”58 CHAPTER TEN SACRED VALUES Novi Coeptus AS TECHNOLOGY AND THE AUTONOMOUS REVOLUTION race forward, we are being inundated with substitutional equivalences and new institutional forms.


pages: 267 words: 85,265

That Wild Country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands by Mark Kenyon

American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, clean water, Donald Trump, land tenure, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

There didn’t seem to be any consensus on how the issue should be solved, whether by privatizing public lands, transferring them to states, or forcing the federal government to change its ways. But despite the unorganized nature of the movement, the rebellion’s general anti-federal-government sentiments had momentum. And nothing more colorfully illustrated this than when Ronald Reagan, while campaigning for president in 1980, said to “count him in” as a Sagebrush Rebel. Acquiring a presidential candidate (and later president) as a champion might have been the greatest win of the entire rebellion. The movement’s momentum continued once Reagan took office and the GOP took the Senate.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

With a scientific pocket calculator, you can use the trigonometric functions sine and cosine to calculate the value of the expression [sin 666°+ cos (6 × 6 × 6)°]. Simply enter 666 and hit the [sin] button and save that number, then enter 216 (= 6 × 6 × 6) and hit the [cos] button, and add the number you get to the number you saved. The number you will obtain is a good approximation of the negative of phi. Incidentally, President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan changed their address in California from 666 St. Cloud Road to 668 to avoid the number 666, and 666 was also the combination to the mysterious briefcase in Quentin Tarantino's movie Pulp Fiction. One clear source of the mystical attitude toward whole numbers was the manifestation of such numbers in human and animal bodies and in the cosmos, as perceived by the early cultures.


pages: 266 words: 85,265

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance

classic study, fixed income, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hive mind, impulse control, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, nocebo, personalized medicine, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, side project, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Yogi Berra

He was so close, he said, he could see the barrel of the rocket launcher. In reality, the helicopter that was attacked was half an hour ahead of his. Similarly, Hillary Clinton once claimed she had been shot at by a sniper in a Bosnian airport, when in fact she had been warmly received there alongside the comedian Sinbad. Ronald Reagan once told a moving story of a World War II pilot who chose to go down with his gunner that later turned out to be the plot of a movie he had seen. It’s safe to say the American public did not tolerate any of these blunders, viewing them all as outright lies. Most of the memory experts I spoke with, however, sympathized with these people, just as they’d sympathize with witnesses who thought they’d identified a criminal, only to find out years later they had remembered the wrong face.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

I’ve often said to people in the Federal Reserve, ‘If you’re worried about deflation, bring me back, because I can cure that problem.’”1 He grew up in a blue-collar Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, where his father was a postal worker and his mother worked in a dress shop. He won scholarships to Duke University and the University of Chicago Law School, and began to go down a well-trod Washington path, winning a job at law firm Shaw Pittman after leaving the White House after Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. As he navigated through his thirties, he found himself bored with practicing law and, he said, not especially good at it. He read an article that said entrepreneurs start their companies by the time they are 37. He took note of a leveraged buyout deal for Gibson Greetings, led by a New York firm called WesRay, which had delivered a $200 million return on a $1 million investment.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

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

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

In some countries this has been preserved, notably in Scandinavia, where collective bargaining supports a collaborative relationship between employers and employees that has contributed to easing the adjustment to technological change. Elsewhere, however, collective bargaining has been eroded by governments sometimes deliberately acting to weaken unions. The iconic case comes from the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when he refused to accommodate demands by the air traffic controllers. In the standoff that followed, the union (which had endorsed Reagan as president) was crushed as the government managed to keep planes flying until striking controllers threw in the towel. The wider consequence was to immediately weaken the hand of unions across the board, as their most powerful weapon—striking—had been blunted.5 Over time, legislation has further disempowered organised labour.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Eminent sociologist Erving Goffman defined stigma as an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” and that reduces the bearer “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”7 Small wonder that when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease—the most common form of dementia—the diagnosis alone can have devastating effects on self-esteem and social life, and is typically accompanied by feelings of anxiety, depression, shame, and humiliation. Some people think Alzheimer’s is contagious. The stigma is only beginning to diminish as public figures like Ronald Reagan and Glen Campbell have emerged as public faces for the disease. Developing what neurologist Peter J. Whitehouse calls a “humanistic, ecological framework of brain aging”8 would strip it of this stigma. Because there’s no agreed upon way to differentiate between Alzheimer’s and normal aging , and none in the offing, in this framework cognitive decline becomes just part of what it means to be a human getting along in years.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

Public opinion in the United States was strongly against starting a war in Nicaragua, but the Sandinistas’ enemies, the counter-revolutionaries, or Contras for short, were happy to do the ground fighting. This is where covert war comes in handy. Because, for reasons that passeth understanding (mine anyway), the newly elected U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, had big heart-shaped eyes for the Contras, likening them to America’s founding fathers. So instead of sending troops to fight the Sandinistas in South America, we sent money. Lots of money. In 1980 the Reagan administration quietly authorized the CIA to “assist” the Contras with funds, weapons, and training.


pages: 337 words: 87,236

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

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

In the 1960s and 70s, the Founding Fathers went out of fashion because most of them were slaveowners: a poor fit with the ideas of those decades about liberation. They would be back. As the historian H. W. Brands wrote in 2003: ‘The Founders’ revival is in part a reflection of the anti-liberal reaction that began with Ronald Reagan and continues today.’18 A couple of decades on from Brands’ observation, the reputations of the Founding Fathers are on the verge of a more critical interrogation once again. The attack on George Washington’s statue on the night of 18–19 June 2020 was about more than his slaveholding, though.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1986, Congress passed the US–Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement to set a minimum price on Japanese chip exports and require it to buy more American chips, though the semiconductor trade war would continue in the years that followed. Beyond trade measures, research funding was also increased. Even though Ronald Reagan had come to power on a pledge to cut taxes and government spending, the Pentagon was spared from his austerity plans. Defense spending increased to the benefit of military contractors and university research labs. DARPA, the same agency that was started in 1958 in response to the Sputnik 1 launch but now with “Defense” appended to the beginning of its name, got a boost of new funding with a specific focus on computing and networking.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

In 1999 the Americans removed more regulations of their own, allowing financial institutions specialising in different activities to combine into huge corporations. It was a deregulatory two-step, the Brits and Americans taking turns to loosen their rules in attempts to attract business to their own financial centre. Most historians credit the decisions of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – and their successors – to dismantle the architecture of the welfare state and the New Deal to their shared conservative philosophy, and of course that’s important. Just as important, however, was the fact they were trapped in a spiral whereby they had to keep removing regulations to prevent their financial sectors vanishing over the Atlantic.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

I once asked the producers how they felt about having a cigarette maker sponsor a play for children, and their sheepish defense was basically that money has to be taken wherever it can be found. That is part of the problem: we live in a world where funding for the arts is not easy to come by. Tobacco companies in the United States helped fill a void created by Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of support for the arts in the 1980s—making collaborations of this sort more attractive. Performance Space 122 artistic director, Mark Russell, when asked what he thought about such sponsorships replied, “Of course they’re using us. We’re using them too.”9 JAZZ VERSUS CLASSICAL AND ROCK MUSIC Music has been another solid tobacco platform, and for many of the same reasons.

(Carter in 1978 irritated health officials in his own cabinet when he claimed that cigarette manufacturers were striving to make smoking “even more safe than it is today”—implying it was already safe.) Smoking was not mentioned in any of the next four presidential Cancer Control Month proclamations, and Ronald Reagan did not issue a strong statement until 1984, when he announced that avoiding smoking was the “single most important step which can be taken” to decrease one’s risk of cancer. Smoking has figured in most subsequent presidential statements but not in Bill Clinton’s from 1998 or 1999 or in George W.

Many of these monopolies have come under pressure to open their markets to foreign competition, and global trade treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization, have made it easier for the transnationals to gain access. Allan Brandt in his Cigarette Century shows how the White House under Ronald Reagan launched a formidable campaign to force Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, and Thailand to open their markets, using the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Tobacco companies managed to convince the head of that office, Clayton Yeutter, that they were victims of unfair trade practices and in need of assistance; heavy political artillery was then brought to the negotiations, with no consideration given to how breaking into such markets might affect public health.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

According to Security Service reports, Ted Grant, the founder of Militant Tendency, came to be derided even within Militant ranks as a ‘Worzel Gummidge’ who had ‘lost his marbles’.77 Margaret Thatcher’s appetite for intelligence actually increased during her eleven years in office. At a meeting with the new DG, Patrick Walker, in January 1988 she mentioned with approval ‘but some irritation’ the President’s Daily Brief which Ronald Reagan received from the CIA each day before breakfast. The Prime Minister also seemed annoyed by the fact that, at meetings with Jacques Chirac, the French Prime Minister (later President), ‘Chirac always seems able to come out with some piece of intelligence which she has not received.’ Henceforth, it was agreed that the DG should see the Prime Minister every four months.78 What had previously been ad hoc and occasional visits by the DG to Number Ten became routine for the first time since the era of Sir Percy Sillitoe.

The KGB documents which he smuggled out of the residency to meetings with his case officer stunned the small circle of intelligence officers who had access to them. They revealed that for the past year, jointly with the GRU, the KGB had been engaged in the largest peacetime operation in its history. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981, the visibly ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev denounced the policies of the US President Ronald Reagan, who had taken office at the beginning of the year, as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by the long-serving Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who was to succeed him as Soviet leader eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, Andropov announced that, by decision of the Politburo, for the first time in their history the KGB and GRU were to collaborate in a global operation codenamed RYAN (a newly devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie, ‘Nuclear Missile Attack’).

Its purpose was to collect intelligence on the plans by the United States and NATO for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. In reality, no such plans existed. RYAN derived from the paranoid tendencies of the Soviet and KGB leadership at a tense period in the Cold War, fuelled by the anti-Soviet rhetoric of President Ronald Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. Gordievsky reported that his colleagues in the Line PR (political intelligence) in London were considerably less alarmist than the Centre about the threat of nuclear war and viewed Operation RYAN with some scepticism. None, however, was willing to put his career at risk by challenging the Centre’s assessment of the aggressive designs of the Reagan administration and its NATO allies.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

They can be in favor of the Klan, they can be in favor of the Nazis, they can say you shouldn’t be allowed to teach the Holocaust, it doesn’t matter, as long as they remain sufficiently supportive of hawkish Israeli policies. As long as they meet that qualification, it’s fine, they can say whatever they want. Ronald Reagan and the Future of Democracy WOMAN: You mentioned Reagan—I’ve heard you say his administration was the first time the United States didn’t really have a President. Would you enlarge on that, and tell us what your thoughts are on the future of that kind of government? I think it has a big future, myself—in fact, I think the Reagan administration was sort of a peek into the future.

So therefore the Reaganites closed off American markets and poured in huge amounts of public funds. And actually, they were perfectly frank about it to the business community—though of course, not to the public. So when he was Secretary of the Treasury, James Baker proudly proclaimed to a business audience in 1987 that Ronald Reagan “has granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century”—which was far too modest, actually; Reagan probably provided more import relief to industry than all his predecessors combined in that period. 42 Of course, the “free market” ideology is very useful—it’s a weapon against the general population here, because it’s an argument against social spending, and it’s a weapon against poor people abroad, because we can hold it up to them and say “You guys have to follow these rules,” then just go ahead and rob them.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Keynesian orthodoxy started from the assumption that capitalist markets would not really work unless capitalist governments were willing effectively to play nanny: most famously, by engaging in massive deficit “pump-priming” during downturns. While in the ’80s, Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States made a great show of rejecting all of this, it’s unclear how much they really did.25 And in any case, they were operating in the wake of an even greater blow to previous monetary orthodoxy: Richard Nixon’s decision in 1971 to unpeg the dollar from precious metals entirely, eliminate the international gold standard, and introduce the system of floating currency regimes that has dominated the world economy ever since.

By the late 1970s, the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultaneously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shock, widespread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis—all of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off. The moment that we start framing the story this way, it’s easy to see that the next thirty years, the period from roughly 1978 to 2009, follows nearly the same pattern. Except that the deal, the settlement, had changed. Certainly, when both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK launched a systematic attack on the power of labor unions, as well as on the legacy of Keynes, it was a way of explicitly declaring that all previous deals were off. Everyone could now have political rights—even, by the 1990s, most everyone in Latin America and Africa—but political rights were to become economically meaningless.


pages: 760 words: 218,087

The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, Works Progress Administration

“Go see Dr. Hamre.” Back in his office, somewhat dazed, Evey waited to be summoned by Hamre. He recalled a front-page story in The Washington Post he had glanced at that morning before leaving his suburban Virginia home. It detailed enormous cost overruns and delays in the construction of the new Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, at 3.1 million square feet second in size only to the Pentagon among all federal buildings. “I started thinking, ‘Gee, if I’m going to do design and construction, I better start learning about this stuff—here’s one that seems to have gone bad,’” Evey recalled. Evey found the article in the office and had just finished copying it when he was told Hamre wanted to see him right away.

The old bus tunnel—considered such a marvel of mass transit when the Pentagon opened—was replaced by a surface-level bus station in 1977 and closed off altogether in December 1983, a few months after a terrorist bombing killed 260 Marines in Beirut. (The tunnel was converted in 1987 into the headquarters for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization—President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.) But the surface-level bus station allowed buses to drive within nine feet of the building. Moreover, an escalator from the Metro subway station below carried passengers directly into the building—Pentagon security officials dubbed it the “terrorist delivery tube.” The 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway only heightened their concerns.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

After remaking New Haven and Boston in the heyday of federal urban renewal and leading the New York Urban Development Corporation in a groundbreaking but ultimately imperfect experiment in public-private and federal-state collaboration, Logue was now taking on the South Bronx at the dawn of a new era of small-scale, neighborhood-oriented, market-based urban interventions. After Nixon had effectively killed federal urban renewal, Carter’s Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program aimed to incentivize private investment. His successor, Ronald Reagan, went even further in promoting private-sector solutions to cities’ problems. In the South Bronx, Logue would face the worst urban devastation of anywhere he had worked, with fewer resources than he had ever before had at his disposal. “In retrospect, it makes the challenges I faced years ago with Dick Lee in New Haven and John Collins in Boston seem very modest indeed!”

In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when urban renewal money flowed plentifully from Washington, the 1970s and 1980s marked a steady decline in the federal government’s support for housing construction and other urban projects that benefited low- and moderate-income Americans. For example, the Section 235 deep mortgage subsidies created in 1968 that Logue had at first counted on to finance homes in Charlotte Gardens were effectively eliminated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.92 The next year, Reagan canceled Section 8 subsidies designed to encourage construction of buildings for low-income tenants through guaranteeing developers and landlords the difference between fair-market rent and 25 (later 30) percent of occupants’ income. Reagan kept only the cheapest part, the vouchers for individual renters.93 The Reagan administration also cut the Urban Development Action Grant program, aimed at leveraging government funding to spur private investment and jobs, though Logue managed to secure $14,500 for each Charlotte Gardens house out of remaining funds.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

If anything, the boatlift occurred at the exact moment that Cuban Americans were beginning to flex their political muscle. By the time the Mariel refugees arrived, the earlier waves of Cuban Americans were already citizens, and they voted. In 1981, with encouragement from the administration of newly elected president Ronald Reagan, they even created a powerful lobbying group called the Cuban American National Foundation. Thus began the pattern by which aspiring presidents railed against Fidel Castro to win Cuban votes in the inevitable swing state of Florida.48 * * * BEFORE THE MARIEL BOATLIFT, AS after, Miami continued to be defined as much by its intense relation to Cuba as its relation to the rest of the United States.

The young, tall Gorbachev convinced much of his country that ambitious reform would usher in brighter times, and he began to do things no other Soviet leader had done before. He took high-profile, televised trips across the country. He freed dissidents and allowed the screening and publication of films and novels previously banned. He began planning an end to the Soviet war in Afghanistan and surprised Ronald Reagan by proposing reductions in nuclear weapons. Most important, he adopted two new approaches to governance. The first, glasnost, was a campaign for greater openness and transparency in government and public life. The second, perestroika, was a restructuring of the economy, the party, and politics.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

No country as affluent as ours can allow any citizen or his family not to have an adequate diet, not to have adequate housing, not to have adequate health services and not to have adequate educational opportunity—in short, not to be able to have a life with dignity.62 Congress even passed a guaranteed-income provision in 1970 by a vote of 243 to 155, but the Senate rejected the bill and others like it for fear it would make Americans more lazy. Not even the support of free-market competition advocate Milton Friedman was able to convince them otherwise. Over the next decade, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s version of the social contract gained acceptance, stressing individual responsibility and pure market solutions to social problems. Since that time, the notion of a guaranteed income or negative income tax has sounded preposterous to most of us, a scheme disproved by the fall of the Soviet Union.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Superstar cities and knowledge hubs are not just the theaters where inequality is most on display; their success is inextricably tied to the very clustering of talent and firms that shapes the widening gap between rich and poor. Inequality in America has risen at a stupefying rate over the past couple of decades. After a long period of moderation spanning roughly the New Deal to the election of Ronald Reagan, income inequality shot up to heights that rivaled that of the Gatsby era of the 1920s. Between 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, and 1979, the year before Reagan was elected president, the share of income going to the top 1 percent declined in every single US state except Alaska. In 2007, just before the economic crisis, the share of national income that went to the top 1 percent was 23.5 percent, the highest it had been since 1928.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

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

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

Any change, deep or shallow, impacts quickly on those supposedly cocooned in affluent capitals, even if they have not noticed the tumultuous waves. In the United States’ presidential election, Trump beat Clinton amongst white voters without a college education by 39 percentage points – a margin larger than Ronald Reagan’s against Walter Mondale, when Reagan won his 1984 landslide to give him his second term. Trump not only beat Clinton by nearly fifty points among blue-collar white men, but by almost thirty points among non-college-educated white women. The areas where he particularly flourished were in the so-called Rust Belt of the United States: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.


pages: 321 words: 92,258

Lift: Fitness Culture, From Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors by Daniel Kunitz

barriers to entry, creative destruction, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Islamic Golden Age, mental accounting, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Upton Sinclair, Works Progress Administration

Recognizing the potential of this new technology was only one way Missett proved a more adept businesswoman than Sorensen: she also paid employees better and nurtured her brand more effectively, for instance, by copywriting it. Harnessing video effectively led Jazzercise to be listed often in this period as one of the top twenty-five franchises in the United States. Missett’s instructors even performed in the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics. Two years later, President Ronald Reagan honored her as an entrepreneur. Of course, it was Jane Fonda’s videos—which first hit the market in 1982—that imprinted aerobics (and, in some sense, the idea of working out) on popular consciousness. Titled simply Workout, starring Jane Fonda, the cassettes provoked not only a frenzy of sales but also of imitators.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The announcement that the Z particle had been found at the European lab came days before a major week-long meeting of the U.S. High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), which planned research facilities. The news focused minds. American physics was losing ground and needed a dramatic shake-up. George Keyworth, a physicist at Los Alamos who became Ronald Reagan’s science adviser following his election in 1980, said America’s world leadership in high-energy physics had declined. “In the years American physicists squandered on a pork barrel squabble, the Europeans moved boldly ahead,” he said.27 The mood was captured in a New York Times editorial published in June 1983 as the physicists arrived at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, for the second day of their meeting.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

The Planetary Society is the world’s largest public-membership space-advocacy organization, and its beginnings are as tied to Voyager as my own. America in the late 1970s was in a state of national crisis: high inflation, high prices (and even rationing) of oil and gas, and federal budget deficits rising to levels not seen in decades. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 partly as a result of a national backlash against President Jimmy Carter’s administration’s inability to get the economy back on track. Reagan interpreted his mandate to be to recover the economy by promoting business growth (this is when the term “Reaganomics” was coined) and cutting taxes and federal spending.


pages: 315 words: 93,522

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

This uncomfortable intersection of corporate sobriety and glorified crime narrative had drawn attention from the self-appointed guardians of the family, who worried about the corrosive nature of the recorded material on the nation’s morals. Bravely leading this self-described “moral crusade” was Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of education. Bennett was a bloated neoconservative, a blithering culture warrior, and a major-league asshole. Under George H. W. Bush, he had served as the nation’s drug czar, overseeing federal antidrug policies that had targeted the same environments from which the gangster rappers now came.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In other words, neoliberalism was not a necessary outcome, but a political construction.52 While Keynesian approaches were eventually able to develop an explanation of stagflation, by then it was too late, and the neoliberal approach had taken over academic economics and the policy world. In short, neoliberalism had become hegemonic. The decade after 1979 saw Margaret Thatcher elected as the British prime minister, Paul Volcker appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States. The IMF and World Bank, facing identity crises after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, were rapidly infiltrated and converted into crucibles of the true neoliberal faith by the 1980s. France undertook a neoliberal turn during the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s, and the major economies of Europe became bound by the neoliberal policies embodied in the constitution of the European Union.


pages: 395 words: 94,764

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

The Order has a civil and military division, and inclusion in the Military Division is regarded as THE HIGHEST CLASS OF BRITISH MILITARY HONOUR OBTAINABLE. Admission to the Civil Division is through personal services rendered in the performance of public duties or which merit royal favour. Foreigners can be admitted as Honorary Members, and these have included RONALD REAGAN in 1989 and the former Mayor of New York RUDOLPH GIULIANI in 2002. Edward the Confessor’s shrine in WESTMINSTER ABBEY was one of the very few to survive the Reformation unmolested. The Abbey was spared much damage because in 1546 Henry VIII declared it to be a cathedral. However, during this time the Bishop of London took the opportunity to divert a goodly portion of the Abbey’s revenues towards his beloved St Paul’s Cathedral, giving rise to the expression ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

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

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

Yet this plane blundered into the airspace of the Soviet Union, where it was promptly shot from the sky by a fighter plane. All 269 passengers and crew perished. It was one of the ugliest moments of the Cold War. Furious US officials accused the Soviets of cold-blooded murder; the outraged Russians insisted the plane had been on a spy mission.21 In the immediate aftermath, President Ronald Reagan announced to the world that to prevent future tragedies, the GPS technology being developed for the military would be made available for civilian use as soon as the satellite network was made operational. We will never know whether having GPS on board would have saved KAL 007. The plane’s navigational systems were superb.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

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

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

In January 1986, Gorbachev proposed the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe and outlined a strategy for eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000; this is often referred to as the January Proposal. He also began the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Mongolia on July 28, 1986. On October 11 of that year, Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met in Reykjavik, Iceland, at Höfði to discuss reducing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. To the immense surprise of both men’s advisers, the two agreed in principle to the removal of their countries’ intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) from Europe and to a global limit of one hundred INF missile warheads each.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

During the 1970s, the US misery index hovered around the mid to high teens, peaking at around 22 percent by 1980. But soon political change, different economics, innovation, and luck would usher in “morning in America,” and elsewhere. The economy would recover, giving the postwar boom new impetus. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of the UK. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected US president. They were to preside over a significant shift in how economies were run. There was increasing skepticism about government programs and intervention in the economy. The existing model of a mixed economy, with significant state involvement, had been unable to deal with stagflation.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

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

He constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking—the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour—did not register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind. 6. Running Out of White Space Have you ever seen the videotape of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan? It’s the afternoon of March 30, 1981. Reagan has just given a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel and is walking out a side door toward his limousine. He waves to the crowd. Voices cry out: “President Reagan! President Reagan!” Then a young man named John Hinckley lunges forward with a .22-caliber pistol in his hand and fires six bullets at Reagan’s entourage at point-blank range before being wrestled to the ground.


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

• You can get around this filter and make foreign words memorable by doing three things: • Learn the sound system of your language • Bind those sounds to images • Bind those images to your past experiences PRINCIPLE 2: MAXIMIZE LAZINESS I’ve heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance? —Ronald Reagan Forgetting is a formidable opponent. We owe our present understanding of forgetting to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who spent years of his life memorizing lists of nonsense syllables (Guf Ril Zhik Nish Mip Poff). He recorded the speed of forgetting by comparing the time it took him to learn and then later relearn one of his lists.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

By then the ‘recycling’ of OPEC money had stimulated a high-octane spurt in the development of the financial markets. The deregulation of international flows of money in the UK and US during the early 1980s certainly helped this continue. But more important was the fact that the demand for capital created by government deficits grew and grew. Ronald Reagan was a key culprit. After his election to the US presidency in 1980 Reagan slashed income taxes. He adhered to ‘supply side’ theories which predicted that lower taxes would stimulate effort and growth to such an extent that tax revenue as a whole would not fall, and there would be no budget deficit as a result of the tax cut.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

[back] *** 5 Although numerous liberals, including unquestionably Roosevelt himself, were also reluctant. And some chose to become conservatives on the issue. [back] *** 6 In time, it should be observed, even for Republican Presidents. In 1969, President Richard Nixon proclaimed his conversion to Keynes. So later, in policy if not in name, did President Ronald Reagan. [back] *** 7 Also, he is no longer boss in the old sense. Rather, he is chairman of what I have elsewhere called the technostructure. This makes the significant decisions. The name of the current head of Exxon or IBM is unknown outside the industry. All the world knew of Rockefeller and Watson.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

GOVERNMENT AS CREATOR OF PLATFORMS One of the best examples of a government unlocking excess capacity is when the United States opened up the space-based Global Positioning System, which was originally built to aid in deterrence of nuclear attack during the Cold War. It was in response to the tragedy of a Korean Airlines passenger plane shot down by the USSR in 1983 after the plane strayed into prohibited Soviet airspace, and 269 people were killed. These tragic deaths could have been avoided if the pilot had had access to GPS. So President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.1 The U.S. government initially configured the GPS platform to determine positions with a one-hundred-meter resolution—adequate for determining whether you were in another country’s airspace, but not that useful if you were lost in a city.


pages: 338 words: 92,465

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century by Katherine S. Newman, Hella Winston

active measures, blue-collar work, business cycle, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, desegregation, factory automation, high-speed rail, information security, intentional community, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, performance metric, proprietary trading, reshoring, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

“In effect, we have a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.” The report condemned the American high school with this memorable conclusion: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” President Ronald Reagan called for enhanced rigor in high-school education to ensure we could compete internationally. The renewed focus on academic quality spurred by A Nation at Risk has perpetuated a nearly continuous and anxious drumbeat about the competitiveness of American education at the top of the academic spectrum.


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

These struggles eventually led to Heath’s electoral defeat, which then led to his replacement as Conservative leader by Thatcher in 1975, the year during which Dawkins completed his book. Ever since then, the two have been linked by observers who have perceived a deeper connection between the fortunes of the biologist and the former chemist. ‘At the same time that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher preached that greed was good for society, good for the economy, and certainly good for those with anything to be greedy about, biologists published books in support of those views’, writes the primatologist Frans de Waal. ‘Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene taught us that since evolution helps those who help themselves, selfishness should be looked at as a driving force for change rather than a flaw that drags us down.’1 For de Waal, then, The Selfish Gene was a tributary to the great current of neoliberal ideology that swept through the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

One of his aims was to understand what was happening to the institution of marriage. Divorce rates had more than doubled in the past two decades, both in the United States and in many European countries. It was clear that the world of marriage had changed dramatically. Some commentators have blamed changes in divorce laws for the trend: Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, signed a bill introducing “no-fault” divorce in 1969, meaning that either partner could simply walk away from the marriage by demanding a divorce. Other states followed. But Becker knew that couldn’t be the answer: If the husband wanted a divorce to run off with his mistress, no-fault divorce didn’t make it easier for him to do that, just cheaper.


pages: 303 words: 93,545

I'm a stranger here myself: notes on returning to America after twenty years away by Bill Bryson

flying shuttle, illegal immigration, millennium bug, National Debt Clock, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, telemarketer

I think this is a wonderful idea, and I can’t believe that it hasn’t been picked up by more countries. Speaking personally, I have a great deal to be thankful for. I have a wife and children I am crazy about. I have my health and retain full command of most of my faculties (albeit not always simultaneously). I live in a time of peace and prosperity. Ronald Reagan will never be president again. These are all things for which I am grateful, and I am pleased to let the record show it. The only downside is that the passage of Thanksgiving marks the inescapable onset of Christmas. Any day now—any moment—my dear wife will appear beside me and announce that the time has come to shift my distended stomach and get out the festive decorations.


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

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

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, traveling chautauquas toured the country, offering speakers and demonstrations in large open-air tents. * * * 11 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his “I Hate War” speech from the amphitheater platform in 1936. Ronald Reagan addressed the Third General Chautauqua Conference on U.S.–Soviet Relations via satellite in 1987. Thomas Edison was the son-in-law of Chautauqua cofounder Lewis Miller. George Gershwin finished his composition of his Concerto in F in a Chautauqua practice shack in 1925. The Athenaeum Hotel was one of the first hotels to have electric lights.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

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

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

He railed against government regulations that encumber entrepreneurship and restrict markets. What Adam Smith was to the eighteenth century, Milton Friedman was to the twentieth. As Friedman’s landmark television series Free to Choose was being broadcast in 1980, the world economy stood in the throes of a singular transformation. Inspired by Friedman’s ideas, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and many other government leaders began to dismantle the government restrictions and regulations that had been built up over the preceding decades. China moved away from central planning and allowed markets to flourish—first in agricultural products and, eventually, in industrial goods.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

We have come to fear the growing economic power of China and, to a lesser degree, India—and not without good reason. In this context, it’s easy to see why top-of-the-line math and science whizzes are a sign of hope. Indeed, 2004 Intel Awards emphasized the economic value of science and math prodigies. In an elaborate ceremony in a neon-bedecked room at Portland’s Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Intel’s CEO Craig Barrett described the young winners as symbols of America’s commitment to staunching overseas job loss. They were, Barrett said, a “weapon” in the war for American economic dominion. This is all part of why high performers in math and science have such perceived value to colleges and companies—they are seen as a needed form of intellectual artillery.


pages: 302 words: 92,546

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin

23andMe, classic study, do well by doing good, double helix, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, life extension, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, medical residency, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, sugar pill, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Spiral CT technology is detecting a very different category of lung cancer, small abnormalities that meet the pathologic criteria for lung cancer yet are not destined to cause symptoms or death. Spiral CT is causing a substantial amount of overdiagnosis. Looking hard for lung cancer can cause real problems. Just ask Brian Mulroney. He was Canada’s prime minister for a decade (1984 to 1993). He was in the Conservative Party and was sometimes viewed as Canada’s answer to Ronald Reagan. In 2005, he went to his doctors for a routine checkup. He was in good health. As part of the checkup, he had a spiral CT scan of his lungs. It showed two small but worrisome nodules. He had surgery to have them removed. Following surgery he developed pancreatitis, a rare but serious postoperative complication.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

But the union presence in these Midwestern plants was not the result of contemporary organizing by the UFCW, but rather of Smithfield Foods’ aggressive acquisition during the 1980s of smaller companies like John Morrell and Farmland, plants and companies that had been unionized by the PWOC in its more radical days, in the decades prior to the election of Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s campaign to deunionize America. But the Tar Heel plant dwarfed all other facilities in size, workforce numbers, and production output. The union understood that its ability to hold or set decent standards in its older Midwestern meat-packing contracts would be eroded or threatened if it couldn’t organize a union in the shiny new factory, the biggest such facility in the world.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

The only resilient structures are the boats that often drop anchor out in the lagoon (Senses, a 193-foot yacht owned by Google cofounder Larry Page, has been spotted offshore). To see what a fortress on the sea looks like, Marshallese have only to take a short boat ride out to Kwajalein, the largest of the Marshall atolls, which is home to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. The twelve hundred Americans who live on the base launch missiles, operate space weapons programs, and track NASA research, supported by an annual budget of $182 million. Kwajalein is not immune to the threat of rising seas. But the US military has no problem finding the money for new seawalls and other protective infrastructure.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

“The same properties that make gold valuable, make bitcoin valuable.” Cameron and his brother may have just started climbing the learning curve of this new digital currency, but as economics majors at Harvard, they were well versed in the world of old-fashioned money. At Harvard, they’d studied under Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan and the real-life inspiration for the character of Mr. Burns on The Simpsons. The brothers were steeped in the works of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and John Maynard Keynes. They understood that gold was worth what people were willing to pay for it—a case of classic supply and demand. They also understood what drove that demand—what made gold “good” money.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Both David and Charles Koch are prolific charitable donors, particularly in cancer research and the arts, but their spending on political influence has taken on history-making proportions. David Koch embarked on an unsuccessful campaign as the vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in the 1980 US presidential election, running to the right of Ronald Reagan, but the Kochs have since stayed away from podiums and focused instead on funding research, candidates, and organizations that promote their view of economic freedom. Over the course of four decades, they have spent many millions of dollars to fund think tanks, academic institutions, donor groups, public relations campaigns, and politicians that support their cause.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

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

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

The FBI trains a hyperawareness of surroundings into the ghosts. We are diligent to the point of being human early-alert systems. Look around you every once in a while. You might spot a spy. The NSA could have done a better job of heeding that old Russian proverb made famous by President Ronald Reagan. In 2013 a contractor and former CIA employee walked out of the NSA with thumb drives loaded with (according to the NSA) an estimated 1.7 million classified files. Edward Snowden has personally admitted to stealing hundreds of thousands of highly classified files detailing US intelligence-collection programs by the NSA.


pages: 340 words: 91,745

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

“If your question is three seconds long, how much talk material can they create in that three seconds? Maybe in doing so they can come up with a whole new strategy. They can come up with maybe thirty seconds of things to say to you. That’s valuable, right? So keep it as short and simple as you can.” And finally: ask follow-up questions. “Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘Trust, but verify.’ In the Agency, some of us used to say, ‘In God we trust, everyone else we polygraph,’” Phil said. “We can never have enough information. Maybe the two best words you can use are ‘What else?’” If this sounds like a lot to remember, it is. “Not everyone will do it well,” said Phil.


pages: 294 words: 89,406

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

Russ’s employees put a total of three million gallons of toxic waste into this hole, which then spent the next few years seeping through watercourses until in 1979 it was found polluting the Susquehanna River. While the three state agencies of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania struggled to close down dumping grounds faster than Russ could find new ones, Ronald Reagan was elected, and Russ got a stroke of luck. Congress passed a law (in 1980) exempting oil wastes from EPA regulation ‘pending further research’ into whether they were really all that bad. After paying fines and closing down the Pittston hole, Russ Mahler started a new oil company called Quanta Resources, and somehow convinced the New York authorities that despite having the same owner, employees and assets, it was nothing to do with the serial polluter that they had banned in 1976.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

They also legitimize the growing desire of autocratic and authoritarian regimes to subject cyberspace to territorialized controls, and the censorship and surveillance practices that go along with them. By our actions in the West, we contribute to this trend abroad. We preach about the need for closed autocratic societies to “open up,” or, as Ronald Reagan famously thundered, to “tear down this wall,” and yet vis-à-vis cyberspace we are contributing to state censorship and surveillance. Although states were once thought to be powerless in the face of the Internet, the giants have awoken from their slumber. Left unchecked, these trends will result in the gradual disintegration of what is in the long-term interest of all citizens: an open and secure commons of information on a planetary scale.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In a sense, Dershowitz is a superstar by proxy: he benefits from the ability of his superstar clients whose labor has been more directly leveraged by digitization and networks.* Laws and institutions have also changed in ways that often boost the incomes of superstars. The top marginal tax rate was as high as 90 percent during the Eisenhower years and over 50 percent early in Ronald Reagan’s administration, but fell to 35 percent in 2002, where it remained through 2012. While this shift obviously boosted the after-tax income of top earners, research suggests it can also affect reported pre-tax income by motivating people to work harder (because they keep more of each dollar they earn) and report more of their actual income, rather than seek ways to hide or shelter it (because the costs of reporting to tax authorities aren’t as high as before).


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Their monopoly power was eventually broken when the Japanese and Germans invaded the US auto market in the 1980s. The return to conditions of greater competition, which became a vital policy objective in the 1970s, then forced labour-saving technologies. But this came fairly late in the game. If all of that failed then there were people like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and General Augusto Pinochet waiting in the wings, armed with neoliberal doctrine, prepared to use state power to crush organised labour. Pinochet and the Brazilian and Argentinian generals did so with military might, while both Reagan and Thatcher orchestrated confrontations with big labour, either directly in the case of Reagan’s showdown with the air traffic controllers and Thatcher’s fierce fight with the miners and the print unions, or indirectly through the creation of unemployment.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

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

For many years the Caribbean formed a crucial stepping-stone for cocaine bound for the United States. In the “Miami Vice” years of the 1980s, speedboats would race from the Caribbean into Florida loaded with cocaine, then head back stacked with dollars. But that route was effectively shut down by the South Florida Task Force, an initiative of President Ronald Reagan that coordinated the work of the FBI, DEA, customs, tax authorities, and other federal agencies, under the command of Vice President George H. W. Bush. The task force made an immediate impact, and the Caribbean route dried up. Traffickers moved west, using Mexico as the main point of entry instead.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Yet all the money and students America had to offer couldn’t change the fact that the hybrid university was a strange and inefficient institution, conflicted against itself and disinclined to do the hard work of educating undergraduates well. The student protest movement of the 1960s had turned large swaths of the electorate against the universities. Ronald Reagan used antistudent outrage as a springboard to the California governor’s mansion and promptly ousted Kerr. In 1971 the government-sponsored Newman Report (no relation to John Henry Newman) found “disturbing trends toward uniformity in our institutions, growing bureaucracy, overemphasis on academic credentials, isolation of students and faculty from the world.”


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Most battleships were scrapped quite soon after the Second World War, but the US kept four Iowa class battleships, designed in the late 1930s, in reserve, meaning they were kept on a care and maintenance basis. They were put back into service in the 1960s and the 1980s and again in the early 1990s. The USS New Jersey was briefly recommissioned in the Vietnam war, when it bombarded the land with 3,000 16-inch shells. All four were recommissioned by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and became platforms for launching cruise missiles. USS Wisconsin also fired 300 tons of 16-inch shells during the 1991 Gulf war. Not since the early nineteenth century had ships this old been in action. The Falklands war of 1982, immortalised by Jorge Luis Borges as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’, certainly involved some balding equipment.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

But there are challenges too, especially when considering the use of new technologies to study the human brain, as opposed to model systems, and it is instructive to consider the history of the genome project to better understand them. Challenges in Mapping the Human Genome The first official funding for the Human Genome Project originated with a proposal from then-President Ronald Reagan in his 1987 budget submission to the Congress. It subsequently passed both houses. The project was planned for fifteen years. In 1990 the two major funding agencies, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, developed a memorandum of understanding in order to coordinate their mapping efforts.


pages: 293 words: 89,712

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

The grim slide from comedy to anguished absurdity accelerated when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sought to mark himself apart. In an interview with a small Jewish cable television network, he made the blandly genocidal statement that the Palestinians were an “invented people”.1 It was an assertion he felt comfortable repeating days later when he evoked Ronald Reagan – a mythical, folklorish figure among Republicans – to underline his “historical” claim. Gingrich’s mendacious statement was not a historical or an anthropological one. It was politics – one with a long history in Palestine. Zionism, the nineteenth-century European movement to colonise Palestine, has always struggled with an inconveniently inhabited Holy Land.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Despite Soviet assurances that these trucks would never be used for military purposes, the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan six years later was facilitated by an armada of Soviet vehicles whose drive trains included Kama engines.17 In 1981 Weiss had been at work on technology transfer to the Soviets for about a decade when President Francois Mitterrand invited President Ronald Reagan to meet with him privately en route to the G7 Summit in Ottawa. The French would soon pass a wealth of Soviet documents into American hands, and considering Weiss’s portfolio with the NSC and his Legion of Honor decoration, it was inevitable that this formidable body of intelligence—now known as the Farewell Dossier—would eventually come into his possession.


pages: 313 words: 95,361

The Vast Unknown: America's First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn

Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Great Leap Forward, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

—NORMAN DYHRENFURTH’S EXPEDITION PROPOSAL FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE TEAM’S DEPARTURE, 350 INDIVIDUALS AND companies had contributed to the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition, although most of the donations were small. King Leopold III of Belgium donated $50. The ledger sheet also tallied a $20 contribution from actor Ronald Reagan, who Dyhrenfurth had once hired to narrate the film of one of his students. The expedition’s hefty price tag drew ridicule from some mountaineering purists. European newspapers ran a cartoon depicting Americans dismantling Everest piece by piece and packing it into a moving van. Within the small American climbing community, Charles Houston, a veteran of Nanda Devi and K2 expeditions in the 1930s, wrote a letter to Dyhrenfurth stressing that they would do fine with more modest quantities of supplies.


pages: 372 words: 96,474

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.) by Pete Jordan

big-box store, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Kickstarter, Mason jar, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, wage slave

And not content with just the one experience, in the couple years that followed, Ford went on to dish in Ann Arbor for his board at his University of Michigan fraternity house. Remarkably, while a teenage Ford was scrubbing in Michigan, at the very same time, only a couple hundred miles away, another future president and fellow scumbag was also in the suds. At Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, slumped over the sinks through his first two years of college was Ronald Reagan. But maybe it’s unkind to call these two dishpit alumni scumbags. After all, Ford had once complied with my mailed request to inscribe a photo of himself—while president—as he loaded a dishwashing machine. He’d written, “To Pete, another fine dishwasher, Gerald Ford.” And besides, these We Never Forget 281 two characters actually busted suds, unlike that malarkeyspewing president/scumbag Lyndon Johnson.


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

But starting with the rise of think tanks in the 1970s, in those disciplines that most affect policy (economics notably), it became normal to be hired to simply come up with justifications for preconceived political positions. By the 1980s, things had gone so far that politicians were willing to openly admit, in public forums, that they saw economic research as a way of coming up with justification for whatever it is they already wanted people to believe. I still remember during Ronald Reagan’s administration being startled by exchanges like this one on TV: ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Our main priority is to enact cuts in the capital gains tax to stimulate the economy. INTERVIEWER: But how would you respond to a host of recent economic studies that show this kind of “trickle-down” economics doesn’t really work?


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

According to Jose Benki, a speech scientist at the University of Michigan, speakers who use frequent short pauses are more persuasive than speakers who are perfectly fluent.9 The reason is that pausing four or five times per minute sounds most natural to most people. If you barrel through those pauses, you sound too scripted and your audience doesn’t have time to think or react. The best radio announcers and interviewers (Larry King, Vin Scully, Terry Gross) pause several times per minute. The best orators (Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton) use even longer and more dramatic breaks. Colin Firth’s portrayal of the stuttering King George VI in The King’s Speech won our emotions and an Academy Award, not for the words, but for the silence between the words. Part of the genius of these communicators derives from deliberative thought, at least at some early stage in their lives when they internalized the specifics of how long they should delay at different times.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

They argued that unless European countries, in particular, rolled back the securities that had been built up since the Second World War for the industrial working class and the bureaucratic public sector, and unless the trades unions were ‘tamed’, de-industrialisation (a new concept at the time) would accelerate, unemployment would rise, economic growth would slow down, investment would flow out and poverty would escalate. It was a sobering assessment. They wanted drastic measures, and in politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan they had the sort of leaders willing to go along with their analysis. The tragedy was that, while their diagnosis made partial sense, their prognosis was callous. Over the next 30 years, the tragedy was compounded by the fact that the social democratic political parties that had built up the system the neo-liberals wished to dismantle, after briefly contesting the neo-liberals’ diagnosis, subsequently lamely accepted both the diagnosis and the prognosis. 6 THE PRECARIAT One neo-liberal claim that crystallised in the 1980s was that countries needed to pursue ‘labour market flexibility’.


pages: 289 words: 90,176

Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds by Rusty Bradley, Kevin Maurer

digital map, friendly fire, operational security, Ronald Reagan, trade route

We did, however, find out that it was not taken well that we had “borrowed” the general’s escort aircraft and used most of their ammunition. Chapter 19 TODAY IS NOT YOUR DAY No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. —RONALD REAGAN The first F-18s checked on station and dropped down into view. The roar of their engines was a welcome sign that help was arriving. I could hear Mike on the radio starting to identify targets and buildings that needed to be leveled. Standing on top of Sperwan Ghar, I could see hundreds of compounds in the sea of green that offered the Taliban fighters good cover.


I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

I finally got Bear Stearns to agree to underwrite a $6 million equity offering. Half of the money would redeem the initial investors’ preferred stock; the other half would go into Home Depot’s business operations. But it was a dicey moment. The economy was in a recession; the market was in the crapper. Ronald Reagan had just become president, but Reaganomics hadn’t yet worked its magic. Inflation was still through the roof; Paul Volcker and the Fed were pushing interest rates higher. And the week before the deal was set to get done, Bear Stearns told me it only had orders for $3 million of the $6 million.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Or, even worse, that they’re counterproductive because they reduce people’s incentive to work. The term is associated with the writings of the mid-twentieth-century novelist and political theorist Ayn Rand. The investor and philanthropist George Soros and others have used the term in connection with the policy agendas, initiated around 1980, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But while Reagan and Thatcher clearly worked to shrink and change the welfare systems in their countries, they never sought to completely eliminate them. Market fundamentalism is a theoretical condition—a society with capitalism, but without welfare—that doesn’t exist in reality.


pages: 487 words: 95,085

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

When I pulled into the driveway, nothing seemed out of place. It could easily have been 1988, right down to the 1988 Reliant K-car wagon. Inside the front door, I heard Mom call from the kitchen, "Ethan, would you like a sandwich? I have egg salad." I walked into the kitchen, unchanged since Ronald Reagan ruled Earth. My brother, Greg, and I once found a pile of cleaning products that predated bar-coding on a hallway shelf. "No sandwich, thanks, Mom. Am I, or am I not, here about a dead biker?" Mom cut her own sandwich in two. "I know for a fact that your diet is appalling. Greg tells me that all you eat is Doritos and fruit leather."


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

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

They'll just wait for the next version to come out - something more "user friendly." * * * Ethan got through to his parents on a cellular phone around sunset; he learned they were having the grandest of times, barbecuing burgers and corn on the front lawn, and meeting their neighbors for the first time in years. "Mom said the Ronald Reagan Library was untouched. Like I care." I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the phone receiver held up to her ear by his father. * * * Todd didn't come to the party. He was out on an actual, real, genuine, not-fake, date-style DATE tonight


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

Those campaigning for political equality among the races, the respect of human rights universally and the sanctity of human life outside of the United States were seen as elitist, out of touch, effete snobs who were getting in the way of serious governance. It played (and still plays) very well with the voting public. In his 1966 campaign for governor of California, Ronald Reagan attacked Berkeley, claiming that ‘a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to a great university’. A year later, Nixon attacked university activism as ‘elitist’ and ‘morally relativist’. The year after, presidential nominee George Wallace said on the campaign trail that he was speaking on behalf of the ‘workin’ folk fed up with bureaucrats in Washington, pointy-headed intellectuals, swaydo intellectual morons tellin’ ’em how to live their lives’.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

She found that the men wrote a great deal about movies (The Empire Strikes Back and The Deer Hunter), basketball (Michigan State beat Indiana State in the NCAA championship), music (Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” the Knack’s “My Sharona”), and politics (whether President Jimmy Carter could defeat Hollywood actor and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan). But mostly the men working through the night at the computer center came across to her as lonely, fixated on fellow classmates and unrequited love, or caught up in the gossip surrounding stars like Carrie Fisher, Sigourney Weaver, Farrah Fawcett, Jacqueline Bisset, and Debbie Harry. * * * Besides offering computer assistance, Magdalena helped the students with their research on everything from writing basic software to writing machine language.


Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

Two of the best anthologies of his work were also published during this period, Language and Politics (1988) and The Chomsky Reader (1987); two excellent introductions to his work were written by Carlos Otero (Radical Priorities [1981] and Language and Politics [1988]); and collections of interviews such as Chronicles of Dissent (1992) and Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with David Barsamian (1994) gave the reader access to interviews on wide-ranging subjects. Scanning this incomplete list of publicationsproduced during an era dominated by a virtual president named Ronald Reagan, an absurd arms race, the decline and dismantling of the Soviet Union, and superpower engagements with such world-menacing despots as Noriega, Hussein, Khaddafi, and Castro, as well as threats to the stability of the free world from Grenada, Nicaragua, and East Timorit becomes evident that a synopsis of Chomsky's output over even a relatively short period file:///D|/export3/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_202.html [4/16/2007 3:21:37 PM] Document Page 203 would only amount to a scratch on the surface of an enormous body of work.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

‘He has a right to expect people to read his letter carefully, but I don’t think one letter from anyone is going to change the foundation’s course’, McGeorge Bundy, then president of the Ford Foundation, commented.68 During the 1980s, thinkers on the left noticed a new trend, one evident since the 1940s but its magnitude underappreciated until the election of Ronald Reagan. Left-leaning policy-makers began to grasp just how influential a tight network of right-wing think-tanks had become in DC, helping to cement Reagan’s victory and guiding his hand in economic decisions. Their criticism had an element of envy, as some on the left bemoaned the lack of similar funding towards ‘progressive’ think-tanks.


pages: 264 words: 89,323

The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe

Amazon Robotics, benefit corporation, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

I was terrified that Mount Rainier, a mere forty-five miles away, would be next, burying us all in ash or lava before we even knew what was happening. The thing about “active” volcanos is that they might erupt in two hundred years or tomorrow, making them sub-ideal things for emotionally crumbly kids to live adjacent to. Speaking of fireballs descending from the sky to kill us all, Ronald Reagan had been elected president. From everything I had heard, which was always filtered first through anxiety and only later through reality, time permitting, nuclear war was more imminent than ever. Reagan was either going to launch a nuke at Moscow before they launched nukes at us or he would be so belligerent as to force them into firing off the first missile just so he could retaliate.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

First, it assumes that the multiplier effects of all this spending will increase economic growth and hence pay for itself. It relies on the borrowing increasing spending, multiplied through the economy. It is the sort of argument the right in the US advanced in advocating unfunded tax cuts under Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Trump. This is a conventional Keynesian GDP growth approach, and there are lots of reasons to be sceptical about its likely success and the impact of the debts that result. If the general problem with GDP growth is that consumption is unsustainably high, it is hard to see how boosting consumption through borrowing is going to make the economy greener.


pages: 301 words: 90,362

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 90 percent rule, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, game design, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Khan Academy, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TED Talk

The National League of Junior Cotillions traces its origins back to the town of Lincolnton, North Carolina, and the year 1979, when a woman named Anne Colvin Winters began teaching etiquette. Winters was a former pageant winner and debutante in her hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, who would go on to be a statewide organizer for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns, focusing on colleges and universities. The little classes she began in Lincolnton eventually grew into a national organization, with three hundred chapters in more than thirty states. Junior Cotillion offered students “a three year curriculum designed to give young people instruction and practice in the courtesies that make life more pleasant for them and those around them.”


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Walter Gilbert leaped up to a blackboard and wrote $3 billion! in bold letters. As if by an alchemy of chalk on slate, the fantasy of human genome sequencing was transformed into a quantifiable plan to be pursued. DeLisi subsequently persisted through approval from the DoE, from Congress, and from President Ronald Reagan, and the Human Genome Project was ultimately fully funded and rolling by 1990. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) was set up to oversee this undertaking, first with Dr. James Watson (from Watson and Crick, of DNA discovery fame) at the helm, and then Dr. Francis S. Collins. Over the next decade, geneticists from twenty universities and research institutes in six countries studied anonymously donated DNA in their quest to sequence the full human genome.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

The Conservative MP Enoch Powell referred to the divine righteousness of British Empire in a speech in 1961, suggesting ‘there was this deep, this providential difference between our empire and those others.’21 Over the 20th century, British imperialists reluctantly relinquished the baton of godly exceptionalism to the United States, where conservative Christians like Ronald Reagan peppered their speeches with chest-thumping praise for America’s manifest destiny. ‘We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago,’ he suggested. ‘We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.’22 Reagan’s providential allusions (greatness was ‘thrust upon us’) are, as Princeton sociologist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, ‘wholly contingent on the erasure or rewriting of three central themes in American history – genocide, slavery and the massive exploitation of waves of immigrant workers.’


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Simpson was scattered and disorganized. Fritsch had management skills and oversaw the business as it grew. The firm’s offices were located in a triangular-shaped building above a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue, about halfway between Dupont Circle and the Washington Hilton, the hotel where the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan had occurred. In time, it grew to employ about twelve people, making it a small company by investigative industry standards. Unlike competitors, Fusion GPS didn’t strive to affect a corporate tone. Instead, its offices resembled a frat house in need of deep cleaning. Employees sat balanced on blow-up balls in front of computers and an open bar was stocked with liquor bottles.


pages: 316 words: 94,886

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

Early in his career, Phil Tetlock, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania, served on a National Research Council committee with a sobering mission: to assess what the social sciences might contribute to rescuing civilization from the threat of nuclear war. It was 1984, during the first term of Ronald Reagan, who in a speech the previous year had referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Political experts felt that the relations between the two nations were “precariously close to the precipice,” said Tetlock. Then, a year later, everything changed. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party and ushered in an era of sweeping reforms.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

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

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

Robert Skidelsky, the noted biographer of John Maynard Keynes, complained in 2005 that “the United States has relied on other countries to adjust their economies to profligate American spending.” His suggestion was that the U.S. government “reduce domestic consumption” with some combination of tax increases and spending cuts. George P. Shultz and Martin Feldstein, two former officials from the Ronald Reagan administration, echoed Skidelsky’s view in 2017. According to them, “Federal deficit spending, a massive and continuing act of dissaving, is the culprit” for America’s trade imbalances. Their solution is to “control that spending.” Just a few months later, Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, argued in 2018 that “to prevent the trade deficit from growing, the United States should increase national savings” by “cutting the federal budget deficit.”


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

“It’s a made-up story about what he imagined the future would be like, because George Orwell lived during a terrible time, and he wanted to make sure we didn’t live in a terrible time. So he warned everyone about what could happen in 1984 if people didn’t watch out.” I took this in like I had taken in all the other political information I picked up from adult conversations, including my belief that Ronald Reagan was literally a puppet, which I found both alarming and cool. The idea that a dead famous writer had fantasized about this year of 1984, the very year I was about to start writing as the date at the top of my kindergarten homework, seemed incredible. When you are a young child, you have no sense of anything that happened before you existed unless it is explicitly spelled out.


pages: 259 words: 87,875

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

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

They arrested Leary and, citing the fact Almeida was high on LSD when she drowned, charged him with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Less than a week later, deputies raided the ranch, confiscated a large quantity of marijuana, hash, and Orange Sunshine, and arrested five people. Leary’s arrest—the second in less than a year—pretty much killed his two-month-old gubernatorial campaign against then-governor of California Ronald Reagan, which Leary had announced in May at a press conference in front of Mystic Arts World. After learning of his friend’s campaign—Leary had lent his voice to the chorus of the Beatles’ 1967 single “All You Need Is Love”—John Lennon wrote the song “Come Together” as a campaign anthem. Leary’s platform included a statewide ban on football, which he felt was too aggressive—baseball being a much more civilized sport—and a legalization of marijuana cultivation.


Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", crack epidemic, desegregation, Multics, Ronald Reagan, Steven Levy, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois

Most of them had once held legitimate jobs that they lost out of either misfortune or misbehavior. Until a few years earlier, they could have gotten a few hundred dollars a month in welfare money, but by 1990, Illinois and many other states eliminated such aid for adult men. The conservative revolution launched by President Ronald Reagan would lead eventually to a complete welfare overhaul, culminating in the 1996 directive by President Bill Clinton that made welfare a temporary program by setting time limits on just about every form of public aid—for men, women, and children. For men like the ones in Robert Taylor, the welfare changes only exacerbated their poverty.


pages: 277 words: 91,698

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build by Jonathan Waldman

Burning Man, computer vision, Ford paid five dollars a day, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Hyperloop, industrial robot, information security, James Webb Space Telescope, job automation, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, off grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing, Yogi Berra

Construction workers were demanding more than they’d been making, but it wasn’t like they were raking it in, certainly not like doctors or lawyers or the corporate executives besieging them. Last, as even Nixon recognized, construction workers were involved in an inflationary cycle, but they were its victims, not its cause. VII. Reagan’s stance especially stung because it was a union hard hat—a carpenter—who probably saved Ronald Reagan’s life. On March 30, 1981, when Reagan left the Hilton Hotel, where he’d been addressing the building and construction trades department of the AFL, Alfred Antonucci, the five-two, sixty-eight-year-old president of Cleveland’s local 1750, was the first person to clobber John Hinkley Jr. on the head, causing his last shots to go wild.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

Exxon started producing small button-sized batteries to power a Swiss watch but the oil company had ambitions to move into electric vehicles and convert a VW car into an electric vehicle. However, as oil prices fell in the following years, the appeal of electric vehicles declined. In 1980, the free marketer Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter to win the presidency. Exxon sold off Whittingham’s technology, and research into lithium-ion batteries largely returned to the domain of academics. ‘The oil crisis of the 1970s went away, top management had changed and they came in one day and looked at a lot of these things and said “you mean the market is not 100 million dollars a year.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

For centuries, republican writers had idealized the home as the anchor of citizenship and community in a restless world of commerce. Now, in the Anglo-Saxon world, the anchor was cut loose. The home was swept away by an international market in credit and debt. Beginning in the 1970s, home-equity refinancing was given a boost by Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Bill which with one hand gave tax privileges to ‘second mortgages’ and with the other took them away from all other types of loan. The cheapest point of credit was now the home. In most of continental Europe, by contrast, the home stayed put in its own legal and material zone.

Swedish and Danish benefits look generous on paper but, in reality, a good deal of what these states give out with one hand, they take back with the other, through fine-tuned taxes. Conversely, public spending in the United States and Britain remained high in the neo-liberal 1980s; Margaret Thatcher managed to cut it in only a single year (1985), Ronald Reagan not even that.61 How sustainable is this state of affairs? In the 1950s and ’60s, high growth and investment generated money for hospitals and pensions. Since the 1970s, however, growth has slowed and the rise in public consumption has been accompanied by a drop in public investment; in the United States and the core European Union (EU12), public investment fell from 4 per cent of GDP in 1975 to around 3 per cent in 2005.

A large part of our confused thinking stems from the simple yet deep-seated error of assuming that ‘traditional’ communities must have lived in a golden age of religion from which there could only have been a fall as people became ‘modern’. In reality, the very opposite happened in America. Americans were less (not more) religious at the time of George Washington than that of Ronald Reagan. In 1776, when the United States declared its independence, Church membership in New England was a lowly 20 per cent. Religious life started to quicken only in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1890, 45 per cent belonged to a Church, chapel or synagogue. Thirty years later, the number had climbed to 59 per cent; in the early twenty-first century, it hovers around 62 per cent.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

From now on, the Syrians and the Palestinians would coordinate their policy on southern Lebanon. Who but they stood against the Israeli army now that Egypt had capitulated? Sadat relied upon dramatic gestures to take the place of serious political argument. Philip Habib, who was to be President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, told me how he sat with the Egyptian leader in the garden of his Cairo home just before the 1977 Jerusalem visit. Sadat had asked Assad and King Husain whether they would be prepared to accompany him on his journey to Israel. They had refused. ‘I am tired of the dwarfs,’ Sadat suddenly shouted at Habib.

Driving through southern Lebanon, we would listen to Haddad’s radio in the car. An angry outburst from the major against the population of a village whom he accused of sheltering ‘terrorists’ would bring a gale of shells onto the nearest roads. It was essential listening. When the results of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential election victory were announced, I was in the village of Qana, which was under the control of the UN’s Fijian battalion. That morning, however, a different mood manifested itself over the air-waves. A few Biblical home truths were imparted (‘For the drunken and glutton shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags’) and there were several reminders of filial duty which presumably appealed to Haddad the family man (‘Hearken unto thy father that begat thee and despise not thy mother when she is old’).

More than a hundred miles away, in Haifa, the Israelis noticed the same unfamiliar effect upon the distant skyline, the creeping darkness that west Beirut’s destruction now placed across the setting sun. From Tripoli and the mountains of the ancient cedars to the land that was Palestine, the sky glowed hot and blood-red. 10 Dawn at Midnight We are now on the eve of achieving what we set forth to accomplish: an end to the bloodshed in Beirut … President Ronald Reagan I September 1982 fifteen days before the Sabra and Chatila massacre. As Safir was the sort of paper that believed in preparing for news stories long in advance. Weeks before the Israelis invaded Lebanon, Bassem Sabbagh, the editor, ordered enough newsprint and generator fuel to go on publishing during a siege.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Washington’s two most skilled consumer advocates, Michael Pertschuk, chairing the FTC, and the unaffiliated, unquenchable Ralph Nader, had too many other battles to pursue. So well entrenched politically was the industry that the senior senator from the leading tobacco state—Jesse Helms—had little trouble extracting a pledge from his party’s 1980 presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, that if he was elected, his administration would countenance no antismoking crusade like Califano’s. Nor was there a peep from any federal administrative figure after the decade’s two most outspoken foes of smoking, Califano and Jesse Steinfeld, had been hounded out of office. The only part of the federal government deeply involved in the health aspects of smoking was the National Cancer Institute, which had spent most of the 1970s and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars doing the industry’s work for it by trying to develop a cigarette that could be endorsed—and was, by its director of smoking research—as a tolerable risk.

To get on the 1978 ballot, they would need to gather 300,000 signatures by petition and mount an organizational effort far beyond anything GASP had attempted before. They got 600,000 names. Even so, the proposed Clean Indoor Air Act, as their Proposition No. 5 was termed, was not going to come easily in a state where Ronald Reagan, with his antiregulatory credo, had lately completed two terms as governor and a steamrolling antitax movement left voters in a sour mood toward activist programs like the antismoking initiative. But Prop Five, as the GASP-sponsored referendum was called for short, was no esoteric daydream of rabid environmentalists; instead, it struck a responsive chord with voters who could distinguish between risks they as individuals could take voluntarily, like skiing down a treacherous slope or driving without a seat belt, and risks that were imposed on their health and safety, like pesticides applied to their vegetables before harvesting or other people’s smoke in their faces.

The cigarette manufacturers’ interests were now roundly championed by such high-riding conservative commentators as William Buckley, James Kilpatrick, Patrick Buchanan, and William Safire, who argued that the health risks of smoking were a matter for each citizen to resolve without government interference. Prominent among Ronald Reagan’s virtues was that, once in office, he did what he had said he would do, such as keeping his promise to tobacco interests that “my own Cabinet officers will be far too busy with substantive matters to waste their time proselytizing against the dangers of cigarette smoking.” His regulators took the cue.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

However, they were encouraged that Trump did not show his face at a party the night before thrown by the self-styled ‘Bad boys of Brexit’, Farage, Banks and co., who had taken over the top floor of the Hay Adams hotel. Word spread that Trump was already calling the prime minister ‘my Maggie’ in an attempt to recreate the chemistry of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The president had also expressed his hopes for a ‘Full Monty’ state visit, with nine holes of golf at Balmoral, a personal tour of the Churchill War Rooms with Boris Johnson and dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. British officials had put on the table the idea of a financial services passporting deal with the US as the precursor to a trade deal.

The argument he told MPs to use was this: ‘If these clowns fuck up Brexit it will hurt local jobs and businesses.’ He concluded by saying, ‘Putting Theresa May in everything delivers you a four-point difference over the Conservative brand.’ One campaign director recalled, ‘Tex said that at that stage Theresa May was the greatest electoral asset on the right of politics since [Ronald] Reagan.’ To start with, it worked. The message from the doorstep was that May had surprisingly broad appeal. One candidate in a working-class seat in the North-East described the prime minister as ‘electoral crack’. Andrew Percy, a local government minister who represented Brigg and Goole, said, ‘I’ve never experienced anything like this in over twenty years’ canvassing in general elections.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said. Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of Technology. The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a telephone—“An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”—and then quipped, “I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the awkward situation surrounding Wozniak’s departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner.

But his heart was never fully in it, which is why the alliance would turn out to be short-lived. It began at a party, a truly memorable one, for the seventieth birthday of the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in June 1987 in Washington. Six hundred guests attended, including President Ronald Reagan. Jobs flew in from California and IBM’s chairman John Akers from New York. It was the first time they had met. Jobs took the opportunity to bad-mouth Microsoft and attempt to wean IBM from using its Windows operating system. “I couldn’t resist telling him I thought IBM was taking a giant gamble betting its entire software strategy on Microsoft, because I didn’t think its software was very good,” Jobs recalled.


pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

I was able to say, “Well, I do gritty.” I shot it in 16mm, so it would have a little bit of grain. I said, “Let’s include some concert footage and some documentary stuff of images that are suggested by the song.” So artistically, it was a kind of free association on the images from the song. Not the Ronald Reagan version of the song, but the song the rest of us heard. The character in the song is talking about tough things. There’s pride in it, and stubbornness, and disappointment. We shot in a Vietnamese neighborhood in LA, we went down to the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Bruce started, and shot there.

Whatever its technical roughness—some of that was on purpose, some of it was the best we could do—it kept that emotion. So it is gritty, and it is kind of guerrilla filmmaking. The cutting is more frenetic than other rock videos, there aren’t any dissolves, and you keep coming back to the concert footage and Bruce’s energetic performance. It was right about the time that Ronald Reagan had co-opted “Born in the U.S.A.” and Reagan, his policies were everything that the song was complaining about. I think some of the energy of the performance came from Bruce deciding, “I’m going to claim this song back from Reagan.” He made it mean something. JON LANDAU: When John Sayles did “I’m on Fire,” Bruce’s confidence level was high enough for him to try some acting.


pages: 756 words: 228,797

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Branden’s essays for the newsletter and its successor publications helped him to refine his core ideas on psychology, especially on the nature of romantic love and self-esteem, which would form the backbone of his future best-selling books. Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, later a member of the Nixon administration and an advisor to Ronald Reagan, occasionally added their views on economic issues, including a defense of the gold standard by Greenspan that, in combination with his lifelong admiration for Rand, came back to haunt him when he was named chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Ronald Reagan. (Nixon had divorced the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, completing a separation begun by FDR.) He never lost his respect for gold.


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

The next president is going to come in and say, ‘Here are the steps that should have been taken, but the previous administration was unwilling or unable to take them, blah, blah, blah.’ You know what that means? The next president is going to bring the hostages home. Obama! Obama is going to bring the hostages home!” Paulson erupted in laughter at the notion that Obama would somehow ride this crisis the way Ronald Reagan rode the Iranian hostage standoff in the late 1970s. He pointed at Kashkari. “Ha, ha. Obama is going to bring the hostages home,” Paulson said. “Oh, yeah? Get the fuck out of here.” A London sky of gray-pink clouds was just beginning to darken on an evening in April when the phone rang for Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays Capital.

“If we were looking for a CEO of this company, not only wouldn’t he have been on the short list, he wouldn’t have been on the long list!” “Well, that’s one of the decisions you’ll have to digest,” Willumstad said calmly, and turned the meeting over to Cohen. Martin Feldstein, an AIG director and former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, couldn’t believe that the government—a Republican administration—was going to be effectively buying a stake in a private business. Rodgin Cohen, reminding the board that they had a fiduciary duty not only to shareholders but to bondholders as well, pressed for a bankruptcy. “You should consider all these things,” Beattie said.


Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, full employment, gravity well, horn antenna, hydroponic farming, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, place-making, Ronald Reagan

Annotation The book depicts a manned mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him in 1963. Voyage is the epic saga of America’s might-have-been — a powerful, sweeping novel imaginatively created from true lives and real events. NASA, the Saturn rocket, and historical figures from Neil Armstrong to Ronald Reagan are interwoven with unforgettable characters that only a world-class novelist could bring to life: Dana, the Nazi camp survivor who achieves the dream of his hated masters; Gershon, the Vietnam fighter jock determined to be the first African-American to land on another planet; Lee, the small-scale aerospace contractor with a big dream; Priest, who gives his life so that others might live to walk on Mars.

Such a mission will permit quantum leaps in our research in science and communications, and our understanding of the nature of our universe. Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders, space holds enormous potential for commerce today… Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), p.362. Thursday, April 16, 1981 NASA HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC Michaels called Tim Josephson into his office. He had loosened his tie and broken open a fresh bottle of his favorite Kentucky bourbon. But there was little mood of celebration, as the two of them sat there sipping their drinks in the half-light; Michaels seemed more exhausted than Josephson had ever seen him.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Ibn Khaldun Discovers the Laffer Curve It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments. With this statement Khaldun anticipated Reaganomics, the economic doctrines that were promulgated by the American president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. One of the plinths of Reaganomics was first sketched out on a napkin in the Two Continents Restaurant in Washington, D.C., by the economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer was trying to explain to Republican rising stars Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and the journalist Jude Wanniski what he regarded as a basic principle of fiscal policy: the hump-shaped relationship between the tax rate levied by the government and the amount of tax revenues.

Most innovative perhaps were the educational programs, which included Head Start, providing preschool education for poor children; the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 for local school districts to assist children from non-English-speaking families; and the huge expansion of federal aid to universities and students from poor backgrounds for attending college. Though society’s mobilization has triggered a spectacular growth in the capacity of the federal state, the architecture of the Constitution continued to influence the way that some of these programs were developed as well as their outcomes (Ronald Reagan quipped about the War on Poverty that “the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won”). Consider, for example, FDR’s flagship Social Security Act. Until the New Deal the United States had failed to develop any broad-based social insurance policy while Britain had started to move in that direction in 1906 and Germany even earlier in the 1880s.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

This makes them effective ways to reach targeted groups. Commercial services offer bulletin boards for pilots, journalists, teachers, and much smaller communities. On the Internet, where the often unedited and unmoderated bulletin boards are called "usenet newsgroups," there are thousands of communities devoted to topics as narrow as caffeine, Ronald Reagan, and neckties. You can download all the messages on a topic, or just recent messages, or all messages from a certain person, or those that respond to a particular other message, or that contain a specific word in their subject line, and so forth. In addition to electronic mail and file exchange, the Internet supports "Web browsing," one of its most popular applications.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

If higher levels of redistribution ultimately hurt the middle class, then the political power of the rich, which slows the growth of redistribution, while suboptimal on its own, may push the economy toward greater prosperity. Were that not the case, growth would have slowed in the wake of Roe v. Wade, which brought Ronald Reagan and pro-business Republicans to power after they formed a winning coalition of odd bedfellows with the Christian Right. Instead, U.S. growth gradually accelerated relative to other high-wage economies after Republicans used their newfound political influence to slow the growth of business regulation and lower federal marginal tax rates from 70 to 29 percent.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In democracy promotion as in life, it’s easier to lecture others on their failings and press them to do better when they cannot turn your criticisms against you; telling someone to quit smoking from a gray haze of your own is not the most effective strategy. The credibility of Western democracy promotion therefore turns on whether or not Western nations can lead by example. Nobody wants to mimic a broken system. Today, too many components of Western democracy are underperforming. â•… In 1988, Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address from the Oval Office. In closing, he invoked one of his favorite lines of imagery, likening the United States to a “shining city on a hill,” a beacon that the rest of the world can always look up to see for inspiration.1 Writing in 1630, John Winthrop, an early Pilgrim settler to the United States, popularized the line.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

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

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

A dozen satellites orbited the earth, allowing US military units with the correct equipment to triangulate their position on the ground with astonishing accuracy. There was no civilian use of this technology until tragedy mandated it. In 1983, a Korean Air passenger liner accidentally wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a fighter jet, killing 269 innocents on board. In a show of Cold War munificence, Ronald Reagan offered civilian airliners the use of GPS to avoid future deadly navigation errors. By 1989, the Air Force began planning an upgraded set of GPS satellites, and the first consumer GPS receiver was on the market. It was expensive and, in truth, not all that good, since the military had intentionally degraded the accuracy of the civilian system to prevent abuse by criminals or terrorists.


pages: 352 words: 96,692

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney by Bill Hare

business climate, fake news, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, McMansion, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, vertical integration, walking around money, warehouse automation, women in the workforce

He had elicited a thunderously positive response from his audience. Oh! Sonofabitch! This wasn't just good, this was wonderful! Something else now happened that was foreign to the experience of Charlie Mechem, Kerry Graham, the LPGA staffers, Carol Edwards, Kim Lang, and Mark Shoener. Before their very eyes, Howell turned into a speaker as good as Ronald Reagan. He read his next lines exactly right, holding up a forefinger and unforgettably extracting drama from the story. "Counting mine, actually 11 hands went up. Besides me, only one other man had bothered to go. One. I looked at them and said, ‘Only two men? Just two of us? [SHORT PAUSE] Fellas, have we forgotten who our customer is?’"


pages: 313 words: 100,317

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

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

EPILOGUE In early March 2013, a demonstration at the East Side Gallery brought about an unexpected turn of events. Unlikely slogans could be heard near the section by Mühlenstraße in the Friedrichshain district: “The wall must stay,” groups of demonstrators shouted, while others chanted, in English, “Mr. Wowereit, don’t tear down this wall!”—a play on Ronald Reagan’s famous call from 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The reason for the demonstration was an investor’s attempt to cut out a sixty-two-foot-long section of the East Side Gallery to clear the way for the entrance to a new apartment tower. The plans called for the removed sections of the Hinterlandmauer to be set up again at another location.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Even looking around the world now you might argue that successful countries have apathy and anger, unsuccessful ones have high voter turnout and mass rallies for politicians. The idea that western electorates en masse are ‘angry’ is plainly not the case. There are pockets, sometimes quite big ones, of disaffection and the US in particular has a high level of negative partisanship, but Obama’s approval ratings on leaving office were about the same level as Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980s. Nevertheless, by the time the populist surge took off in Europe at the turn of the century the non-voters were no longer seen as lending their consent and had come to be regarded as sullen and alienated—‘active’ non-voters because they thought that all the main parties represented variations on Anywhere progressive individualism, the politics of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, and they no longer saw people like themselves represented in politics.


pages: 287 words: 99,131

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Celebration, Florida, desegregation, double helix, estate planning, feminist movement, invention of writing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“He was very shy,” Dan said, “and had injured his leg. I said, ‘Why don’t you come and we’ll cost-share with each other?’ And so we sort of got together, in an apartment in Oakland, and I thought, Well, something like this may really work.” Dan had gotten a real estate license, but in 1980, after Ronald Reagan was elected president, the real estate business soured and interest rates were rising. Meanwhile the alternative energy projects Paul had been working on got canceled, so Dan and Paul both took a ten-week computer programming course at Golden Gate University and became programmers. Paul was in a wheelchair most of the time, so when his grandmother died and left him some money, they bought the little Newark house, which was all on one level, where they lived for a year and a half, until Paul died.


pages: 327 words: 102,361

Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder

always be closing, desegregation, index card, pattern recognition, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence

They had managed to save some bowls and spoons, a box of cereal, and some milk, and when Judith came past them, the family was gathered on the filthy staircase eating breakfast. That sight had inspired Judith's latest essay, which was about the homeless. It began, "I live in the Hispanic ghetto, and I've seen people sleeping on the stairs." In it, she scolded Ronald Reagan. The other day Judith had read the rough draft aloud to a couple of classmates over near the social studies bulletin board. This was what, in Room 205, was called an "editing conference." Claude served as one of Judith's editors, and Claude seemed to understand the irony of his situation. "That was so great!"


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Along with these changes, the increasing viability of organ donation added an interesting pressure to the debate: to declare certain people with a breath and a pulse “dead,” and thus available for organ donation, could save the lives of others.11 The “President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research” presented Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1981 with a 177-page report called “Defining Death” wherein the American legal definition of death would be expanded, following the decision in 1968 of an ad hoc committee of the Harvard Medical School to include those with cardiopulmonary function (be it artificial or natural) who had sufficiently irreparable and severe brain damage.


pages: 314 words: 101,034

Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders

classic study, data acquisition, discovery of penicillin, high batting average, index card, medical residency, meta-analysis, natural language processing, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan

This is a kind of medical groupthink in which once a diagnostic label is attached to a patient, it tends to become “stickier and stickier.” Doctors are taught in medical school that they should not simply accept a diagnosis given to a patient but should reevaluate the data for themselves before accepting or sometimes rejecting this diagnosis. That we should, as former president Ronald Reagan often exhorted (in a very different setting), “Trust but verify.” Rather than accept a previous diagnosis, doctors are supposed to start fresh by thinking things through for themselves. This, of course, is much easier said than done. If a doctor is tired or in a hurry, she is far less likely to take the time to review all the test results and other evidence that went into the diagnosis.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

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

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

Bob Kahn, DARPA’s sole remaining champion of networking, had left the agency in 1985 to form the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit company whose charter was to foster research and development for a “national information infrastructure.” The people now running DARPA weren’t particularly interested in networking. In their view, all the interesting problems had been solved. Moreover, the agency was distracted by President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program. The ARPANET itself, which cost ARPA $14 million a year to run, looked arthritic next to the higher-speed NSFNET. DARPA management decided the ARPANET had outlived its usefulness. It was time to shut it down. Mark Pullen, a DARPA program manager who now ran the networking project, was given the task of decommissioning the ARPANET.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

When she became Conservative Party leader in 1975, in a first meeting with her shadow Cabinet, she fished out Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her bag and slammed it down on the table, saying, ‘This is what we believe!’ Hayek’s views included hostility to the public sector, state-based social protection and progressive tax, which he called unjust and oppressive. In 1984, Thatcher arranged for Hayek to be given the rarely awarded Order of the Companion of Honour by the Queen. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan listed Hayek as one of the three people who had most influenced him and invited him to the White House. In 1991, George H. W. Bush awarded him the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Truly, a prophet honoured in his lifetime. The second highly influential MPS member, possibly even more so than Hayek, was Milton Friedman, who had been the youngest inaugural member of the society in 1947.


pages: 297 words: 96,509

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

One such piece of information is the fact that California is the liberal state that gave us Transcendental Meditation, granola, psychedelic rock, Governor Moonbeam, and Debbie Does Dallas. So it makes sense that Michael Dukakis—like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry—would have won the state handily. But before Californians began voting for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, they voted as many times as they possibly could for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon. Unless you are a political scientist, a CNN junkie, or a longtime Californian, you probably didn’t remember that bit of historical politrivia. Instead you made a logical inference, namely, that because California is a liberal state, and because Dukakis was a liberal candidate, Californians must have voted for him.


Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

This is evidently the consummation of 'rart pour l'art.' Mankind, which in Homer's tinle was an object for contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruc- tioJ1 as an aesthetic pleasure of t he first order." The Bias toward Death Ronald Reagan once said, "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them alL" A movie actor and politician, Reagan had doubtless struggled with the question of the reproducibil- ity of himself. Perhaps he, like other commodities, lost his es- sence in reproduction and so did not notice that all redwoods are not the same.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

It is moral, intellectual, and spiritual,” declared George Gilder, an evangelist for libertarianism. He also said that entrepreneurship “most deeply springs from religious faith and culture” and that entrepreneurs “embody and fulfill the sweet and mysterious consolations of the Sermon on the Mount.” Ronald Reagan liked to use the catchphrase “the magic of the market”—inadvertently bearing out the jibes about his “voodoo economics.” Carlos Fuentes, the novelist, derided what he calls economic fundamentalism, “with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems.”


pages: 342 words: 95,013

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

CHAPTER THREE BURBANK, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 14, 2001 Except for his bone-weariness and persistent itches inside his stale clothes, Van had no problem driving around Burbank. He had spent a lot of time in Burbank with his grandfather, in summers and on holidays. For a time, during his marriage to Grandmother Number Two, Elmer “Chuck” Vandeveer had owned a weekend ranch up in the hills, not far from the Ronald Reagan spread. The times spent on the ranch were Van’s happiest childhood memories. He had much enjoyed falling off horses, setting fire to bales of hay, and shooting rats and rabbits there. Grandpa Chuck was one of the world’s top aerodynamicists. As a jet designer, he tackled his toy ranch as a make-or-break project: feverishly digging post holes, efficiently splitting firewood.


pages: 357 words: 100,718

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

Proffitt, "Ozone Destruction by Chlorine Radicals within the Antarctic Vortex: The Spatial and Temporal Evolution of ClO-O3 Anticorrelation Based on in Situ ER-2 Data,"Journal of Geophysical Research 94 (August 30, 1989): 11, 474. 14. Mario J. Molina, "The Antarctic Ozone Hole," Oceanus 31 (Summer 1988). 15. DuPont dropped its search for CFC substitutes upon the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. 16. The political process is described clearly and fully by Richard Benedick, who was the chief negotiator for the United States, in R. E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 17. mid., 215. 18.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

(If you find my story unconvincing and want a clear conscience when buying clothes, why not visit UNITE’s website and order “union-made, sweat-free clothing” at www.uniteunion.org.) The power of special interest groups Harry Truman is credited with the request for a one-handed economist, who would be unable to give advice and then say, “on the other hand”; Ronald Reagan, who always had better speech-writers, once said that there should be a version of trivial pursuit for economists “with one hundred questions and three thousand answers.” True enough, economists don’t always agree. But it is a rare economist who will not be enthusiastic about the merits of free trade.


pages: 328 words: 100,381

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

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

As impressive as all that may be, it pales beside the clandestine metropolis rising around the nation’s capital. Ask anyone who knows Washington, DC, and they will say the federal city is defined by the White House, the Capitol, the Mall, and the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington monuments. Passengers on flights into and out of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport can pick out the other points of political and cultural power: the five-sided Pentagon, the majestic National Cathedral, the towering office buildings and shopping malls of Tysons Corner near where the revolution in information technology was launched in the 1980s, beginning the permanent transformation of the region.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

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

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

Knowledgeable commentators have pointed to the “uncomfortable dualism” in Bush’s foreign policy, with “Bush the neo-Reaganite” making “ringing calls for a vigorous new democracy campaign in the Middle East,” while policy imperatives tempt “Washington to put aside its democratic scruples and seek closer ties with autocracies”—as in the past, with remarkable consistency. Reviewing this “dualism” and the continuing support for brutal and repressive regimes, Thomas Carothers expressed his hope that Bush would shift to “the true spirit of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy” with its “attempts to spread democracy.”57 These hopes are particularly interesting because of their source. Carothers has done some of the most careful work elucidating the “true spirit” of Reaganite dedication to democracy. He combines the standpoint of a scholar with that of an insider, having been a participant in the Reagan State Department’s Democracy Enhancement projects in Latin America.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

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

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

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


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Of course the market had survived and thrived. There seemed to be no other mechanism that could deliver positive results to a diverse, connected world.52 The notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good was impossible to imagine, let alone propose. This vision was known as neoliberalism. Although Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed it, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair mastered it. It had its roots in two prominent ideologies: techno-fundamentalism, an optimistic belief in the power of technology to solve problems (which I describe fully in chapter 3), and market fundamentalism, the notion that most problems are better (at least more efficiently) solved by the actions of private parties rather than by state oversight or investment.53 And it was not just a British and American concept.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

“We never put pictures of them on the wall, never made a big deal out of it or took advantage of them. They just enjoyed coming in. They were marvelous people. I enjoyed all of th — well, maybe there were one or two I didn’t like. I don’t want to mention any names, but some stars weren’t as good about paying.” Among Hyman’s most scrupulous customers was Ronald Reagan, who occasionally dropped by with Nancy (a tea drinker) when he was governor of California and always insisted on paying right away with a personal check. Lee Marvin — the square-jawed, gray-haired leading man who played the commander of the “Dirty Dozen” — was devoted enough to Hyman’s product that he often worked behind the counter just for fun.


pages: 329 words: 97,834

No Regrets, Coyote: A Novel by John Dufresne

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, always be closing, fear of failure, illegal immigration, index card, mirror neurons, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, young professional

I guess the thrill was that I was doing something new and powerful. And then it just felt like work. I resented having to finish the job, and that just made me angry. I wanted to be alone with a bowl of cereal and my computer.” He shut his eyes. “It’s hard to kill someone who doesn’t want to die.” He walked behind me and stood. “I remember being in school—Ronald Reagan Middle School—in the cafeteria, sitting alone, watching other kids smile and talk to each other, and I looked at my miserable uncut bologna-oleo-yellow-mustard-white bread sandwich and my carton of warm milk, and I hated my life so much I squeezed the sandwich into a ball until the bread began oozing out between my fingers.”


pages: 341 words: 95,752

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, company town, index card, microaggression, natural language processing, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, why are manhole covers round?

But old habits die hard: The possessive “it’s” still shows up with regularity in print, and not just in hand-lettered flyers for local garage sales. Our files have recent evidence of the possessive “it’s” in everything from Vogue to The New York Times Magazine to Gourmet to Time magazine (which is quoting Ronald Reagan), and then some. They are, of course, typos, but the fact remains that each “it’s” was unobtrusive enough that it slipped slyly by the two people most invested in an error-free article: writer and editor. — So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

They were forced to compromise, however, by the threat of unilateral Congressional action and American trade sanctions against their products. The United States made clear that without a global deal it would enforce a de facto ban through sheer economic muscle. Even more strangely, all this took place during the antiregulation administration of President Ronald Reagan. It was led by the Environmental Protection Agency, but also by strong pressure within the United States Senate. Again, in stark contrast to the climate change issue, the Senate enthusiastically ratified the Montreal Protocol in March 1988, making the United States only the second country to do so.


pages: 362 words: 104,308

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

bioinformatics, business intelligence, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, phenotype, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, the scientific method, zero-sum game

Mixed metaphors; something was either a chicken or an ostrich, even if in fact it was both. But he could work on it. He had a draft in hand, and he would revise it and then give it to Diane Chang, head of NSF, in the slim hope that it would wake her up. He hit the SAVE button for the first time in about an hour. The plane turned for its final descent into Ronald Reagan Airport. Soon he would be back in the wasteland of his current life. Back in the swamp. BACK IN Leo’s lab, they got busy running trials of Pierzinski’s algorithm, while continuing the ongoing experiments in “rapid hydrodynamic insertion,” as it was now called in the emerging literature. Many labs were working on the delivery problem and, crazy as it seemed, this was one of the more promising methods being investigated.


pages: 364 words: 102,926

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen

correlation does not imply causation, information retrieval, intentional community, machine readable, Parler "social media", pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, statistical model, Steven Pinker, traumatic brain injury

The real fragility resides in the minds of those adults who are easily swayed to believe in the deleterious effects of profanity. aI don’t mean to sow mistrust in science generally. But scientists are humans, and humans sometimes get things wrong. So it’s not unreasonable to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s book: trust, but verify. bIt was Tyler Marghetis, for what it’s worth. cThe only drawback I can come up with is the following. Suppose exposure to profanity actually decreased aggression. For instance, suppose that people seek out profanity specifically in order to have an outlet to deal with feelings of aggression.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Having altruistic-sounding mission statements on the corporate website is well and good, but how can people be sure a company is living up to its own ostensibly high ethical standards—any more than they should trust that a sovereign is good simply because he says he is? In the long run, an Internet-related company’s value proposition is questionable at best and fraudulent at worst if it rejects the need for accountability. As Ronald Reagan famously said to Mikhail Gorbachev when they signed a major arms control treaty in 1987, “Trust, but verify.” As citizens, we are right to hold the same attitude toward Internet and mobile communication companies, which we now depend upon to inform ourselves, participate in political discourse, and exercise our rights as citizens.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

A surge in steel and automobile imports, along with the 1981–1982 recession (described as the worst recession since the Great Depression, until the Great Recession) led to the perception that companies needed to be more focused on controlling costs down to the penny. The deregulation of trucking, airlines, and telecommunications, allowed for increased start-ups, but it also affected large, unionized companies. Finally, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,500 striking air traffic controllers, and the disbanding of their union, paved the way for other companies to copy such hard-nosed tactics. While the Supreme Court had ruled in 1938 that companies could replace striking workers with permanent replacements, few companies had dared to do so before the 1980s.


The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

It is to the economics profession that people of the world owe the no­ tion that the quest for distributive justice comes always and every­ where at the expense of efficiency.27 The idea that progressive taxation weakens economic incentives is hardly new. But in recent decades, it Too Many Contestants? 123 has achieved growing currency. W hereas Milton Friedman and his fol­ lowers at the University of Chicago waged a lonely battle through the 1950s and 1960s to persuade policy makers that taxation impedes economic growth, by the time Ronald Reagan assumed office in 1981, the sale had been closed. Indeed, Reagan administration officials went so far as to embrace the "Laffer curve," a relationship claiming to show that reductions in tax rates would so stimulate the economy that total tax revenues would actually rise. Events of the past decade have cast doubt on the empirical validity of the notion that tax rate reductions cause enduring economic growth.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

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

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

We forged a different path over the last half century from the rest of the advanced world, and it has turned out to be a dead end for millions of Americans. * * * — ONE SIGN THAT the United States was moving rightward and following a different trajectory than the rest of the West was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan both reflected and shaped the country’s mood in the 1970s when in his speeches he regularly denounced a Chicago welfare recipient: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands.”*2 After his election to the presidency, he famously declared in his inaugural address in 1981, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

PARTISANSHIP, PERSONALIZATION, AND POLARIZATION Much as the invention of the printing press allowed for a more diverse array of books, the advent of cable television allowed people to select specialized media outlets that closely reflected their views. Prior to 1987, the Fairness Doctrine of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) strived to ensure balanced coverage of controversial issues in news programming. But it was repealed under President Ronald Reagan. Hastened by the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, cable news channels proliferated and specialized in delivering specific political perspectives. In the United States, mainstream news has become increasingly partisan over the past twenty years. The figure below illustrates the diverging ideological positions of three prominent cable news channels, as estimated from broadcast transcripts.


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

Mars Observer’s launch was delayed by a couple of years, and soon instruments were being jettisoned to control the ballooning costs. NASA still wanted an altimeter to fly, but it could no longer afford the one being built. The agency announced it would hold an open competition for a cheaper version. Maria knew that, as part of Star Wars—Ronald Reagan’s Cold War missile defense system—the United States had been investing billions of dollars in laser technology. She finagled a security clearance, and she and some other young scientists started meeting with engineers. They had already sorted out the power-supply issues, nailed the pointing, and figured out a way to stabilize the jitter.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

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

The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) was also formed in 1983, an alliance between the government and computing industry firms offered as a way emulate Japan’s heavy state-sponsorship model “without getting bogged down in the socialist mire of direct government intervention in the marketplace.”60 (Only three years later, however, the MCC would somewhat backtrack from the initial goal of implementing artificial intelligence on an “elusive” specialized computer.61) Also in 1983, George Keyworth, President Ronald Reagan’s science advisor, wrote that the administration is committed to “maintaining U.S. supremacy” in AI and supercomputing, which is considered vital for “national security.”62 AI managed to remain both murky and somehow essential for American hegemony. Leading figures within AI fostered this impression by participating in military projects, such as the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI) (the so-called Star Wars project).


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

A government’s policy towards financial markets will influence this process, especially in determining whether certain kinds of dealing are to be allowed or whether they are restricted by law. This has been especially important for the ability of capitalists to deal across national borders. After 1979, government policy in all major countries turned in favour of an expansion of financial markets, helped by the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. That said, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the policy changes after 1979 were qualitatively different from what had happened before. They are more accurately viewed as being further developments of earlier moves. By 1974, the US had removed almost all the controls on international capital outflows, partly due to its new-found freedom in not having to defend the dollar’s value and partly on the expectation that OPEC oil revenues would be invested in US securities.21 Before 1979, several other countries had followed the US in cutting back capital controls, including Canada and Germany.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

Foege had followed Sencer as the CDC’s director even though he hadn’t especially wanted the job. (He preferred working in the field, fighting disease.) And the job was clearly changing, in ways that made Foege want it even less. “The White House meddled more and more,” he recalled. The CDC director was then a career civil servant, and when Jimmy Carter was replaced by Ronald Reagan, Foege remained in his job. But now, when Foege testified before Congress, the White House sent minders to sit with him and monitor what he said. They meddled in science that conflicted with the interests of Reagan’s base and his financial backers. Any research having to do with AIDS, for instance, had to first be vetted by the White House.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

If TP53 mutates, now the cell death pathway is switched off. The tumor becomes resistant to chemo. So, sometimes, chemo can make cancer more dangerous. Despite this risk, we decided to give cisplatin to Mom first. Surgery to physically cut out what remained came second. The morning of the surgery at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center, we all woke at 3 a.m. It was warm out. LA. Mom was first on the schedule. We always ask for the first slot if anyone in our family is getting a procedure done. It’s like a family rule. Fresh surgeons make better decisions. I was terrified. I didn’t show it. We loaded up two cars to drive to UCLA.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In the United States, the events of September 11—the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the planet—are a raw wound in the memory of my generation. But much like Europe, the United States bears many more scars from other harrowing terror campaigns. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981 reshaped the very institution of the presidency—and likely cemented the support for the sweeping expansion of the country’s gun laws, as enacted in 1968, 1986, and 1991. The devastating Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, itself purportedly a reprisal for the grotesquely mishandled standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge, catalyzed radical militia movements and fed into the enduring siege mentality across many law enforcement agencies.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

He saw a global debt crisis coming—a rolling recession, even total economic collapse—and now Congress had asked him to testify about this. Ray wasn’t the only one calling the future this way. A book called The Coming Currency Collapse was soaring up the book charts. Internal White House memos advised President Ronald Reagan on how to manage permanent economic decline. Ray was there to warn the public. He was loud and confident, and he bet his own investment portfolio on the decline of the economy. But… “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Ray says. “It was the exact bottom in the stock market—and we moved into a bull market after that.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

They identified certain phrases that were more likely to be used by one side or the other: For the Democrats/left-leaning, phrases included “civil rights,” “social justice,” “people of color,” and “African American.” For the Republicans/right-leaning, the phrases included “death tax,” “illegal alien,” and “Ronald Reagan.” The patterns played out exactly as you’d expect, with Fox skewing very conservative, MSNBC very liberal, and CNN in between with a slight liberal bent. The business incentives of cable news channels drive polarization. If you invest in neutrality and evenhandedness and straight news, the audience does not reward you by tuning in every night.


pages: 335 words: 100,154

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

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

Still exhausted from their long flights, the Americans made the half-mile trip to the Federation Council, Russia’s upper legislative chamber. The trip had been organized by Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher from Orange County, California. Early in his career, Rohrabacher had been a speechwriter for the anti-Soviet crusader Ronald Reagan, but now he was notorious on Capitol Hill for being Putin’s favorite congressman. No one in Washington knew what had caused this metamorphosis, but it was long complete. In 2012, Rohrabacher burnished his pro-Putin bona fides by being one of only a handful of lawmakers to vote against the Magnitsky Act.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

“While it may be virtually impossible to do business in such countries without doing business with a government official or a close relative of a government official, it is still possible—indeed, it is expected—that we do business ethically and comply with all U.S. and local laws.”27 Twenty-five “It’s Not My Money to Tithe” On the morning of January 8, 2009, twelve days before Barack Obama’s inauguration as president, Rex Tillerson arrived at the Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House, to announce ExxonMobil’s new lobbying position on climate change. He made his way to the rear of the cavernous Reagan building, which housed several government agencies. Upstairs, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a government-supported think tank, Tillerson strode into an amphitheater where about one hundred scholars, researchers, and journalists had gathered.

Under a federal law enacted in 1953, individual states own and manage resources beneath ocean waters for three nautical miles from the shore, although Florida and Texas own nine nautical miles’ worth, because of old treaty claims.6 The federal government owns and manages the rest of America’s territorial waters, through the Department of the Interior. Even President Ronald Reagan, who was elected with a sweeping mandate to deregulate industry and spur economic growth, could not overcome America’s strangely Balkanized politics of offshore oil drilling. Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, initiated plans to lease oil in all of America’s oceans, but in the end, aggressive drilling went forward only in the waters off Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell's chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet S S-18 and S S-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. 'These bombs', Schell wrote, 'were built as "weapons" for "war", but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes.

The ballistic missile threat that dominated American and NATO national security debates in the late 1 990s is declining by most measures: There are far fewer nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the United States or any European country today than there were 10 years ago. Agreements negotiated by American Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H .W. Bush and George W. Bush have slashed the former Soviet arsenal by 71% from 1 987, while China has retained about 20 missiles that could reach U S shores. No other country can strike the United States from its own soil. Most of the news about missile tests in Iran, North Korea, or South Asia are of short- or medium-range missiles that threaten those nations' neighbours but not America. 31 31 In 1987 the Soviet Union deployed 2380 long-range missiles and China approximately 20.


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Olga Herbert, executive director, Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor, Ligonier, PA * * * Rejoin Hwy 30 in Valparaiso, and motor into Illinois. The road runs through Chicago’s southern suburbs, then turns northwest. In Aurora take Hwy 31 north to Geneva, and exit west on Hwy 38. Flat cornfields dominate the view right up to Dixon. Now Illinois may be the Land of Lincoln, but Dixon is all about another presidential son: Ronald Reagan. Dutch spent his childhood here, and there’s no greater homage than the portrait that hangs in the Dixon Historic Center – made from 14,000 red, white and blue jellybeans. Take Hwy 2 to Sterling, and rejoin Hwy 30, which crosses the mighty Mississippi into Iowa and lands in the city of Clinton.

Follow signs for the Holland Tunnel, which will whisk you under the Hudson River towards the New Jersey Turnpike. DO Andy Warhol Museum A superb museum dedicated to the maestro of pop; a must for any serious art fan. 412-237-8300; www.warhol.org; 117 Sandusky St, Pittsburgh, PA; adult/child $15/8; 10am-5pm Tue-Thu, Sat & Sun, 10am-10pm Fri, closed Mon & major holidays Dixon Historic Center Ronald Reagan’s old high school has been converted into a shrine, complete with jellybean likeness. 815-288-5508; www.dixonhistoriccenter.org; 205 W Fifth St, Dixon, IL; suggested donation $3; 9am-4pm Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm Sat Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area Straddling the Utah and Wyoming state line, it comprises 201,000 acres of protected scenery surrounding Flaming Gorge Reservoir; most facilities, including the visitors center, are in Utah. 435-789-1181; www.fs.fed.us/r4/ashley/recreation/flaming_gorge/index.shtm; admission $5; main visitor center 9am-5pm Jun-Aug Golden Spike Tower & Visitor Center Docents await on the 8th-floor observation deck. 308-532-9920; www.goldenspiketower.com; 1249 N Homestead Rd, North Platte, NE; adult/child $6/4; 9am-7pm Mon-Sat, 1-7pm Sun May-Sep, with variations; Legion of Honor More than 4000 years of art overflow in this faux-French palace: mummies, mega-Impressionists, experimental drawings John Cage made with eyes closed. 415-750-3600; www.famsf.org/legion/index.asp; Lincoln Park, San Francisco, CA; adult/senior/student/under 12yr $10/7/6/free; 9:30am-5:15pm Tue-Sun; Mr Ed’s Elephant Museum A roadside oddity in classic style, see thousands of elephant curios of every shape and size – including one that talks!


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As Jimmy Carter said later, “I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry, but I felt in the process it was likely that the hostages’ lives would be lost, and I didn’t want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn’t attack.”173 Though American hawks were furious at Carter’s wimpiness, their own hero, Ronald Reagan, responded to a 1983 bombing that killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut by withdrawing all American forces from the country, and he sat tight in 1987 when Iraqi jet fighters killed thirty-seven sailors on the USS Stark. The 2004 train bombing in Madrid by an Islamist terrorist group, far from whipping the Spanish into an anti-Islamic lather, prompted them to vote out the government that had involved them in the Iraq War, an involvement many felt had brought the attack upon them.

When people moralize, they take a victim’s perspective and assume that all perpetrators of harm are sadists and psychopaths. Moralizers are thereby apt to see historical declines of violence as the outcome of a heroic struggle of justice over evil. The greatest generation defeated the fascists; the civil rights movement defeated the racists; Ronald Reagan’s buildup of arms in the 1980s forced the collapse of communism. Now, there surely are evil people in the world—sadistic psychopaths and narcissistic despots obviously qualify—and there surely are heroes. Yet much of the decline in violence seems to have come from changes in the times. Despots died and weren’t replaced by new despots; oppressive regimes went out of existence without fighting to the bitter end.

James Sheehan’s characterization of the postwar transformation of the mission of the European state, from military prowess to cradle-to-grave nurturance, is almost a caricature of traditional gender roles. Yamaguchi’s exact prescription, of course, can be debated. George Shultz recalls that when he told Margaret Thatcher in 1986 that he had stood by as Ronald Reagan suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons, she clobbered him with her handbag.8 But, Yamaguchi might reply, Thatcher’s own children were already grown up, and in any case her views were tuned to a world that was run by men. Since the world’s nuclear states will not all be governed by women anytime soon, let alone by nursing mothers, we will never know whether Yamaguchi’s prescription is right.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The first one was an article by Slate’s Daniel Gross about the Mulherin paper. The third was Mulherin’s own Web site, with a link to his paper. That search—which, remember, did not include Mulherin’s name—took 0.10 seconds. A few minutes later, my search for the lyrics to a Ramones song about Ronald Reagan visiting the Bitburg cemetery took 0.23 seconds, and the first item on the list had what I needed. If you use the Internet regularly, these examples of Google’s performance will not surprise you. This is what we have come to expect from Google: instantaneous responses with the exact page we need up high in the rankings.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Incoherence The international monetary system is now in a time of dynamic uncertainty. This dynamic resembles the phase from 1971 to 1981 when extremes in inflation, interest rates, commodity prices, exchange rates, and geopolitical instability pushed markets to the edge of chaos until Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Ronald Reagan, James Baker, and later Robert Rubin provided the leadership and enlisted the international cooperation needed to restabilize the former Bretton Woods gold-based system around a new dollar-based one. The task of restabilization today is no less daunting. In 2015, I spoke privately with two of the world’s most powerful central bankers on this topic.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

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

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

The program’s ostensible mission was to get more young people excited about the sciences, but its overall effect was to entrance us with the allure of the national project and pull us into the optimistic orbit of can-do nationalism. McAuliffe was supposed to deliver a school lesson from space. The whole thing was part of a program Ronald Reagan launched in 1984 in which teachers would be selected to go to space then return to the classroom, the idea being to stimulate interest in science and technology among young people in school and, eventually, help win the space race and the Cold War. Kids around the country, myself included, gathered in classrooms to watch her ascent.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

His many books were not written by him but transcribed and edited by others from recordings of his talks. The technical books were records of his classroom lectures, and the popular books were records of his stories. He preferred to publish his scientific discoveries in lectures rather than in papers. This book now reveals that Feynman was, like that other great communicator Ronald Reagan, secretly writing personal letters to a great variety of people. Few of the letters are to his professional colleagues. Many of them are to his family, and many are to people he did not know and never met, answering letters that they wrote to him with questions about science. In spite of his pretense of being illiterate, the letters are written in lucid and grammatical English.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Some scientific questions migrate: what was once a technical issue becomes politically inflamed, and what was once politically inflamed becomes technical. As an example of the latter phenomenon, consider the depletion of the ozone layer, where the scientific evidence has long been overwhelming. That evidence led to bipartisan support for the Montreal Protocol, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. Even so, there is no question that preexisting values help to account for political polarization with respect to GMOs and greenhouse gases. Taken together with the activities of interest groups and the echo chamber effect, those values help explain why the leaders of our two major political parties are strongly inclined to accept the dominant view within the scientific community in one case—and reject it in another.


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Income Autopilot III MBA—MANAGEMENT BY ABSENCE The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. —WARREN G. BENNIS, University of Southern California Professor of Business Administration; adviser to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy Most entrepreneurs don’t start out with automation as a goal. This leaves them open to mass confusion in a world where each business guru contradicts the next. Consider the following: A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear…. If the employees come first, then they’re happy.


pages: 332 words: 104,587

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

UNFPA did make the disgraceful mistake in 1983 of awarding its Population Award gold medal to Qian Xinzhong, the head of the Chinese family planning program, who was then presiding over a brutal family planning crackdown involving forced abortions. The Chinese Communist Party leaders themselves were sufficiently embarrassed by Qian’s zealotry that they fired him a year later. The United States government had no mechanism to punish China for forced abortions, so instead it pummeled UNFPA. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan reduced funding for it. Then George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both eliminated U.S. funding for the agency. Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, led the fight against UNFPA. He’s a good man who genuinely cared about Chinese women and was horrified by coerced abortions. He wasn’t trying to score cheap political points in criticizing UNFPA, since most New Jersey voters had never heard of the agency.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Since there are no known significant costs other than those in Table 2, and it’s only benefits that we’re missing, we know that the high-quality day care program was a success and a great bargain. Moreover, the point of conducting the cost-benefit analysis was an attempt to influence public policy. And, as the saying goes, “In the policy game, some numbers beat no numbers every time.” When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, one of his first acts was to declare, over the strong objections of many on the left, that all new regulations issued by the government should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis. The policy has been continued by all subsequent presidents. President Obama ordered that all existing regulations be subjected to cost-benefit analysis.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Giuliani graduated with honors in 1968. He began clerking for U.S. judge Lloyd MacMahon, who had prosecuted Frank Costello for tax evasion. Giuliani was smart and motivated, and his career advanced quickly. In January 1981, Giuliani was named associate deputy attorney general, the third highest position in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice. He had changed his registration to Republican only a month before. Giuliani was thus working in Washington at the time the Supreme Court handed down a decision that would change his life. The case was the United States v. Turkette, and it concerned the organized crime law RICO.


pages: 363 words: 109,417

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson

Apollo 13, Easter island, intentional community, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, post-work, Ronald Reagan, telerobotics, trade route, young professional

—Paul Siple from 90 South 13 Before 1996 the risky “humanitarian” flights brought mail and freshies (fruits and vegetables), and much appreciated cocaine to a guy at McMurdo who liked to climb onto the roof shirtless wearing his cowboy hat, and acid to someone who said tripping on a snowmobile at Pole in the winter was about as good as things get anywhere. 14 “Every effort shall be made to manage the program in a manner that maximizes cost effectiveness and return on investment.”—Ronald Reagan, President’s Memorandum Regarding Antarctica, 1982 CHAPTER FIVE THE MOST PEACEFUL SPOT IN THIS WORLD Age by age, through gulfs of time at which imagination reels, life has been growing from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime towards freedom, power, and consciousness. —H.G. Wells, A Short History of the World Even during off-duty hours, events may occur that require swift, intelligent action.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. With its jumpy cuts and pitiless close-ups, TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth, and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they managed to project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life. They were made for television. Today, with the public looking to their phones for news and entertainment, we’re at the start of the third technological makeover of modern electioneering.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

To my mind, the evidence is most persuasive that the growing inequality I think the most worrisome, the increasing 90/10 differential, stems primarily from the gap between the demand for the highly educated and their supply. Progressives, no doubt, attribute substantial weight to the antilabor policies followed by Republican governments since Ronald Reagan, whereas conservatives attribute much of the earlier wage compression to anticompetitive policies followed since Franklin Roosevelt. Neither side would, however, deny the importance of differential educational attainments in fostering inequality. Attitudes toward Inequality Americans have historically not been too concerned about economic inequality except when it becomes extreme—as it did toward the end of the nineteenth century.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Nancy Hanks, quoted in National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1995, 23. 68. Ibid., 32. See also C. Richard Swaim, “The National Endowment for the Arts: 1965–1980,” in Mulcahy and Swain, Public Policy and the Arts, 181. 69. National Endowment for the Arts, “Summary of Appropriated Funds 1966–1998,” www.arts.endow.gov/learn/Facts/Appropriations.html. 70. Ronald Reagan, quoted in National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1995, 44. 71. Nancy Hanks, quoted in ibid., 30. According to data supplied by the Conference Board Annual Survey of Corporate Contributions, business contributions to the arts doubled between 1980 and 1986, growing from $257 million to $536 million (Rosanne Martorella, “Corporate Patronage of the Arts in the U.S.,” in Art and Business: An International Approach on Sponsorship, ed.


pages: 339 words: 112,979

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Flim-Flam (1992) There is evidence from questionnaire research that many people who read daily horoscopes don't really believe them. They state that they read them only as 'entertainment' (their taste in what constitutes entertaining fiction is evidently different from mine). But significant numbers of people really do believe and act upon them including, according to alarming and apparently authentic reports, Ronald Reagan during his time as president. Why is anybody impressed by horoscopes? First, the forecasts, or character-readings, are so bland, vague and general that they fit almost anybody and any circumstance. People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

But his analysis identified another factor triggering change: “the combination of substantial levels of economic development and short-term economic crisis or failure was the economic formula most favorable to the transition from authoritarian to democratic government.”23 Many other variables can be cited, of course, for communism’s collapse: the organization of civil society in the east, the revolutionary impact of Lech Wałęsa’s independent trade union Solidarity in Poland, more liberal foreign travel for eastern European citizens, their decreasing fear, Soviet military defeat in Afghanistan, the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, perhaps even the threat of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars antimissile project. But special mention must be given to the 1975 Helsinki Agreement concluded by thirty-five European and North American states. It pledged signatories to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and, against the odds, ended up boxing communist governments in.


pages: 311 words: 17,232

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

The contract, mainly for the northeastern seaboard of the US, was to start a revolution in the way oil was traded. However, it did not turn the world on its head from day one, with only 22 contracts traded the first day (Faber, 2004). But it was enough to test the waters in the domestic energy market, which was about to undergo further changes with the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan. One of Reagan’s first official acts was to remove all remaining price controls on the US oil industry that were put in place by President Nixon following the oil price spike after the Arab oil embargo. This paved the way for Nymex to introduce the unleaded gasoline futures contract in 1981, and on 30 March 1983, the WTI TRADERS | 253 contract.


pages: 357 words: 110,072

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

Similarly there had been no investigation into the safety of acupuncture implements, which was why the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to prevent shipments of needles from entering the United States. Eventually the FDA softened its position and accepted the importation of acupuncture needles under the label of experimental devices. The Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, took a similar line, and in August 1972 he signed into law a bill that permitted acupuncture, but only in approved medical schools and only so that scientists might test its safety and efficacy. In hindsight, we can see that those who argued for caution were probably correct. It now seems highly likely that many of the Chinese demonstrations involving surgery had been faked, inasmuch as the acupuncture was being supplemented by local anaesthetics, sedatives or other means of pain control.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

My only connection with the wider world was a clunky Philips shortwave radio I bought in São Paulo. In the darkness of many Amazonian nights, I turned the volume low and listened, when all the Pirahãs and my family were asleep, to music shows such as Rock Salad, to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and to news of such events as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan. As much as I enjoyed my radio, though, I wanted to do more than just listen passively. I wanted to talk. I would lie awake after discovering some difficult grammatical or cultural fact about the Pirahã and feel lost. I could barely wait to ask people questions about the data I was collecting and my ideas about it.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

Most of us don’t believe they made it to the other side of Hale Bopp but many of us do believe in heaven and hell, which “appear unexplainable by the laws of nature.” As miracles go, the Heavensgate project is not uniquely unimaginable, but the media treated it as superstition. During the New Hampshire Republican primary campaign George H. W. Bush shouted at Ronald Reagan, “That’s Voodoo economics!” (I couldn’t tell whether he capitalized voodoo.) I doubt whether anyone would dare to say, in a New Hampshire primary campaign, “That’s Mormon economics” or “That’s Seventh Day Adventist economics” or “That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses economics.” There might be a Mormon, or an Adventist, or a Witness in the audience but probably not someone from Haiti registered to vote.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Almost half of suburban housing, notes historian Alan Wolfe, depended on some form of federal financing.54 In recent decades, sadly, many progressives have become increasingly strident in their opposition to suburbia, some of them even suggesting that suburbs reflect something of a dangerous addiction foisted on America by the likes of Ronald Reagan.55 Yet in some ways, this hostility runs against a population that, for the most part, lives a suburban lifestyle and overwhelmingly prefers single-family houses.56 The massive postwar shift to suburbia is now well over a half century old. In 1950, only half of the residents of today’s major metropolitan areas lived in suburbs,57 but since that time, 90 percent of metropolitan growth has been in the suburbs.58 The move to suburbia in America has been, as in Britain, closely aligned with the rapid expansion of homeownership.


Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

They were expensive and not very effective at short range, but at longer range the bullets built up enough velocity to be moderately destructive—in one demonstration, a Gyrojet round was reported to have blown a good-sized branch off a tree. What about larger weapons for use closer to Earth? During the Ronald Reagan years, when the Strategic Defense Initiative (more commonly known as “Star Wars”) was active, a lot of money was spent researching various space-based laser systems, to be powered via large volumes of highly reactive chemicals. The lasers were known as COIL weapons (Chemical Oxygen Iodine Lasers), and when the caustic chemicals were rapidly mixed, they could pump out a brief high-powered laser blast.


pages: 461 words: 109,656

On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

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

Augustine and Machiavelli bequeathed the heavy and light hands with which Philip and Elizabeth shaped different new worlds. Napoleon lost his empire by confusing aspirations with capabilities; Lincoln saved his country by not doing so. Wilson the builder disappointed his generation; Roosevelt the juggler surpassed the expectations of his. To paraphrase a Ronald Reagan story about a pony,40 there’s got to be a pattern in here somewhere. Perhaps it lies in Philip Tetlock’s suggestion that we’ve survived as a species by combining the habits of Berlin’s animals: foxes adapted more easily to rapid changes, but hedgehogs thrived in stable times.41 Which extends Fitzgerald’s “first-rate intelligence” to holding opposites in behavior as well as in mind.


pages: 324 words: 104,934

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Airbnb, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Ronald Reagan

Yet not like your father at all. Your uncle and his wife live in Culver City. They have a foldout couch, a backyard with a lemon tree and a swing set, and two boys who pinch you when no one is looking. On their days off, the adults cook elaborate meals, drink mint tea, and talk for hours about the king and Ronald Reagan. They make the king sound like he’s in the next room, and Reagan like he’s in another house. The children are supposed to play outside, but most of the time you have no idea what your cousins are saying, so you mimic the way they walk, the way they laugh, and finally the way they talk. They dress you up in costumes and parade you around the yard.


pages: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

Even when Perella—known affectionately as Joey Pa—was “off,” he somehow managed to communicate to the prospective client both his unpretentious common sense and his fundamental decency—both qualities in short supply on the Street. And, from my selfish perspective, win or lose, there was no one I learned more from or who was as much fun. Despite Perella’s idiosyncratic style, he was also a remarkably effective leader. Like one of his heroes, Ronald Reagan, Perella cared about a few overriding principles deeply, and he made sure everyone knew what they were and knew the penalty for violating them. It was generally understood what he thought constituted effective client coverage and what kind of parochial behaviors he thought dysfunctional. He also had an unerring eye for bullshit and generally could tell the good guys from the bad guys.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

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

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

Someone with $50,000 to invest either in the stock or housing market wasn’t going to make as much money as someone with $500,000 to invest, who wasn’t going to make as much as someone with $5 million, and so on, no matter what the average annual rate of return on investment was. Believing otherwise defied the laws of everything from mathematics to common sense. Yet the notion that our own money smarts and investment skills could make us rich continued to gain traction. Seemingly beginning in tandem with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we began to doubt the collective spirit of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and once again romanticized the pull-yourself-up-by-the bootstraps ideology of Horatio Alger. The wealthy were idealized, the poor derided. If it wasn’t working out for you, you must be doing something wrong. As the national savings rate plunged over the 1980s and 1990s to near zero by the mid-2000s, instead of examining the rising costs of housing, education, and medical care, a chorus of scolds emerged to call us a nation of overspenders.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

This gave rise to a systemic change in which currency values could fluctuate significantly at any point in time. This was the beginning of the 'floating exchanges' and a market that would prove highly profitable for those who know how to navigate it. 2. 1980s financial deregulation: The governments of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US embarked simultaneously on massive financial deregulation programmes. The Baker Plan (a reform package named after the then US Secretary to the Treasury, Mr Baker), imposed a similar deregulation in 16 key developing countries in the wake of the developing countries' debt crisis. These deregulation’s enabled a much larger array of people and institutions to become involved in currency trading than would have previously been possible. 3.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Bona fide banks that fell below the 8 percent capital limit were pronounced undercapitalized, and if they didn’t fix the problem, they were liable to be seized by the government. For good measure, the FDIC kept in place its old 20-times leverage rule that ignored the European idea of tailored speed limits. But Volcker was no longer around to celebrate his achievement. The previous year, President Ronald Reagan had declined to renew his appointment as Fed chairman. He had been replaced by Alan Greenspan, whose libertarian philosophy was more in line with Reagan’s zeal for deregulation. Greenspan did not interfere with the signing of Basel I—after all, it would help U.S. banks that wanted to expand into foreign lending markets; but he steadily pulled back from his predecessor’s coplike approach to banks and instead made it clear that he believed in (and fostered) Wall Street innovation.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, Marxism ceased to have much of a credible voice in economics. Its virtual disappearance from the discussion created space for the rapid rise of the neoliberals, who for some time had been drawing energy from widespread reactions against the repression and inefficiencies of state-run economies. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both relied heavily on advice from neoliberal thinkers like monetarist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and followers of the Austrian School economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992). There is a saying now in Russia: Marx was wrong in everything he said about communism, but he was right in everything he wrote about capitalism.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

NOTE TO READERS xiv with cheap stuff we may have forgotten we own: According to the Self-Storage Association, a Virginia-based trade group with more than six thousand members, one in ten United States households rented self-storage units in 2007, up from one in seventeen in 1995. Nearly sixty thousand storage facilities in the U.S. satisfy that demand, annually generating $20.1 billion in revenue. xiv key economists have endorsed this view: Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and chief economic advisor to President Barack Obama’s political campaign, worked tirelessly to keep prices in check, as did his successor, Alan Greenspan. INTRODUCTION: GRESHAM’S LAW 1 attractively packaged but inferior in content: Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (New York: Collier Books, 1996), 75. 2 family spending on basic expenses grew $4,655: See, for example, Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren’s testimony before the U.S.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

As the US software, personal computing, and telecommunications industries came to dominate national as well as international markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan surpassed the United States in the global automobile and steel markets, and did so in the context of a US economy suffering from high trade deficits and the outsourcing of manufacturing. Amid fears of losing ground to foreigners in a flagging economy, US legislators launched an aggressive campaign to develop and fund the high-tech and knowledge economic sector (Dickson 1988; Mowery 1999; Sell 2003). In addition, under US president Ronald Reagan, the glimmerings of what is now known as neoliberalism—an ideology of enlightened selfishness marshaled by a government catering to big business in the name of laissez-faire economics—flickered brightly within the US political and economic landscape. In this climate, legislators encountered little friction, much less outright opposition, when proposing changes in intellectual property law and other corporate-friendly policies.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

I predicted the Soviet Union would have serious difficulty and the Soviet empire could fall apart. This was the height of the Cold War, and it piqued Casey’s interest. He got on the phone and I hurriedly arranged to meet him. Casey had been head of the CIA for two years; prior to that, he’d successfully managed Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. But Casey’s career in espionage had begun forty years earlier when he, then a Navy lieutenant junior grade, was summoned by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the legendary “Father of American Intelligence,” to join him at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan immediately liked Casey.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Smiling gamely, she speaks in short, clear sentences and seems to want to make the conversations work. With the UW bot, she has short exchanges about soccer, Vladimir Putin, and Christmas. With the Czech bot, she talks about a book she is reading. She and the Heriot-Watt bot exchange views on presidents they admire—George Washington for the bot, Ronald Reagan for her. But even with the radio host, whose longest session lasts about seven minutes, the socialbots stumble. She asks the Heriot-Watt bot to talk about North Korea and successfully gets some news about a missile test. She leans forward, looking concerned. “There could be a chance for war,” she says.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

We greatly appreciate all the valuable advice, insightful feedback, and continuous support we received from all contributors in this group. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude to the coauthors, who so enthusiastically turned all these ideas into the final product. Ernst Stetter PREFACE It has been about 40 years since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the age of neoliberalism and American-style supply-side economics. While most people focused on tax cuts (especially for top earners) and deregulation (especially for the financial sector), a much more fundamental change was taking place in economic and legal frameworks.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

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

These two examples of air travel and telecommunication illustrate three important characteristics of competition policy at that time, all of which we will revisit often in this book. The first feature is that antitrust was largely a bipartisan affair. Airline deregulation happened under a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and the breakup of AT&T under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. Second, regulation and technology are deeply intertwined. Technological change creates a permanent, and often beneficial, challenge to existing regulations. In the telecom industry, the cost of transmission and information processing declined thanks to integrated circuits and computers. The open architecture of the network and its digitization encouraged entry and competition while improvement in software allowed the sharing of information at a scale that was previously unimaginable.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

US inflation seemed under control, and Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker predicted a decline in interest rates, so Baum purchased tens of millions of dollars of US bonds, an ideal investment for that kind of environment. But panic selling overcame the bond market in the late spring of 1984 amid surging bond issuance by the administration of President Ronald Reagan and rapid US economic growth. As his losses grew, Baum maintained his typical equanimity, but Simons feared the troubles could take the firm down. “Lighten up, Lenny. Don’t be stubborn,” Simons said. Baum’s losses kept growing. A huge wager that the yen would continue to appreciate also backfired, placing Baum under even more pressure.


pages: 349 words: 104,796

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman by Ken Auletta

Bear Stearns, book value, business climate, classic study, corporate governance, financial independence, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Herman Kahn, interest rate swap, junk bonds, New Journalism, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, traveling salesman, zero-coupon bond

If this consolidation is fated, then it follows that individuals are not to blame; larger institutional forces, the crush of history, the economic and political environment, are to blame. And, surely, among these forces must be counted the social and economic environment of America in the 1980’s. A freer market economy has been in the ascendancy for the past decade, energized by a variety of catalysts, including the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Whatever excesses arguably exist on Wall Street—the scramble for mergers, leveraged buyouts, fat fees, arbitrage speculation, junk bonds or greenmail†—the Securities & Exchange Commission wants to regulate by relying on market forces, not on its policing power. This restraint springs from several factors, including the political mood of the nation and a belief that government prescriptions are sometimes worse than the disease they are meant to cure.


pages: 404 words: 110,290

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

Fail to do that, and conflict ensues. Ibn Khaldun was no abstract theorist: he was famed for his practical thinking. When the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was on the outskirts of Damascus in 1401, he summoned Ibn Khaldun to converse for hours about what causes the rise and fall of civilisations. President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have all cited Ibn Khaldun, but none has tried to unpack his insight on the rise and fall of countries and civilisations based on the energy and synergy of group-feeling. In the modern world, the idea that comes closest to the force that Ibn Khaldun identified is patriotism.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

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

Meanwhile, CEOs and investors issuing moral fiats from Davos are the rich devotees who get to cut the line. Liberals think the answer is to change capitalism by putting words like “stakeholder” or “conscious” or “environmental, social, and governance” in front of it. For their part, classical conservatives think the answer is to ignore the problem and recite a Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan quote, failing to recognize that—as Dorothy might have said to Toto—we’re not in 1980 anymore. Instead we’re in a postmodern Oz where the Wizard is no longer just big government. It’s a new hybrid of big business and big government; of capitalism and democracy. Abraham Lincoln said eight score years ago: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… we must think anew.”


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

For some, that gap can look like a canyon—or, worse, an abyss. And crossing it seems like the scariest, most foolish thing anyone could consider. In 1984, the creator of Sam Adams beer, Jim Koch, was staring long and hard across the chasm. It was spring. It was the beginning of the baseball season in Boston, and it was about to be “morning in America.” Ronald Reagan was preparing for what would be a land­slide reelection to the presidency, the economy had finally turned around after years in recession, the US Olympic team was about to run away from the competition at the Summer Games in Los Angeles, and Jim was in the middle of his sixth year as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), already earning $250,000 per year (that’s more than $600K in 2020 dollars) before his thirty-fifth birthday.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Tetlock had been part of a rather grand project in which social scientists had been tasked with preventing nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. As part of that project, he had interviewed many top experts to get their sense of what was happening in the Soviet Union, how the Soviets might respond to Ronald Reagan’s hawkish stance, what might happen next, and why. But he found himself frustrated: frustrated by the fact that the leading political scientists, Sovietologists, historians, and policy wonks had such contradictory views about what might happen next; frustrated by their refusal to change their minds in the face of contradictory evidence; and frustrated by the many ways in which even failed forecasts could be justified.


pages: 404 words: 107,356

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

While the project never reached the engineering design phase, it scoped out the potential for such a device and was well received by the next Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Figure 7.7:A timeline of the main events in ITER’s history. At the 1985 Geneva Summit, Gorbachev proposed the ITER project to US president Ronald Reagan as a continuation of INTOR. While ITER was similar to INTOR, it had a significantly different organizational structure. The INTOR organization, which was basically a loose confederation of scientists, was too decentralized and weak to effectively manage an actual construction project. The ITER organization was designed to be much more powerful, but (as we will soon see) would still struggle to manage such a large and unwieldy endeavor.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

The third myth is that deficits will burden the next generation. Politicians love to trot out this myth, proclaiming that by running deficits we are ruining the lives of our children and grandchildren, saddling them with crippling debt that they will eventually have to repay. One of the most influential perpetrators of this myth was Ronald Reagan. But even Senator Bernie Sanders has echoed Reagan, saying, “I am concerned about the debt. It’s not something we should be leaving to our kids and our grandchildren.”8 While this rhetoric is powerful, its economic logic is not. History bears this out. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), the national debt was at its highest—120 percent—in the period immediately following the Second World War.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Ownership of the sprawling collection of companies—which stretched farther east to energy, finance, and infrastructure providers in Pakistan and India—put Arif in a powerful position. He had a strong claim to be the best person to help Obama deliver American money to Middle Eastern entrepreneurs. When Arif arrived in Washington, Obama welcomed him and the other guests, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. Over dinner at the Ronald Reagan Building, Obama complimented his visitors from distant lands and described them as visionaries. “I know some have asked—given all the security and political and social challenges we face—why a summit on entrepreneurship? The answer is simple,” the president said. “Because throughout history, the market has been the most powerful force the world has ever known for creating opportunity and lifting people out of poverty.”


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In his fifties, he suddenly started gaining rating points in every tournament he played, becoming one of the top one hundred players in the world. He was on course to crack the top fifty had he not been caught. Chess players can improve in middle age, but to reach the top fifty for the first time at that point would have been unprecedented. 5 Ronald Reagan famously explained his willingness to negotiate with the Soviet Union by quoting a Russian proverb: “Trust, but verify” (“Doveryai, no proveryai”). The first part comes to us easily—often too easily—but the second part requires effort. When something seems improbable, that should prompt you to investigate by asking more questions.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

(Nikolai Ignatiev / Alamy Stock Photo) It was during his Monday watch, amid escalating tensions with the United States, that Lieutenant Colonel Petrov’s computer systems changed their indicators rapidly and without warning from “launch” to “missile strike.” The signal indicated that the United States had launched five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from their silos and they were bound for the Soviet Union. Now it appeared that the unthinkable had become a reality: President Ronald Reagan had launched a surprise attack. For fifteen seconds Petrov’s team paused in shock, but then their training kicked in. They understood well that following any such “missile strike” warning, they were to immediately notify high command, which would effectively initiate the Soviet Union’s response to the American attack.


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

Diplomatic relations between Iran and the USA were cut in 1980 and have yet to be restored following the taking of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran, the event which set the course of the relationship. A mob attacked the embassy in November 1979 and took over fifty Americans hostage. The 444-day crisis haunted President Jimmy Carter and helped usher in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Tensions between Iran and the USA have been a constant, but there was a temporary ‘ceasefire’ of sorts during the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria that was linked to the nuclear deal of 2015. Tehran realized that the more powerful ISIS became in the region, the greater the risk of Iranian influence being blocked.


pages: 394 words: 107,778

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

The C-141 had a large crew—commander, copilot, flight engineers, loadmasters, flight nurses, couriers, and others on board. Coordinating all these roles was a valuable learning experience. Our mission was to carry people and cargo all over the world for America’s armed services. Many of these flights delivered humanitarian aid, and many supported military exercises. I came into the C-141 world two years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency. His administration worked to rebuild a strong military. While I was still instructing in T-38s in 1981, our classes grew from forty to sixty students to bolster the pilot force to the strength needed to implement the administration’s policies. Now, two years later, C-141 crews significantly expanded their flying hours to support military exercises around the world.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

Souresrafil, Khomeini and Israel (London, 1988), p. 114. 130Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran–Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 176. 131For the arms sales, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran–Contra Affair, passim. 132A. Hayes, ‘The Boland Amendments and Foreign Affairs Deference’, Columbia Law Review 88.7 (1988), 1534–74. 133‘Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy’, 13 November 1986, PPPUS: Ronald Reagan, 1986, p. 1546. 134‘Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy’, 4 March 1987, PPPUS: Ronald Reagan, 1987, p. 209. 135L. Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, 4 vols (Washington, DC, 1993). 136G. H. W. Bush, ‘Grant of Executive Clemency’, Proclamation 6518, 24 December 1992, Federal Register 57.251, pp. 62145–6. 137‘Cabinet Meeting regarding the Iran–Iraq War, mid-November 1986’, and ‘Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ba’ath Officials’, early 1987, both cited by Brands, ‘Inside the Iraqi State Records’, 105. 138‘Saddam Hussein Meeting with Ba’ath Officials’, early 1987, cited by Brands, ‘Inside the Iraqi State Records’, 112–13. 139Ibid., 113. 140Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 3 vols (2004), 1, p. 31; Brands, ‘Inside the Iraqi State Records’, 113. 141Colin Powell Notes of meeting 21 January 1987, Woodrow Wilson Center, The Origins, Conduct, and Impact of the Iran–Iraq War. 142Brands, ‘Inside the Iraqi State Records’, 112. 143D.


Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss

anti-communist, British Empire, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, full employment, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Claiming that he had been “just a leg man” for Stimson, who had died in 1950, McCloy, at age eighty-six, testified before a congressional commission on the subject that the internment had been “reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted.” When he added that the war had “caused disruption in all our lives,” the audience guffawed and booed—as they should have. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that provided a formal apology and payments of $20,000 to survivors of the camps. The pugnacious, unrepentant McCloy told a friend that the hearings had been “a disgrace” and derided the idea of restitution. “Money, money, money!” McCloy exclaimed. “Why don’t they dun the Japanese government?

Having definitively lost a war for the first time in their history, Americans resisted the prospect of entering future conflicts. In 1976, while running for President, Jimmy Carter promised, during an interview for Playboy magazine, that if elected, he would not adopt “the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth.” In 1980, during his campaign, Ronald Reagan urged voters to rid themselves of their “Vietnam Syndrome,” telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars, “We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt, as if we were doing something shameful….Let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight, and possibly die, in a war our government is afraid to let them win.”


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Within a decade after the war, California’s population had grown by 40%, reaching 13 million. The state’s military-industrial complex continued to prosper during the Cold War era, providing jobs in everything from avionics and missile manufacturing to nuclear-submarine maintenance. Military spending peaked in the 1980s under ex-California governor and then US president Ronald Reagan. The classic film Chinatown (1974) is the fictionalized yet surprisingly realistic account of the brutal early 20th-century water wars that were waged to build Los Angeles. Bohemians, Beats & Boomers Unconstrained by the burden of traditions and promoted by film and TV, California has long been a leader in new attitudes and social movements.

The Japanese American Citizens League files lawsuits, providing legal support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 1943 Tension between Americans and Mexicans reaches boiling point during the Zoot Suit Riots, which pit US military servicemen against zoot-suit-clad Mexican teens while LA police look on. 1955 In Anaheim, Disneyland opens to bad press, as crowds swarm the theme park, temperatures hit 101°F (38°C), ladies’ high-heeled shoes sink into the still-soft asphalt and drinking fountains don’t work. 1965 It takes 4000 National Guard troops to help quell the six-day Watts Riots in LA, which cause death, devastation and over $40 million in property damage. That same year, Rodney King is born. 1966 Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California, setting a career precedent for fading film stars. He served until 1975, then in 1981 became the 40th US President. 1968 Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy is assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in LA by Palestinian immigrant and anti-Zionist Sirhan Sirhan, who remains in jail in San Diego County today. 1969 UCLA professor Len Kleinrock sends data from a computer in Los Angeles to another at Stanford University, typing just two characters before the system crashes.


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

The behavioural policy agenda got a jumpstart when one of Cass’s former colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School got himself elected president of the United States, and appointed Cass to be the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This position was created by President Ronald Reagan and its primary function is to assure that government regulations do more good than harm. During his tenure, Cass was able to use his knowledge of social science, and of nudging, to require many agencies issuing new regulations to incorporate the tools of behavioural science into the design of their policies.


pages: 392 words: 112,954

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

Eric was part of a generation of young black men for whom the worst insult was to be called a deadbeat, a word often thrown at black men of his father’s generation by white politicians, including New York’s own Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. These politicians and social scientists in the mid-sixties began to point fingers at the unemployed black male as the root of much inner-city evil. “Deadbeat dad” was the counter to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” an insult that cut to the core, and Garner would have none of it. “You could say anything to him, but if you called him a deadbeat dad, he’d go crazy,” Esaw says. “He’d say, ‘I take care of my kids! I’ll take care of them from a jail cell!’ ” As it turned out, he had to do exactly that.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

The walls and floors of the impeccably decorated house were covered with Persian rugs and African tapestries. One woman wore a blue taffeta skirt; and all came dressed as if they were dining at an upscale restaurant. The hostess served French food and wine while the dinner guests, mostly Europeans, debated global politics and complained about Ronald Reagan, America, and everything Rwandan. Intrigued by the women in evening attire, I asked the colleague who’d invited me to the party who they were. “Most are married to aid workers or UN civil servants,” she told me. “Even those who want to work often can’t get visas. Though some do significant work as volunteers, other women languish at the country club, wishing they were anywhere but here.”


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

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

So that they could get materials to the island, they repaired a pier, then built a 1,200-foot bridge, from New Jersey to Ellis Island, because it was cheaper than transporting supplies on barges. Around the statue, they erected the world’s tallest freestanding scaffolding, and eventually they fixed the statue up properly, drastically increasing her life expectancy. It was all overseen by Lee Iacocca—the man who saved Chrysler—who was appointed chairman of the endeavor by President Ronald Reagan on May 17, 1982. Iacocca said he’d raise $230 million, $300 million, $500 million, or $1 billion if he had to. The fund-raising effort began in New York, and soon spread to Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas, where fund-raising offices were opened. A gala at New York’s Lincoln Center, with Luciano Pavarotti and Bob Hope, raised $750,000.


pages: 404 words: 118,759

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

“Every sufferer for the redemption of our land now is sacred,” King once told someone whose brother died in the Civil War. In death he, too, became sacred. A mountain in Yosemite was named for him, and a giant sequoia in the Calaveras Grove. In 1931, California honored him with a statue in the US Capitol. It stood for nearly eighty years before being replaced, in 2009, with one of Ronald Reagan. “I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was,” explained the legislator responsible for the change. Fortunately for King, his legacy endured in other ways. To San Francisco’s writers he had been a patient father, scribbling edits in the margins of their manuscripts and administering fortifying doses of moral support.


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Even in the bigger space, though, there was a disproportionate number of men with volcanic tempers squished together so tightly that they were practically on top of one another. Cohen and the rest of Aizer’s employees couldn’t have chosen a more opportune moment to begin a career in finance. Ronald Reagan’s pro-business policies had strapped a jet pack on Wall Street and the traders and raiders who filled its ranks. Regulations were loosened, freeing companies to borrow money and buy their competitors, and the stock market began one of the most prolonged upward swings in its history. The pace of mergers and acquisitions increased, fueled in part by Milken’s empire at Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had created a new way of financing corporate takeovers through high-yield debt, also known as junk bonds—which were ranked “below investment grade” by ratings agencies because they were riskier than other bonds.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

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

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

They took the long view: with backing from business and billionaires, they funded university professorships and scholarships, and built an international network of ‘free market’ think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.6 The big time came at last in 1980 when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan teamed up to bring the neoliberal script to the international stage. Both newly elected, they were surrounded by Mont Pelerin insiders: Reagan’s election team included more than twenty members of the Society, and Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, was a member too. Like the longest-running of Broadway shows, the neoliberal show has been playing ever since, powerfully framing the economic debate of the past thirty years.7 It is high time we met the cast of characters that star in its story, each accompanied here by a biographical note and a one-line character summary that – in true Shakespearean style – loads the plot from the get-go.


pages: 422 words: 119,439

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

airport security, McMansion, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan

Back at Camden I was engaged (briefly) to four different girls who hadn’t seemed particularly interested before the book was published. At the graduation party my father threw for me at The Carlyle the attendees included Madonna, Andy Warhol with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Molly Ringwald, John McEnroe, Ronald Reagan Jr., John-John Kennedy, the entire cast of St. Elmo’s Fire, various VJs and members of my massive fan club, which five Vassar seniors had started, with a film crew from 20/20 covering the event. Also attending was Jay McInerney, who had recently published a similar first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, about young people and drugs in New York, that made him an overnight sensation and my closest East Coast rival; one critic pointed out in one of the many articles comparing the two novels that if you substituted the word “chocolate” for “cocaine” both Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City would be considered children’s books, and because we were photographed together so often people began to mix the two of us up—to simplify things the New York press simply referred to us as the Toxic Twins.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

On the evening of September 11, 1976, Hayne Leland, a thirty-five-year-old professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was having trouble sleeping. He’d recently returned from a trip to France. A weak dollar had made the trip excessively pricey. Stagflation, a crippling mix of high inflation and slow growth, was rampant. The economy and the stock market were in the tank. California governor Ronald Reagan was threatening cutbacks in the salaries of academics such as Leland, who worried that the prosperous American lifestyle of his parents’ generation was in danger. As he pondered this bleak reality, Leland recalled a conversation he’d had with his brother, John, who worked at an investment management company in San Francisco.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

He called for an energy board similar to the War Production Board of World War II to oversee a complete mobilization of the country, with the goal of winning the war of energy independence.30 When the price of oil on the world market began to fall, the American business community and the public lost interest in the great energy crusade. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the solar panels from the White House roof and scrapped the wood-burning stove in the living quarters. America went back to business as usual, buying even larger gasguzzling vehicles, and using ever greater volumes of energy to support a wasteful, consumer-driven lifestyle. Although Carter’s warnings faded from the public mind in the ensuing decade, vast changes in the global economy were laying the groundwork for the first tentative forays into North American continentalization and, once again, energy would come to play a critical role.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

” • Solar so far is a bit player in electricity generation—10 gigawatts of capacity total in the world in 2007, but with solar’s 14 percent capacity factor, that’s only 1.4 gigawatts operational, less than one large nuclear reactor. I fondly remember the 1970s solar boom, which ended the moment Ronald Reagan became president and canceled Jimmy Carter’s solar tax credits. I had the delicious opportunity to interview Ted Turner in front of the 2007 Solar Power Conference, which had twice the attendance of the previous year, 12,500 people. Among them were only a few of the old solar guard such as John Schaeffer, whose solar mail-order catalog, Real Goods, has freed thousands from the grid since 1978.


pages: 403 words: 119,206

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

The long-term secular trend toward higher market valuations that had characterized the years since 1920 (interrupted by the Depression) continued, and accelerated, in the 1980s. By mid-1987, stock price valuations (adjusted for interest rates) were the highest they had ever been. Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1980–1989 © Dow Jones & Company Inc. 15 AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN WHEN RONALD REAGAN appointed Alan Greenspan chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1987, critics openly questioned whether Greenspan was up to the job. The retiring chairman, Paul Volker, had attained near-legendary status by successfully vanquishing inflation. Greenspan lacked stature in comparison to Volker; some critics also questioned whether he was too close to Reagan to be truly independent.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

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

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

“Welcome to the era after communism.”13 The phrase “free-market economy” also applied to the Giuliani administration’s efforts to dismantle the social welfare programs that the city had developed since the Great Depression. Though this reorientation of public policy began during the Koch administration in the late 1970s and became a national strategy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Giuliani gave it his personal stamp. Between 1984, when Koch was mayor, to 2000, near the end of Giuliani’s two terms in office, ninety community gardens were destroyed. Most were bulldozed and turned over to developers during the Giuliani years. But the end to this policy came in 1999, when newly elected New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer developed an interest in stopping the mayor.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

“Put all this happiness and optimism together with John Templeton Jr.’s political agenda,” writes Ehrenreich, “and you could come up with some pretty paranoid scenarios: for example, that the Templeton Foundation is a plot to numb Americans into smiley-faced acquiescence to the status quo. And could it be a coincidence that Templeton helped finance the re-election of the most optimistic President we’ve had since Ronald Reagan?” Templeton Sr.’s critics, from Richard Dawkins down, liked to brand him as a hard-line right-winger supporting traditional conservative causes such as religion and free markets. But this may be a more apt description of his son. Templeton Jr. has been in charge of the day-to-day management of the foundation since 1995, with his influence over it growing as his aging father declined.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Especially in the United States, both Republicans and Democrats should occasionally take a break from their heated quarrels to remind themselves that they all agree on fundamentals such as free elections, an independent judiciary, and human rights. In particular, it is vital to remember that right-wing heroes such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were great champions not only of economic freedoms but also of individual liberties. In a famous interview in 1987, Thatcher said that ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women … and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’1 Thatcher’s heirs in the Conservative Party fully agree with the Labour Party that political authority comes from the feelings, choices and free will of individual voters.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

With excitement for OTEC building, Hawaii’s other senator, Daniel Inouye, sponsored the first OTEC commerce bill around 1980. As chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he had wide powers concerning what would be spent by the military. Everything was in place to make the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, the most environmentally progressive administration in history. Soon after Patrick Takahashi addressed Congress on the potential of OTEC, fossil fuel prices dropped, and interest in OTEC dropped with it. After extensive consultation with energy industry lobbyists, OTEC was put on the backburner and forgotten.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

During the interview process she told me that she sang in the church choir and was a religious woman. While I didn't ask anything pertaining to religion, she assumed that I assigned honesty to religion. She was right, and it dismantled my defenses. I hired her without verification and it took me several years to uncover the truth. Verify First, Trust Later Former president Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust, but verify.” When I hired the liar, I trusted but didn't verify. It took several robberies, video cameras, and public record searches to uncover the truth. I verified too late and it cost me. The most egregious cases of trust are our financial system. Bernard Madoff perpetrated the largest Ponzi scheme ever, and billions of dollars were lost.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

This has the effect of not valuing the consequences to future generations, and some economists think that is unfair and potentially immoral. Even with this central issue around discount rate, cost-benefit analysis is an incredibly valuable model to frame a more quantitative discussion around how to proceed with a decision. As such, many governments mandate its use when evaluating policy options. In 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12291, which mandated that “regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society from the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society.’’ This language has been tweaked by subsequent U.S. presidents, though the central idea of it continues to drive policy, with the U.S. federal government conducting cost-benefit analyses for most significant proposed regulatory actions.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

They are respectively the chairman of Nile Trading and Development and the managing director of its affiliate, Kinyeti Development, named after South Sudan’s highest mountain, on the border with Uganda. Both companies are based in Texas. Douglas was an “ambassador at large” and coordinator of refugee affairs for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, a time when Sudan was producing plenty of refugees. Thatcher is a British investment banker, who claims “special familiarity and contacts in southern Sudan.” In 2008, Thatcher negotiated a forty-nine-year lease on 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) in the state of Central Equatoria.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

That the ideas kept changing did nothing to imbue the developers with humility or uncertainty, nor did the sensitivity of the fashions to first-world politics appear to undercut the technical certainty of the aid industry. The antipoverty rhetoric of the World Bank when Lyndon Johnson was U.S. president was replaced by the “getting prices right” rhetoric when Ronald Reagan was president. “Our” politics seems to be a legitimate part of development thinking, while “their” politics is not. Aid and aid-funded projects have undoubtedly done much good; the roads, dams, and clinics exist and would not have existed otherwise. But the negative forces are always present; even in good environments, aid compromises institutions, it contaminates local politics, and it undermines democracy.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

In the West, in particular, we tend to regard speech as both a proxy for emancipation and its inevitable catalyst; and if the Internet has done anything, it’s produced a global flood of speech. Prophecies of liberation have come fast and furious. “The Goliath of totalitarian control will be rapidly brought down by the David of the microchip,” Ronald Reagan intoned in 1989. And as Hillary Clinton more recently proclaimed, the United States was willing to “bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.” Alas, this isn’t true. Or at very least, it isn’t simply true. Communications tools may be a necessary condition for broad-based social change, but they aren’t a sufficient condition.


pages: 426 words: 115,150

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Paul Wachtel noted in his 1989 book, The Poverty of Affluence, that:In 1958, when economist John Kenneth Galbraith appropriately described the United States as “The Affluent Society,” 9.5 percent of U.S. households had air conditioning, about 4 percent had dishwashers, and fewer than 15 percent had more than one car. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s successful bid to replace Jimmy Carter was based on the widespread sense that people were suffering economically, the percentage of homes with air conditioning had quintupled, the percentage with dishwashers had increased more than 700 percent and the percentage with two or more cars had about tripled.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

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

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

At RAND, I started out doing nice civilian work, artificial intelligence (AI)–inspired analysis of econometric models for the Department of Energy (DoE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), helping with the design of a storm surge barrier for the Dutch water ministry. It was all very interesting, but fairly remote from quantitative finance. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the election, promising to abolish both the EPA and the DoE. He didn’t quite do that, but the cash flow to RAND from those agencies slowed to a trickle. The Dutch stopped analyzing and started building the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier.6 I was drafted into the military side of RAND. There were classified and unclassified sides of the building, separated by thick, secure glass doors operated by guards.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

That would have been a nice touch. Instead he sent the USS Hornet, a more expedient option at the time. The Kennedy never saw the Pacific, and was in dry dock in Portsmouth, Virginia, for the July 1969 splashdown. Consider another example: With top cover from the industry-friendly Republican president Ronald Reagan, Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, which not only allowed but also encouraged civilian access to NASA-funded innovations related to launch vehicles and space hardware, thereby opening the space frontier to the private sector. A Democrat might or might not have thought up that legislation, but a Republican Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives both passed it, and the concept is as American as a moonwalk.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

Unlike the current German chancellor, however, Thatcher was never frightened of making a tough decision. Perhaps, instead, we should focus on our leaders’ most senior advisors. In the US particularly, there’s come to be a tradition whereby each new leader recycles a gallery of failed, or evidently biased, advisors. Larry Summers, for example, has advised Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Summers was one of the key players who torpedoed the better regulation of financial derivatives, a decision so bad that it should have prevented him from ever having an influence over policy again. Timothy Geithner reportedly refused his president’s order to develop a plan for the winding-up of Citigroup‌—‌a failing which, if the accusation is true, should be regarded as no less treasonous or destructive than a battlefield general refusing a direct order from his commander-in-chief.


pages: 386 words: 114,405

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

Edgar Hoover of the cancer institute—listening in on everyone and, I soon realized, using what she learned to dole out information to people outside the office. The other members of the guard, I soon realized, were similarly exchanging information and wielding power. I replaced most of them, including Phoebe. Eight months into my job, I faced my first political crisis. Ronald Reagan had won the presidential election, and I was a Jimmy Carter appointee. The new head of personnel in the White House, Pendleton James, had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, an empty chair was better than any Carter appointee. That didn’t bode well for Don Fredrickson, the NIH director, or me.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

“There’s no young people in between 18 and 40 in Weed, there’s no jobs, there’s no education,” Hofer lamented to me. Hofer’s father is a Berean (an offshoot of mainstream Protestantism) reverend, and former official with the Siskiyou County Republican Central Committee. Growing up in the 1980s, Hofer remembered, there were two portraits side-by-side in the family’s home: President Ronald Reagan and Jesus. “I came from a place where the thing to do was to hang out at McDonald’s because there was no humanity around,” he said. “Half of our main street is abandoned, it’s a ghost town.” Hofer’s always followed politics—he’s voted in every election he’s been eligible for. “But I’m like every nine out of ten people, I just sat on the sidelines,” he said.


pages: 382 words: 117,536

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

Perhaps quoting a comic book is one of those little tricks clever Boris Johnson uses to appear down with the normal people, irrespective of his actual feeling for the work itself, having long since made the concepts of truth and expediency indivisible in his own mind. Johnny Marr told David Cameron he wasn’t allowed to listen to The Smiths; Bruce Springsteen disavowed Ronald Reagan’s absorption of ‘Born in the USA’; and ’80s anarcho-punks Flux of Pink Indians were privately dismayed by the Countryside Alliance’s misappropriation of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack its campaign against rural post-office closures. And likewise, Boris Johnson™ absolutely cannot have our Incredible Hulk™ – no way, man!


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

When the factual picture is messy in this way, but on the other hand there is a public consensus that something must be done, there develops a great thirst for answers. Speaking simplistically offers a kind of cognitive relief. This is what politicians specialize in. Speaking off the cuff in 1971, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, told the Associated Press, “I have often wondered if we aren’t going to come to a point where we are going to have to take a look at the possibility of funding and junking cars older than a certain age.” A month later, Tom Carrell, the head of California’s Senate Transportation Committee, echoed his chief executive with a similarly fateful bit of musing, but this time it was musing with numbers: “Getting old cars off the road is the only way to solve the problem.


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

There has been little international enthusiasm for criticising Zionism, past or present, or for putting effective pressure on Israel to re-orientate its policy priorities. American support of the state of Israel was critical at the time of its foundation and has been unflinching since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Although the Cold War came to an end, Israel is still deemed to have considerable strategic significance for the West in the manifold repercussions – including post-USSR Russian involvement – of the 2004 US-led invasion of Iraq. It is no surprise that at the time of writing there is little sign of any peace process, or even peace-seeking process: neither bilateral, engaging Israel and the representatives of the Palestinian people, nor multi-lateral, involving the UN and ‘the international community’.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Dovish politicians may commit themselves to a purely defensive posture (reflected in the United States’ shift from a Department of War to a Department of Defense in 1949). But defenses can often be repurposed as offensive weapons; think, for instance, of autonomous drones designed to destroy missiles but reprogrammed to assassinate generals. Thus, even protective plans can seem aggressive, as in the case of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Popularly known as Star Wars, SDI would have relied on lasers in space to shoot down Soviet missiles. Had it worked, it would have upset a fragile balance of deterrence (mutually assured destruction via nuclear annihilation). Now, LAWS, automated cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns threaten to disrupt long-settled expectations about the purpose and limits of international conflict.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

The entire shuttle disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and molten debris, ultimately resulting in the deaths of all seven members of its crew. These images are seared into the minds of millions who had tuned in to watch the live event—in part because Christa McAuliffe, selected to be the first teacher in space, was on board the space shuttle. A special commission was appointed by President Ronald Reagan—popularly known as the Rogers Commission after its chairman, William P. Rogers, former attorney general and secretary of state. The commission determined that the explosion resulted from a failure of the O-rings. At a commission hearing, Richard Feynman stunned television audiences by dropping an O-ring into ice water.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It has begun to seem that almost anything is possible, any resource constraint surmountable, any utopian vision for humanity achievable.16 At a seminar I gave in a UK government department shortly after the first edition of this book was published, a government economist insisted that the entire concept of limits was ‘economically illiterate’. Former US President Ronald Reagan, appealing to the same zeitgeist, once proclaimed that there are ‘no great limits to growth because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder’.17 It’s worth examining this assertion a bit more closely, precisely because it conveys a partial truth. There are some unlimited aspects to human existence.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

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

He first came to prominence in 2014, when he was accused of funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to pro-Russian rebel groups in eastern Ukraine, earning him a place on several international sanctions lists.4 Malofeev was one of several conservative religious figures who rose swiftly up the ranks of Putin’s inner circle as the president sought to shore up domestic support by burnishing his Orthodox credentials, taking a hard line on culture war issues such as gay rights and abortion.5 The forty-four-year-old Malofeev, nicknamed “God’s oligarch”,6 helped lead, along with long-time Putin ally Igor Shchyogolev, a resurgence of Orthodox thought among Russia’s elite, similar to how the religious right in the US allied with and partially co-opted that country’s ultra-rich. Malofeev, like Putin, tried to paint Russia as a safe harbour from the pro-gay, pro-Islam decadence of Western democracies, saying in 2014 that “just as Christians in the west in Ronald Reagan’s time helped us against the evil of communism, we now have to return our debt to Christians who are suffering under totalitarianism in the west. This so-called liberalism, tolerance, and freedom, these are just words, but behind them you can see the totalitarianism.” Beyond his conservative religious beliefs, Malofeev was also that rarest of things: a twenty-first-century monarchist.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

The debate about the right design for Europe should not be a beauty contest about the best form of domestic organization per se, but about the right constitutional architecture for a continent with a history of tearing itself apart and failing to respond to external threats. This must be the Anglo-American Union model. It can coexist with many different forms of domestic organization. The United Kingdom, after all, produced both the welfare state and Thatcherism. The United States brought forth both the New Deal and Ronald Reagan. One should therefore make no general assumption about the domestic or ideological configuration of a future single eurozone state, save that it would be democratic, and that it would evolve and mutate, as democracies do and should. Its purpose would not be to promote any particular form of western democracy but rather to ensure that the eurozone has the means to protect itself against undemocratic challenges from within and, particularly, without.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

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

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

Last but not least, some become irregular migrants because borders move and they end up on the wrong side of them, as happened to many people when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. However they became irregular migrants, their status is only partly due to their own actions; it also depends on government decisions. Where people can move freely, nobody is an irregular migrant. Moreover, governments can – and sometimes do – decide to regularise migrants’ status. President Ronald Reagan, who would have been ashamed of what the Republican party has become under Donald Trump, pushed through a limited amnesty in 1986 that attracted three million applicants. France, Spain, Italy and other European countries also periodically regularise eligible migrants’ status. Even when they remain undocumented, immigrants still contribute to the economy and society and tend to be good people.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Randolph seized the situation and, posing as a lowly Czech immigrant to ingratiate himself with the girl, tried to profit from the promotional opportunities. Despite fully utilising the talents of Virginia Mayo, the movie flopped. However, the actor who played Randolph fared much better and, by 1982, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. The country had changed somewhat since Reagan’s beach outing on Long Island in 1949. One thing remained the same, however. Wall Street was in the doldrums. The road from the summer of 1949 to the summer of 1982 is the longest between two periods of extreme undervaluation covered in this book.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

By the 1970s, trucking became the favorite scruffy but loveable blue-collar profession. Hence the slew of corny hit movies—from Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and Breaker! Breaker!—that would flop instantly today if released in any format except for horror. This golden era was anticompetitive, inefficient, and opposed across the political spectrum from Ralph Nader to Ronald Reagan, but it provided a stable, respectable income for the individual trucker. Then, literally overnight, with the scrawl of President Carter’s pen, everything shifted. Trucking underwent a radical course correction, deregulating in extremis if you were a driver. Carriers multiplied, authorities fell from the regulatory sky, nonunionized workers flooded the market, and the price of transport dropped by 20 percent in just the first few years.


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

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

As sheriff, he staged chain-gang parades of detainees, deputized an armed 3,000-person volunteer posse, and installed checkpoints in Latinx neighborhoods to turn undocumented residents over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation. The Border Patrol Explorer Program was also launched in 1973 under Nixon’s reign, training teenagers in militarized border patrol tactics and indoctrinating them into racism. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the beginning of the war on drugs in 1982, again using implicit racial appeals to white voters as a means of advancing racial-capitalist governance. He responded to economic crisis with his Thatcher-inspired Reaganomics of welfare retrenchment, capital gains tax reduction, and neoliberal deregulation.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

This was a place where generations of exiles from the country’s eastern half had arrived, eager to abandon the problems of the older cities—racial conflict, the counterculture, high taxes, Democratic politicians. Trinidad Castañeda’s hometown, Fullerton, is where Richard Nixon went to high school. Liberals used to complain that Orange County, the place “all good Republicans go to die,” in Ronald Reagan’s words, had exported its pious, antigovernment politics of white grievance to the country at large. But in recent years, Orange County had become more like the places its residents once sought to escape. In 2016, Orange County voted for the Democratic nominee for president, for the first time since 1936.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Hyper-libertarian technologists like the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel celebrate a vision of the state withering away, seeing this as liberation for an overmighty species of business leaders or “sovereign individuals,” as they call themselves. A bonfire of public services, institutions, and norms is cheered on with an explicit vision where technology might “create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.” The techno-libertarian movement takes Ronald Reagan’s 1981 dictum “Government is the problem” to its logical extreme, seeing government’s many flaws but not its immense benefits, believing that its regulatory and tax functions are destructive rate limiters with few upsides—for them at least. I find it deeply depressing that some of the most powerful and privileged take such a narrow and destructive view, but it adds a further impetus to fragmentation.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Thankfully, Haines discovered other career options. He soon opened an antiques and interior design store and became one of the originators of the aesthetic known as Hollywood Regency. Along with designing homes, he loaned his personal art collection to film productions and worked with clients like Joan Crawford, George Cukor, and Ronald Reagan. Ryan Murphy, known for creating TV shows like The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Nip/Tuck, and American Horror Story, made Haines one of the characters in his 2020 alt-history Netflix melodrama Hollywood. The series was shot on various L.A. locations and soundstages, but it came fully to life thanks to the efforts of workers in a building at 5808 Sunset Boulevard, the de facto U.S. headquarters of Netflix.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

“Maybe we can create a recreation area and turn it around.” The Times reporter describes the area as looking like the “result of wartime bombing,” ushering in language that will shape public discourse about the Bronx for the next three decades. From this point on, Charlotte Street becomes visual political rhetoric. In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigns at Charlotte Street, using it as evidence of Carter’s failed promises. He stands on the same pile of trash, mobbed by protesters. One woman asks what he’s going to do for them, and a visibly flustered Reagan screeches over the jeers, “I’m trying to tell ya! I can’t do a damn thing for you if I don’t get elected!”


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

That allowed policy makers to benefit from technical input and advice but make the difficult political choices themselves. The agency was not shy about providing its technical perspective on highly controversial and politically consequential issues. In 1984, Ashton Carter, a young physicist who later went on to serve as secretary of defense between 2015 and 2017, authored a report on President Ronald Reagan’s beloved space-based missile defense program (commonly known as “Star Wars”). He spoke plainly in concluding that “a perfect or near-perfect defense” against nuclear missiles represented an illusory goal that “should not serve as the basis of public expectations or national policy.” The Pentagon was outraged and demanded retraction of the report.


pages: 422 words: 114,817

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable by Joanna Schwartz

Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, Ronald Reagan

Reinhardt, “The Demise of Habeas Corpus and the Rise of Qualified Immunity: The Court’s Ever Increasing Limitations on the Development and Enforcement of Constitutional Rights and Some Particularly Unfortunate Consequences,” Michigan Law Review 113 (2015): 1219–54 (written by President Jimmy Carter’s appointee Judge Stephen Reinhardt); Calixto v. City of New York, No. 1:15-cv-6676, 2018 WL 10128043 (E.D.N.Y. April 12, 2018) (written by President Ronald Reagan’s appointee Judge Raymond J. Dearie); Ziglar v. Abbasi, 137 S. Ct. 1843 (2017) (concurrence written by George H. W. Bush’s appointee Justice Clarence Thomas); United States v. Weaver, 975 F.3d 94 (2d Cir. 2020) (concurrence written by President William J. Clinton’s appointee Judge Guido Calabresi); Jordan v.


pages: 370 words: 114,741

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

23andMe, Adam Curtis, air freight, company town, desegregation, index card, indoor plumbing, life extension, medical malpractice, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, white picket fence

A reporter friend called my cell phone and told me the news, saying, “Don’t go to D.C., it’s not safe.” I turned my car around as the second plane hit, and by the time I got home, the TV was filled with footage of the Pentagon’s wreckage and buildings throughout D.C. being evacuated, including the Ronald Reagan Building, where the conference reception to honor Henrietta was supposed to be held. I called Deborah, and she answered in a panic. “It’s just like Pearl Harbor all over again,” she said. “And Oklahoma! There’s no way I’m going to D.C. now.” But there was no need. With airlines and Washington shut down, the NFCR canceled the Henrietta Lacks conference, with no plan to reschedule.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

California’s Japanese American Citizens’ League demands civil rights in court, providing legal support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 1957 City Lights wins a landmark ruling against book banning over the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and free speech and free spirits enjoy a reprieve from McCarthyism. 1966 Ronald Reagan is elected governor, setting a career precedent for fading film stars. He served until 1975 and in 1981 became the 40th president of the United States. January 14, 1967 The Summer of Love kicks off at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park with the blowing of conch shells and minds, and the lighting of draft cards used as rolling papers.

A quieter war commemoration is the Civil War Memorial Grove, which was planted in 1897 with saplings from famous battlefields. North of the Capitol is the Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park (Map; 916-323-3047; cnr 16th & H Sts; adult/child $4/2; 10am-5pm), built in 1877 and acquired by the state in 1903. No governor has lived in the house since Ronald Reagan moved out in the 1960s. Guided tours are given hourly from 10am to 4pm. OLD SACRAMENTO Though the art and culture of Midtown have challenged the conventional perception of Sacramento’s visitors attractions as lackluster, this historic river port, adjacent to downtown, is the city’s stalwart tourist draw.

The highlight is the 1822 convent, built with 4ft-thick adobe walls and Romanesque arches. Inside is an elaborate baroque altarpiece from Spain, and a small museum chronicling the mission’s history. It’s in the far northern Valley, near where I-405 and Hwy 118 meet. RONALD W REAGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM When Ronald Reagan, the country’s 40th president, died on June 5, 2004, at age 93, he was buried in the shadow of his presidential library (off Map; 800-998-7641; www.reaganlibrary.net; 40 Presidential Dr, Simi Valley; adult/child 13-19yr/senior $7/2/5; 10am-5pm) in the western Valley, just across the Ventura county line from LA.


pages: 386 words: 121,400

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman

clean water, double helix, Ronald Reagan, two and twenty

There are no other people once we are in Nicaragua, just us bus passengers and Sandinista soldiers standing in the distance on top of the hills, staring off into the fields surrounding us. They are looking for Contras, the guerrilla army that has been trying to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in what has become known down here as Ronald Reagan’s war. The United States is training and supporting the Contras. It is sweat-dripping hot. The women from my bus have towels or rags around their necks so they can soak up the sweat. I just drip, as though someone is wringing out clothes on my head. From time to time, I wipe the sweat with the bottom of my T-shirt.


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive investment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to “open carry” loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today. The far right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government—the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

If Democrats, say, owned all the TV stations in a region, then the Republican Party could just go home. Therefore, according to the Fairness Doctrine, anyone using the public airwaves was obliged to show all points of view, not just preferred ones. TV was the public’s resource. It’s an idea that sounds both radical and quaint today, and indeed it was snuffed out by Ronald Reagan long ago. But at the time, the Fairness Doctrine seemed sensible to most people across the political spectrum. Even so, the law hadn’t been tested much. A batch of friends and I decided to give it a go. We “intervened”—that’s a formal legal term—when television stations in the El Paso area had to reapply for their rights to use the airwaves.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Regulation and deregulation played a large, but partly accidental, role: few of the consequences of regulatory policy changes were intended. Institutional reorganisation played a part; traditional forms of business organisation, such as the partnership and the mutual, were folded into public limited companies. The support for free markets that followed the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan influenced public and business policy in many ways. The list of factors contributing to the change is long, and has one striking feature: the change in the nature of finance had little to do with any change in the needs of the real economy. Those needs remain much the same: we need financial institutions to process our payments, to extend credit, to provide capital for business.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

At an investors' meeting I attended in London two and a half years after his collapse, by which time many were remarking on the extent of his recovery, Kibaki still gave the impression – characteristic of stroke victims – of being a little tipsy. His delivery was slightly slurred, his enunciation ponderous, and when answering questions he meandered and contradicted himself. The entire audience seemed to be willing him on, praying he would make it through to the end without some monstrous faux pas. Like the latter-day Ronald Reagan in the grips of early Alzheimer's, he came across as an urbane, delightfully charming old duffer, but not a man anyone would want running a country. Confronted by a calamity no one had anticipated so early on, Kibaki's closest aides reeled and then rallied. If the Old Man was temporarily incapacitated, then they would have to run the country until he regained his faculties, just as the Kremlin's stalwarts had done whenever their geriatric Soviet leaders turned senile.


pages: 367 words: 122,140

A Very Strange Way to Go to War: The Canberra in the Falklands by Andrew Vine

Boeing 747, clockwatching, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

It was on the evening of 31 March that firm reports reached London that Argentina was about to invade both South Georgia and the Falklands. Operation BLUE was under way, and not even desperate, last-minute diplomacy, including an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and a telephone call from US President Ronald Reagan to Galtieri urging that the invasion should not go ahead could head it off. The success of the operation was never in question. Before first light on Friday 2 April, troops began streaming ashore on East Falkland, followed soon after by armoured vehicles. The airport was seized and the invaders headed for the capital, Port Stanley.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Respondents were questioned as to whether they were “basically confident that our children’s generation will end up enjoying a better standard of living than our generation, just as our generation has mostly been better off than our parents.” Only a tiny minority in all countries answered in the affirmative.14 One of the key arguments used by Thatcher and her supporters since the 1970s, along with US president Ronald Reagan from the 1980s, to justify placing public assets in private hands was the alleged excessive power of the trade unions and meddling bureaucrats—and it was true that some unions ferociously protected their turf. The point was made that Britain was not fulfilling its potential because leftists hated the idea of private enterprise.


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

He also set up the investment banking services department to help manage client relationships, win business, and reduce the firm’s reliance on any one individual. Both were innovations for Wall Street. He helped focus the firm on international growth. He retired in 1984 to serve as deputy secretary of state, under George Shultz, in the Ronald Reagan administration, from 1985 to 1989. Whitehead is currently a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and, until his resignation in May 2006, was chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Whitehead graduated from Haverford College and Harvard Business School and is author of A Life in Leadership: From D-Day to Ground Zero: An Autobiography (2005).


pages: 366 words: 123,151

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

airport security, Atahualpa, carbon footprint, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, financial independence, Google Earth, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal

My college roommate of two years, Doug Dittman, who was gay, had died of AIDS a year before I read the article. His partner, Mark, my other roommate, had become infected as well; and between Doug’s death and Mark’s illness, I found myself thinking about AIDS a lot. Other people seemed to be trying hard not to think about it (President Ronald Reagan resisted mentioning the epidemic for years), and that was something I wished I could change. When I read about the African truckers, a lightbulb went on: because of our own trucker culture, I thought, this story might interest American readers in AIDS in Africa (where it was expected to be much worse than in the USA).


pages: 384 words: 122,874

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee by Bee Wilson

air freight, Corn Laws, food miles, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, new economy, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair

As one lawyer has written, apropos of the aspartame case, it is the job of the law to resolve questions “inexpensively and quickly.”89 In the end, it was politics that supplied the necessary confidence in NutraSweet. Aspartame had been championed during the 1970s by Donald Rumsfeld, when he was chief executive of Searle, the company that manfactured it. In 1981, Rumsfeld moved to the White House, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. In that position, he oversaw the appointment of a new head for the FDA, who conveniently made the decision to overrule the board’s initial decision and approve aspartame. The FDA now endorsed Searle’s contention that there was no evidence of aspartame having a carcinogenic effect on the brains of animals; the science and statistics on which the fourth report had been based were flawed.


pages: 366 words: 119,981

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, Great Leap Forward, Kitchen Debate, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

In the United States, it seemed that everyone from schoolchildren to newspaper reporters to politicians was bemoaning national failure. The Soviet Union had a major propaganda victory on its hands—the biggest victory it would ever have from the moment of its inception by Lenin and the proletariat in 1917 to its demise at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1989—and it knew how to play that game too well. The immediate question on Khrushchev’s mind was what to do next. He didn’t want Sputnik to be a momentary triumph. With the fortieth anniversary of the revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union to be celebrated in less than a month, he wanted another victory in space.


pages: 410 words: 122,537

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

This seems to have been successful and a plan was announced for thirty trains, each with three Minuteman missiles, but the scheme was scrapped on the grounds of cost by the incoming administration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. A similar scheme was revived in December 1986, when President Ronald Reagan announced that there was to be a ‘rail garrison’ system for basing part of the so-called Peacekeeper Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force. In order to make the hundred-strong missile system less vulnerable to attack, half the missiles were to be mounted on a set of twenty-five trains, which would each have two locomotives, two security cars, two missile launch cars, a control car, a fuel car and a maintenance car.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

The drab title, “Software Aspects of Strategic Defense Systems,” offers no hint of the controversy that birthed it. Parnas, a computer science pioneer and longtime expert on defense software engineering, served on a panel of computer scientists convened to provide advice on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), President Ronald Reagan’s proposal for a missile defense program, colloquially known as Star Wars. Parnas had done plenty of work for the military in the past and was no kneejerk peacenik. But in June 1985, he resigned from the committee, declaring that the software required by SDI could never be built. Star Wars, Parnas argued, was doomed, because neither the software engineering techniques of the time nor those imaginable in the future could ever meet the program’s requirements.


pages: 497 words: 124,144

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

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

That year, for the first time in history, airlines had supplanted both rail and ships as the primary mode of transcontinental and transatlantic traffic, making travel less time-consuming. And the explosion of cars on American roads made it more affordable for the masses. For Disney, it all added up to one thing: a tourism boom. All he needed were telegenic hosts for his Sunday night Disneyland infomercials on ABC. The actor Ronald Reagan would handle the grand opening. Was the handsome von Braun interested in hosting the “Man in Space” segments of the Tomorrowland programs? It was thus from the odd pairing of Mickey Mouse and a former SS major with a Teutonic Texas twang that most Americans first heard of the futuristic concept of an earth-orbiting satellite.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

A decade later, the world’s governments met again, in Mexico City, to review progress and make midcourse corrections to the Bucharest Plan of Action. Much had been accomplished. The fertility rates in much of the developing world were falling sharply. Yet the political circumstances had changed a bit. With Ronald Reagan as president, the U.S. delegates argued that fertility reductions were natural results of development and that family planning was much less important. They also suggested that population growth had only “neutral” effects on overall economic development prospects, a change of viewpoint from the earlier (and more accurate) position that high fertility rates are deleterious to long-term development.


pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note. A more radical and converse prediction that emerges from these findings is that, by improving someone’s sleep, we should be able to reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease—or at least delay its onset.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

He began to wonder if there were hints of a different way to live lying in their lyrics, but he couldn’t find anyone to discuss it with. It was only when Tim went to study at Vanderbilt University, a very conservative college in the South, at the height of the Reagan years, that it occurred to him—slowly—to think more deeply about this. In 1984, he voted for Ronald Reagan, but he was starting to think a lot about the question of authenticity. “I was stumbling around,” he told me. “I think I was questioning just about everything. I wasn’t just questioning these values. I was questioning lots about myself, I was questioning lots about the nature of reality and the values of society.”


pages: 443 words: 125,510

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

Browning, “Presidents, Congress, and Policy Outcomes: U.S. Social Welfare Expenditures, 1949–77,” American Journal of Political Science 29, no. 2 (May 1985): 197–216; Andrew C. Pickering and James Rockey, “Ideology and the Size of US State Government,” Public Choice 156, nos. 3/4 (September 2013): 443–65. 62. Quoted in Henry Olsen, “Here’s How Ronald Reagan Would Fix the GOP’s Health-Care Mess,” Washington Post, June 22, 2017. 63. Libertarian Party, “2016 Platform,” adopted May 2016, https://www.lp.org/platform/. The Libertarian Party’s emphasis on “individual sovereignty” illustrates how deeply suspicious, if not hostile to, it is of the state.


pages: 406 words: 120,933

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

clean water, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), off grid, Ronald Reagan, urban sprawl

The 1981 study concluded that tripling the diversion was technically possible, but that the increased flow would create a number of hydrologic headaches immediately downstream.19 Then, in 1988, a drought lowered water levels on the Mississippi River by several feet, hampering the river’s billion-dollar commercial barge traffic. Barges, and other vessels, were forced to dodge numerous exposed—and unexposed—sandbars in the low water—if they could move at all. Democratic senator Jim Sasser from Tennessee, speaking for several Mississippi Valley politicians, encouraged President Ronald Reagan to use emergency powers to temporarily divert additional water from the Great Lakes via the Illinois diversion to help alleviate low flows on the Mississippi. Several bills were introduced in Congress to do just that.20 While those bills went nowhere, Illinois governor Jim Thompson shocked his Basin neighbors by supporting the call for an increase in the diversion all the way up to 10,000 cfs—the maximum that the Sanitary and Ship Canal could handle.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The emphasis on the inefficiency of taxes reinforces the examples given in the texts in the supply and demand applications (reviewed in Chapter 3). They are typically ones in which the government appears to mess things up: minimum wages increase unemployment, rent controls create apartment shortages, subsidies create inefficiencies and taxes create efficiency losses. This might have been what former US president Ronald Reagan was referring to when he said: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”’ (Vitullo-Martin and Moskin 1994: 130). The order of topics in the texts almost invariably buries the discussion of government, taxation and redistribution deep in the book.


pages: 561 words: 120,899

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

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

“In essence, the riskmanagement approach to monetary policymaking is an application of Bayesian decisionmaking,” Greenspan told the American Economic Association in 2004.3 The audience of academic and government economists gasped; few experts in finance analyze empirical data with Bayes. Economists were still catching their breaths when Martin Feldstein, professor of economics at Harvard, stood up at the same meeting and delivered a crash course in Bayesian theory. Feldstein had been President Ronald Reagan’s chief economic advisor and was president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading research organization. He learned Bayesian theory at the Howard Raiffa–Robert Schlaifer seminars at Harvard Business School in the 1960s. Feldstein explained that Bayes lets the Federal Reserve weigh a low-probability risk of disaster more heavily than a higher-probability risk that would cause little damage.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

However, he did not commit British forces to the conflict, despite immense US pressure to do so,causing great frustration in Washington.1 When Wilson privately expressed concerns about Johnson’s escalating war in February 1965, the President – referring to British counter-insurgency actions in Malaysia – snapped: ‘I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam … If you want to help us in Vietnam send us some men and send us some folk to deal with these guerrillas. And announce to the press that you are going to help us.’2 The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 – just over a year after Margaret Thatcher’s British electoral victory – proved a decisive turning point. If Thatcherism had played a key role in forging Britain’s new Establishment, the two Reagan administrations unleashed a similar process in the United States. In large part, Reaganism was a fusion of two ideologies: neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

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

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

Government can transfer money from the wealthy to the disadvantaged—or it can transfer money from common folk to the politically well-connected. In short, government can be used to create the foundations for a vibrant market economy or to stifle highly productive behavior. The wisdom, of course, lies in telling the difference. There is an old joke, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorites, that goes something like this: A Soviet woman is trying to buy a Lada, one of the cheap automobiles made in the former Soviet Union. The dealer tells her that there is a shortage of these cars, despite their reputation for shoddy quality. Still, the woman insists on placing an order.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Yet humanity ended up dodging the nuclear bullet, at least for the time being, and it did so thanks to what at the time seemed rather unlikely developments. Who would have guessed that a radical reformer like Mikhail Gorbachev would somehow rise to the top of the repressive Soviet system and make peace with Ronald Reagan, a right-wing zealot who never met a weapons system he didn't like? It's a useful reminder: history is full of surprises, and sometimes it really is darkest just before the dawn. But this line of thinking brings only so much consolation, I'm sorry to say, for there is a fundamental difference between the climate crisis and the nuclear arms race.


pages: 521 words: 125,749

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon by Colin Burgess, Kate Doolan

Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Ferguson, Missouri, Gene Kranz, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, profit motive, Ronald Reagan

Gus Grissom had already received this prestigious award as the Apollo 1 commander and one of America's most accomplished astronauts. At that time only ten other astronauts had received the medal. President Jimmy Carter had awarded the first six to John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, and posthumously to Gus Grissom. President Ronald Reagan presented one to John Young in 1981, President George Bush awarded the medal to Tom Stafford in 1993, and President Bill Clinton presented the medal to Jim Lovell in 1995 and to shuttle astronaut Shannon Lucid in 1996. The families of Ed White and Roger Chaffee were there at the White House, together with Betty Grissom.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

The only real difference between Right and Left was the readiness of the Conservatives to deregulate the private rental market, in the hope of encouraging private landlords, and the equal and opposite resolve of Labour to reimpose rent controls and stamp out ‘Rachmanism’ (exploitative behaviour by landlords), exemplified by Peter Rachman, who used intimidation to evict the sitting tenants of rent-controlled properties, replacing them with West Indian immigrants who had to pay market rents.31 As late as 1971, fewer than half of British homes were owner-occupied. In the United States, where public housing was never so important, mortgage interest payments were always tax deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913.32 As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage interest relief was ‘part of the American dream’.ao It played a much smaller role in Britain until 1983, when a more radically Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher introduced Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS) for the first £30,000 of a qualifying mortgage.


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

., Acosta was the legal point man for virtually every significant civil rights case regarding Chicano activists. In late 1968 he defended thirteen protesters who were indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the public school system after a teacher walkout. In 1969 he defended the Biltmore Seven, a clutch of radicals who were arrested for trying to firebomb the Biltmore Hotel while Governor Ronald Reagan was giving a speech inside. To Acosta, guilt or innocence was beside the point; due process should be accorded to anyone who had to defend him- or herself in a court of law. He became the Latino equivalent of white civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who had defended the Chicago Seven in the wake of the violent clashes between cops and protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In 1908 Leopold yielded personal ownership of Congo to the Belgian state, which, keen to retain influence over the mineral seams of Katanga following independence in 1960, encouraged the region’s secessionists, helping to bring down the liberation leader Patrice Lumumba in a CIA-sponsored coup that ushered in Mobutu, who became one of the century’s most rapacious kleptocrats.76 Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush welcomed him warmly to Washington. Only once his usefulness expired after the end of the Cold War did the United States abandon Mobutu to flee from Laurent Kabila’s advancing rebels. In the era of globalization the foreign protagonists in Congo’s looting machine are not monarchs or imperial states but rather tycoons and multinationals.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

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

Since the Reagan era, a highlight of the conservative playbook has been to claim that lowering taxes raises tax revenues. Their claim is that lower taxes stimulate business growth independently of any other variables. That is precisely a claim that there can be more than one equilibrium. This is the famous Laffer curve, which was promoted by one late 20th century president, Ronald Reagan, and ridiculed by another, George H. W. Bush, as “voodoo economics.” It’s counterintuitive, no? On the face of it, lowering taxes should lower the amount of money brought in by taxes. A remarkable, decades-long, and maniacal public relations campaign has brought about a general atmosphere in which the idea is respectable.


The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Donald Davies, friendly fire, information security, Leo Hollis, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, operational security, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Turing machine, unbiased observer, undersea cable, Zimmermann PGP

On graduation he seemed set for a steady career in the rapidly growing computer industry, but the political events of the early 1980s transformed his life, and he became less interested in the technology of silicon chips and more worried about the threat of nuclear war. He was alarmed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the election of Ronald Reagan, the instability caused by an aging Brezhnev and the increasingly tense nature of the Cold War. He even considered taking himself and his family to New Zealand, believing that this would be one of the few places on Earth that would be habitable after a nuclear conflict. But just as he had obtained passports and the necessary immigration papers, he and his wife attended a meeting held by the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.


pages: 503 words: 126,355

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, open borders, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

Begin acknowledged that it was a “war of choice,” unlike all of Israel’s previous conflicts, but he promised that the war would bring “forty years of peace” to Israel once the job had been done. The master plan, envisioned by Ariel Sharon, was to force the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Jordan, which would effectively turn that country into a Palestinian homeland and allow Israel to absorb the West Bank. Begin promised President Ronald Reagan that Israel would not need to go farther than forty kilometers from the border. Whatever limitations on the plan that the government had imposed were left aside as soon as Sharon moved his army into Lebanon. The Israelis conspired with a Christian warlord, Bashir Gemayel, of the Maronite Phalange party, to expel the Palestinians, defeat the Syrian forces in the country, and make Gemayel president of Lebanon.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

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

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

He called a stop to it and asked his country to change direction. It was so simple to see and yet so very difficult to deliver. In addition to his significant contribution there were two other very strong and highly convicted world leaders that were able to grasp the significance of the opportunity: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Both very different in background and style but both conviction politicians who were able to nudge the Western world back to some degree of stability. Some say that when Reagan came to power in 1980 he spent too much on defence which led to the American budget deficit problems of the 1990s. His detractors now argue (not at the time), that he knew in the 1980s that the Soviets were financially crippled by their excesses in trying to match the military capability of the industrialised West.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

He left Harvard and began in earnest to promote his vision that cultural revolution and spiritual enlightenment could be attained via the consumption of psychedelics, and soon became notorious. In numerous TV and radio appearances, he evangelized about LSD and its many benefits. In an interview with Playboy he advised that on an average acid trip women could expect to have a thousand orgasms. He ran against Ronald Reagan for governor of California and lost. Fueled in part by Leary’s proselytizing, the countercultural movement of the 1960s picked up momentum. In 1967, in San Francisco, Leary, by now “High Priest” of the psychedelic movement, addressed the Human Be-In that was attended by tens of thousands. Soon afterward, in a haze of backlash and scandal, LSD and psilocybin were made illegal.


Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

The dismantling of rules and regulations had begun piecemeal in the late 1970s and continued over time. In 1978, for example, after years of paying inflated fees to telephone companies to hang wire on their poles, Congress granted the FCC power to control utility pole attachment fees. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his 1981 appointment of Mark Fowler, a free-market believer, as chairman of the FCC were welcome news to cable operators. It was abundantly clear by that point that consumers were absolutely starving for cable. Cable was in 19 percent of American homes by 1978, after almost 30 years 9486_Robichaux_01.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:53 AM Page 73 Thrilla in Manila of building; penetration doubled to 40 percent in just 6 more years.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Ushered in during the aftermath of Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the FCPA—which bars American companies and figures from bribing foreign officials—remains the linchpin of America’s broader anticorruption efforts. Yet Trump entered the presidency having already publicly declared the FCPA a “horrible law.”24 (The only other president to enter office pledging to repeal the FCPA? Ronald Reagan.25) Almost immediately, Trump set about attempting to dismantle the entire act. In the spring of 2017, Trump enthused to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he wanted the FCPA scrapped entirely. “I need you to get rid of that law,” Trump bleated to Tillerson. Trump then ordered one of his advisers to author an executive order to that effect—all but eviscerating America’s pro-transparency reputation from the outset of his presidency.26 Luckily, thanks to the regulatory structure and broad bipartisan support the FCPA still enjoys, Trump’s efforts went nowhere.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

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

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

The Pentagon split off from ARPANET to form its own, more secure network: MILNET.19 Ironically, the network the military left behind would become a prime battlefield of the twenty-first century, as a creation of the first Cold War came to define the next one. * * * At about this time, President Ronald Reagan settled in for a Camp David viewing of the new Hollywood thriller WarGames. The president watched in alarm as a teenager (played by Matthew Broderick) hacked into his high school computer to change his grades, eventually finding his way into the North American Aerospace Defense Command and nearly causing World War III.


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.’ This thought was picked up by the twentiethcentury economist John Maynard Keynes and turned into theory by Arthur Laffer; the Laffer Curve credits Ibn Khaldun with being the first to notice the inverse relation between tax revenues and power. And that explains why the late US President Ronald Reagan quipped that ‘I did not personally know Ibn Khaldun, although we may have had some friends in common!’ The achievement was all the greater because Ibn Khaldun was not writing in Aristotle’s Athens, in Alexandria’s ancient library or Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, but in a remote castle in turbulent, fourteenth-century North Africa, with darkness and difficulty spreading around him, governments fighting each other, and people left to fend for themselves.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

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

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

Two of his rivals, both moderates, self-destructed: Michigan governor George Romney, seeking to explain newfound skepticism about the war, said he’d been “brainwashed” by the military, became a laughingstock, and withdrew before the first primary; while New York governor Nelson Rockefeller entered the race too late to stop Nixon’s momentum. California governor Ronald Reagan failed to declare himself a candidate until the convention, and then proved unable to peel away enough southern conservatives from the front-runner to make a difference. When Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, James Reston of The New York Times called it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.”

And no long-hairs….The California delegation at the Republican convention…was so different from the California delegation to the Democratic convention that it might have come not from a different state, but from a different country or a different era—no cowboy boots, no open collars, no Indians, few blacks, no blue-jeaned girls.” Governor Ronald Reagan of California warned that “our traditional two-party system has become a three-party system—Republican, McGovern, and Democrat.” Barry Goldwater denounced McGovern for having “already surrendered to the enemy before the election has even been held.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller nominated Nixon as the president “who has brought us to the threshold of peace.”


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Some like basketball. I like policy and politics.” His cluttered Goldman office on the trading floor—filled with unopened boxes—also had pictures of him with presidents Carter and Reagan. He knew that someday he wanted to work in the White House, although with Mondale’s defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan he knew that wasn’t going to be anytime soon. Afterward, Mondale had nothing but praise for Rubin. “I definitely would have offered him a position in my administration, one that would have been significant and matched his skills and interests,” Mondale told Institutional Investor in 1990. “Bob is the ablest person I have ever met.”

In an era before e-mail, Paulson was a relentless user of voice mail and would spend hours a day leaving messages, forwarding messages, and copying others on messages. This also sent a powerful—message—to the organization. Paulson constantly bombarded his partners: “Here’s what I just heard. Boom.” He was a “great networker of information,” explained one partner. “A great communicator, ironically. Not in a Ronald Reagan sense, but in an ‘I hear it, I get it out’ sense. That’s how he made his career in banking, too, was as a user of information, calling CEOs and saying, ‘What are you doing? This is what I heard.’ ” Everyone at Goldman would have hundreds of voice mails to deal with every night that would require hours of attention.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

Clarke had been President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism czar and chaired the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council (NSC) for the decade leading up to 9/11. He had also served on President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council and was an assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He was one of the most experienced counterterrorism officials in the United States and, at the time of the hearing, was on his way out of government, though he still held a post as a special adviser to President George W. Bush on cyberspace security. Clarke was a hawkish figure who had risen to prominence under a Democratic administration and was known to have pushed hard when Clinton was in power for more covert action.

“I think Rumsfeld, Cheney thought that the CIA was a bunch of pansies, much the way they thought about the State Department,” recalled Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff. Wilkerson said that, during this period, he began to see a pattern of “what I consider assumption of presidential power, commander in chief powers, by the vice president of the United States.” Cheney, in particular, he said, longed for the covert wars of the 1980s, “the Ronald Reagan period of helping the Contras to fight the Sandinistas” and the “almost symbiotic relationship between some of the Special Operations Forces and the clandestine operators in the CIA. That, I think comes to a real art form in the War on Terror, as one would suspect it would, because this is what Cheney wanted to do.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The sheer visibility of homeless people in Northern California, particularly in San Francisco, is a shock for many visitors. Understanding the causes and demographics of Northern California’s homeless is not easy. Some are teens who have run away or been kicked out by their families, but the largest contingent of homeless Californians are US military veterans. Some say the problem started in the 1960s, when Ronald Reagan slashed funding to mental-health facilities, drug-rehab programs and low-income housing programs, both as governor of California and later as president. Over the following decades this left few options for many Californians suffering from mental illness and drug addiction. Also standing in line at homeless shelters and food banks are the working poor, unable to cover rent and expenses on minimum-wage salaries, despite recent increases to the latter.

Some of the most eloquent modern writing on Northern California, the Summer of Love, the Central Valley and the California political circus is by the hand of Sacramento native essayist Joan Didion. Didion’s White Album is a collection of essays that goes deep into the psyche of California in the late '60s, and discussion of the Central Valley in Where I Was From takes a thoughtful look at Ronald Reagan’s governor mansion, water wars and the odysseys of California’s mythmakers. The Land & Wildlife Northern California has stunning landscapes. Its Mediterranean climate – characterized by dry summers and mild, wet winters with snow only at high elevations – makes it an easy year-round destination.


pages: 525 words: 146,126

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Stadler, the scientist who sells out his scientific integrity for political clout in Atlas Shrugged. Greenspan “is fully aware of the truth . . . yet leads and promotes the government agency destructive of objective money . . . his public record . . . involves a series of intellectual cave-ins for the sake of maintaining his political standing.” Among them, “In 1981, he scared Ronald Reagan and his advisors out of returning to the gold standard by resorting to bogus arguments. He headed the Social Security Commission in 1983 and recommended huge hikes in the payroll tax, even though partial privatization options were available . . . He fought Reagan’s tax cuts and supported Bush and Clinton’s tax hikes . . .


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

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

Johnson’s Great Society boosted spending in an attempt to fight urban poverty, the riots of the late ‘60s hastened the flight to the suburbs. With support for conservatives increasingly coming from such suburbanized, low-tax states as Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada, Republicans understood it was in their interest to enact policies favorable to the suburbs. Ronald Reagan became the first suburban president, cutting funding to cities and mass transit, and explicitly favoring investment in highways and sprawled Sun Belt metropolises. During his first term, George W. Bush announced, “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” and under his administration Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac radically lowered mortgage purchase standards.


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Under pressure from the Justice Department, IBM executives in the late 1960s decided to “unbundle” their hardware and software products – a watershed event in computing history. Their decision to unbundle stimulated new markets for software and “plug-compatible” peripherals, undermined IBM’s dominant position as the de facto guardian of computer interfaces, and ultimately disaggregated control in the industry.31 By the time President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department dismissed the IBM antitrust suit in 1982, the combined force of critiques from entrepreneurs, hackers, and regulators had radically changed the foundations of the computer industry. Innovative ideas, companies, and machines were everywhere, but an important question remained: If IBM would not be allowed to be the system architect for the entire computer industry, who or what would be responsible for industrywide compatibility?


pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

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

It’s essential to understanding where our modern world begins, its birth pains, its principal path. What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what Félix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it. Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico.


pages: 402 words: 129,876

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It by Ben Goldacre

behavioural economics, classic study, data acquisition, framing effect, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income per capita, meta-analysis, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, sugar pill, systematic bias, WikiLeaks

For many decades, for example, the FDA’s performance was measured by how many drugs it managed to approve in each calendar year.25 This led to a phenomenon known as the ‘December Effect’, whereby a very large proportion of the year’s approvals were rushed through in a panic during the last few weeks around Christmas. By graphing the proportion of approvals that were made in December over the course of thirty years (below, from Carpenter 2010), we can see the size of this effect, and also trace the arrival of a more aggressive pro-industry stance during Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–89). If approvals were evenly distributed throughout the year, we’d expect to only see 8 per cent in each month: during the late eighties, the proportion passing in December rose to more than half, and it’s hard to believe that this was simply when the assessments were complete.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Tall, lanky, and with a rectangular face, Mueller is an easygoing sort who muddled through college for a bit, teaching his friends how to make smoke bombs, and then eventually settled down and did well as a mechanical engineering student. Fresh out of college, he worked for Hughes Aircraft on satellites—“It wasn’t rockets, but it was close”—and then went to TRW Space & Electronics. It was the latter half of the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program had the space gearheads dreaming about kinetic weapons and all sorts of mayhem. At TRW, Mueller experimented with crazy types of propellants and oversaw the development of the company’s TR-106 engine, a giant machine fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. As a hobby, Mueller hung out with a couple hundred amateur rocketry buffs in the Reaction Research Society, a group formed in 1943 to encourage the building and firing of rockets.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

The dollar had bounded to unprecedented levels in the middle of the 1980s on the heels of huge Japanese and European purchases of dollar securities and a strong U.S. economy. Foreign investors were attracted to high dollar interest rates, in part driven by record U.S. budget deficits but also by a strengthening of the U.S. economy and the capital-friendly presidency of Ronald Reagan. By February 1985, the dollar became massively overvalued and U.S. exports became very uncompetitive, severely worsening the U.S. trade deficit. The dollar then reversed course and began a steep decline. Central bankers initially cheered the fall of the overpriced dollar, but they grew concerned when the dollar continued to decline and the U.S. trade deficit, instead of improving, worsened.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

According to e-Estonia.com, “With KSI, history cannot be rewritten.”10 Clearly, blockchain technology applies not only to corporations fixated on profits but also to public institutions focused on prosperity for all, from government, education, and health care to energy grids, transportation systems, and social services. Where to start? SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE In his Gettysburg Address in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said that society’s greatest goal was a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Twelve decades later, President Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 Inaugural Address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Many in the nascent blockchain ecosystem agree. In a 2013 survey, over 44 percent of bitcoin users professed to be “libertarian or anarcho-capitalists who favor elimination of the state.”11 Libertarians of all stripes tend to support bitcoin.


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

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

The software was jointly developed with the Bank of America’s data processing staff. The system was rolled out, with extensive publicity, over 2 years: “Opening ceremonies for ERMA, held in 1960 at three different locations connected by closed circuit television, were hosted with great fanfare by Ronald Reagan of General Electric Theater. With the installation of the last ERMA in June 1961, 13 ERMA centers, employing 32 computers, were servicing 2.3 million checking accounts at 238 branches. Conversion of the bank’s 2,382,230 savings accounts was begun on January 11, 1962, and completed on February 23, 1962.”64 After the early 1960s, with many command-and-control systems in place, the US government dramatically reduced spending on such systems.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Several specialised nuclear weapons have also been designed to explode below the surface of the earth as a means to destroy subterranean facilities. One so-called nuclear Earth Penetrator Weapon (EPW) is the United State’s twelve-foot-long, javelin-like B61-11 ‘mini-nuke’. This weapon is the first US nuclear device to be fielded since the global testing ban; between 60 and 150 have been deployed. Ronald Reagan seriously considered using B61-11s to destroy alleged chemical weapons complexes at Tarhunah as part of the wider US bombing campaign against Libya in 1996. Harold Smith, assistant secretary of defence at the time, asserted that B-2 stealth bombers would use the weapon if asked by Reagan. ‘We could not take [Tarhunah] out of commission using strictly conventional weapons’, Smith said.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The lobbyists also turned their attention to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) – a body that invests $30 billion into medical research every year. A 2011 act had a rider that stated no NIH funding ‘may be used, in whole or part, to advocate or promote gun control’. 67. Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy (the lone Democrat), Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The elder Bush resigned from the NRA in 1995 after LaPierre’s attack on federal agents in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/11/us/letter-of-resignation-sent-by-bush-to-rifle-association.html 68. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/18/pro-gun-groups-donated-senators 69. http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/05/01/12591/gun-lobbys-money-and-power-still-holds-sway-over-congress 70. http://www.cpsc.gov/en 71. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/27/guns-children-hospitalizations/4796999/ 72. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/11/guns-child-deaths-more-than-cancer/2073259/ 73.


pages: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

It's all jungle drums and gossip with them, they love it, they swim in it, like fish in a stream in a cave ... A terrific thought bubbles up in the universal brain ... The Acid Test Graduation is scheduled for Winterland on Monday, October 31, Halloween. The next night the California Democratic Party is holding a big rally in Winterland for Governor Brown, who is running against Ronald Reagan. Kesey and the Pranksters hold their Winterland blast on Halloween. Right? Far from being an "acid graduation," it will be an Acid Test of unbelievable proportions. Electric Kool-Aid will rain in the air like a typhoon, swizzle up every vein, 6,000 heads smashed out of their nuts, ricocheting off the walls like electric golf balls...


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

As hope of the 1970s settled into economic malaise, however, Coke showed how easy it was to appeal to the other side of the political spectrum. A new series of ads featured lighthouses, redwoods, and corn silos, set to a song called “Look Up, America!”—a nod to the new “moral majority” backing conservative president Ronald Reagan. Through it all, sales of soft BUILDING THE BRAND 59 drinks continued to soar, from 242 cans per person in 1970 to 363 cans per person in 1980. As Pepsi’s new CEO Roger Enrico once said, “At Pepsi, we like the Cola Wars. . . . The more fun we provide, the more people buy our products—all our products.”


pages: 430 words: 140,405

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. Mcdonald, Patrick Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, diversification, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, naked short selling, negative equity, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, value at risk

Personally, I thought Hank Paulson was going to do something like Custer’s last stand, riding bravely in defense of capitalism at the head of his troops, and let the market do its worst. Trouble with that was everyone might get killed. Worse yet, the son of a bitch was going to do it with my money. All my life I’ve been a laissez-faire Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher capitalist, swearing by the market, taking the risks, and the devil take the hindmost. But this one time I was looking for a government rescue, and I wasn’t going to get it. Around eight on that Sunday night the Lehman negotiators returned to the office from the Fed building and went straight to the thirty-first floor.


Frommer's Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs by Eric Peterson

airport security, Columbine, Easter island, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, life extension, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, young professional

Every president since 1905 (except Calvin Coolidge) has visited the hotel, and Dwight Eisenhower made the Brown his home away from the White House. His former room, now known as the Eisenhower Suite, is a vision of stately elegance, with a preserved dent in the fireplace trim that is the alleged result of an errant golf swing. There are also lavish, unique suites named after Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and The Beatles. Standard rooms are also lush and comfortable, either Victorian or Art Deco in style with reproduction furnishings and fixtures. Each has a desk, a duvet, and individual climate control. The clientele is a mix of leisure travelers and businesspeople with a taste—and a budget—for luxury.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

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

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

“While the Court is certainly sympathetic … the remedy for this situation lies in the sound discretion of the General Assembly, not with the judiciary.” “I figured they were licensed when we went to take a tour,” Cummings told me. “They seemed like they knew what they were doing. They were mothers. They were grandmothers.”30 In 1981, when some states were trying to set higher teacher-training standards for child-care workers, Ronald Reagan scoffed at the attempt. “Mothers and grandmothers have been taking care of children for thousands of years without special college training,” he said.31 In the minds of many, child care means little more than babysitting. And how hard can that be? The New Republic writer Jonathan Cohn, in his sobering “The Hell of American Day Care,” chronicled the deaths of four children in a family care home in Texas.


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

Other top business leaders with a different sort of reputation—but no less remarkable a memory—include indicted Hollinger CEO Conrad Black, convicted former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, convicted CEO Martha Stewart, and (if you consider mob bosses to be business leaders), dreaded capo di tutti i capi Toto Riina.95 President Bill Clinton, with his marvelously retentive memory, could cover gaffes such as being given the wrong speech for his first State of the Union address through recollection and ad-libbing—no one ever guessed what was going on until later. And President Ronald Reagan was a near-professional raconteur, with ready quips always at hand to loosen tension; he could quote long passages from memory of books that had impressed him. It was Reagan's extraordinary memory that underpinned his moniker of “The Great Communicator” (which makes his later Alzheimer's all the more tragic).


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Initially it was top-secret, a component of the nuclear strategic arsenal designed to make certain that planes carrying atomic bombs and submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles always knew where they were to a high degree of accuracy, and that their weapons knew their targets’ locations to within margins of just a few meters. Then, in the aftermath of the shooting down in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet fighters after it accidentally strayed into forbidden airspace over Sakhalin Island while flying from Anchorage to Seoul, Ronald Reagan decided that civil users (airlines initially, and then ordinary civilians, too) should have equal access to the technology. To withhold deliberately a means of accurately determining one’s location was considered morally questionable, Reagan’s White House decided, even when ranged against the strategic advantage of keeping the information to oneself, as was claimed by the military.


pages: 457 words: 143,967

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

Computers were programmed to execute trades automatically when pre-drawn lines were crossed. Sophisticated risk models supplemented traders’ feel for markets. Trade processing became automated and paper was on the way out. Faster communications linked America with the rest of the world. At the same time, Ronald Reagan, tax cuts, deregulation and a squeeze on inflation rebooted the American economy and the US financial services industry boomed. For British firms like Barclays the timing was very unfortunate. Between July 1983, when the run-up to Big Bang started, and October 1986, when it ended, the Americans moved the finishing line.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Each year, several hundred of them are selected by competitive evaluation as “administrative officers” who earn double the standard salary. Max Weber, the father of modern government science, would have been gravely worried by the state of the United States’ federal service, which has been in decline since the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s. The more than 2 million US civil servants (including half a million postal service workers) across more than four hundred agencies are underpaid and overworked, often use archaic software, and are subject to periodic government shutdowns. They have no mandate and little incentive to learn from other countries.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

The reasons people had left the party included extremism, trade unions, defence policy and weak leadership. The Thatcherite revolution in fighting the miners, the GLC, and being strong on defence had combined with aspirational politics over home ownership to make Labour look irrelevant in the modern world where things were changing incredibly quickly. Ronald Reagan had been replaced as US president by George H. W. Bush, but this was of secondary importance to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union who, from 1985, launched glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) within the USSR that slowly but surely spread to the East European states under Soviet influence.


pages: 473 words: 130,141

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

The figure of 3500 CE was extrapolated from increases in the size of the world’s twenty-eight largest empires since the Akkadian Empire in 2100 BCE. 75. Overy 2009; Hathaway and Shapiro 2017. 76. Suicide attackers are a striking exception, since their behavior seems unlikely to be adaptive. They normally represent the consequences of intense cultural persuasion (Atran 2003). 77. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. Reagan persuaded Congress to fund the SDI on the basis that it would provide an effective shield against nuclear attack by the USSR. The effort proved technically impossible, politically challenging, and hugely expensive, and was eventually shelved.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Add in the adrenalin, the attention you get, and the time away from family … toxic mix.’11 Among the Tories, such behaviour seems particularly prevalent. Narcissism can lend itself to less self-control. It is worth remembering that right-wing politicians often accuse the poor of not having enough self-control when it comes to sex and money. It was seen in Ronald Reagan’s 1976 trope of the black welfare queen, and in Peter Lilley’s 1992 ‘little list’ of ‘scroungers’ (which included ‘young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue’), and in Esther McVey, in her role as Work and Pensions Secretary, saying that it was ‘right’ that more people were using foodbanks.12 While taking away from others, Conservatives simultaneously celebrate taking so much for themselves.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Then in 1980, with Cold War tensions reaching a new peak, Margaret Thatcher agreed to station ninety-six US nuclear Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, making my hometown nuclear strike target number one. The move represented a significant escalation in tactics by the hawkish new US President Ronald Reagan, who had reversed years of détente with the Soviet Union and begun calling it the ‘Evil Empire’. Many felt that the MOD – and the British state overall – had sold out British interests for American ones. ‘The sign at the gate maintained the pretence of RAF ownership, hence British control,’ notes historian George McKay.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The fact that in a few instances austerity was associated with economic expansion only meant this: in these instances, but for the austerity, the expansion would have been even stronger. In some cases, in spite of the expansion of trade, the economy remained below full employment. In such cases, austerity had worsened the level of unemployment; the austerity had not caused the reduction in the unemployment. An analogy might be useful: When Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, the government undertook two policies almost simultaneously, a large tax cut and very tight monetary policy. The economy went into the deepest economic downturn, the worst, up to that point, since the Great Depression. It would be wrong to infer that the tax cut caused the economic downturn.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Reagan has delivered handsomely on one of his campaign promises: he has given the adherents of religion a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations. This defines our subject for tonight. It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises. Is the New Right the answer to the New Left? What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism? Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism—or to something else? In discussing these issues, I am not going to say much about the New Right as such; its specific beliefs are widely known. Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader, philosophical context.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

They were trustees, worried about losses and lawsuits and perfectly willing to sacrifice potential gains in order to avoid bad news. Toward the end of the decade, a couple of UC–Berkeley finance professors, together with a veteran financial entrepreneur, figured out how to sell them on portfolio protection. In the early 1970s, then-governor Ronald Reagan had cracked down on spending—and thus faculty pay—at California’s public universities. In high-priced Berkeley, this turned professors’ thoughts to moonlighting. Barr Rosenberg was the first great success at it. One night in mid-decade his friend and fellow finance professor Hayne Leland cloistered himself in his study, committed to devising his own money-making idea before he emerged.


pages: 460 words: 130,053

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

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

Nobody in Russia had heard of Ben Cardin before, but after April 26, 2010, the conventional wisdom in Russia was that this senator from Maryland was the most important politician in America. Russian human rights activists and opposition politicians jumped onto the bandwagon, writing letters to President Obama and the head of the EU supporting the Cardin List. Not since Ronald Reagan had Russians witnessed a foreign politician act so decisively on a Russian human rights issue. The sad fact was that most Russian atrocities were never noticed by the outside world, and in the rare instances that they were, foreign governments almost never reacted to them. But now, all of a sudden, a US senator was calling for sixty named Russian officials to have their US visas revoked for their involvement in a human rights atrocity.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Bradley Jr. wrote that the result of federal regulatory forays into the natural gas market was that the electricity industry had to substitute “the most pollutive fossil fuel (coal) for the cleanest fossil fuel (gas).”26 The thicket of regulations on the gas sector eventually became so onerous that Congress finally had no choice but to repeal most of them. And much of that deregulation occurred during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But even as the natural gas business was being gradually deregulated, many analysts continued to claim that America was running out of natural gas. For instance, in 1983, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (a now-defunct arm of Congress) predicted that by 2000, U.S. gas output would likely be no more than about 19 trillion cubic feet per year.27 The reality was quite different.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

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

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

As millions of people both rationally and irrationally pursued their goals, a working market would order itself around them. The market was as much a part of human beings as their DNA. Given the premises he worked under, Hayek’s conclusions were intelligent enough, and foreshadowed some of the systems theory to follow. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton all based their approaches to the economy on his work, which still forms the theoretical core of free-market theory today. When it’s working as designed, the free market can accurately predict and address a wide range of human needs, with a minimum of central planning.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

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

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

When a 2010 Washington Post article stated that Obama was “a rare President who comes from the middle class,” some readers clamored that Obama was only one of a number of presidents from families in this economic group. National and international media coverage informed audiences that not only President Obama but also former presidents Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton were all products of the middle class.39 Class-related media framing of stories about President Obama has focused on the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families, established by his administration and chaired by Vice President Joseph Biden. The task force’s findings include the following: • Middle class families are defined by their aspirations more than their incomes.


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

She served as vice chancellor of Academic Affairs of the University of Kansas from 1981 to 1985. She was the national president of the KU Alumni Association and received its Fred Ellsworth Medallion for extraordinary service to the university (1992). She also received the KU Distinguished Service Citation (1996). On October 31, 1985, Judge Tacha was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a new seat on the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (created by 98 Stat. 333). She was confirmed by the US Senate and received her commission on December 16, 1985. Judge Tacha served as chief judge of the Tenth Circuit from 2001 to 2007. In 2008, she received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award from the American Judicature Society.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Krikorian, Robert, "Have You Noticed? An American Resurgence is Underway," Vital Speeches of the Day, March 1, 1985, p. 301. 14. Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 29. CHAPTER 17 White House press release, April 12, 1994. 2. "Now It's Our Turn," Readers Digest, May 1985, p. 109. 3. Ronald Reagan, as quoted from televised budget message, in "A Vision of Voluntarism," Time, October 19,1981, p. 47. 4. Ellis, Susan, and Noyes, Katherine, By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers, (San Frnacisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1990), pp. 290-291. 5. "2 Million Points of Light," Across the Board, March 1989, p. 12. 6.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

The Foundation also gave $100,000 to the National Book Festival, a favourite charity of Laura Bush, the wife of President George Bush.’17 Khodorkovsky also pumped money into the powerful investment fund Carlyle Group, run by Frank Carlucci, a former deputy director of the CIA and US Defense Secretary under Ronald Reagan. These moves all helped to secure the oligarch goodwill among powerful US political figures. Hoping to win over public opinion, in 2001 he invited a handful of prominent journalists on what became an infamous champagne-fuelled junket around Russia by private jet. The trip, organized by Prince Michael of Kent, became known among Moscow correspondents as the ‘plane of shame’.


pages: 495 words: 138,188

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, borderless world, business cycle, central bank independence, Corn Laws, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, inflation targeting, joint-stock company, Kula ring, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price mechanism, profit motive, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor, Works Progress Administration

From the mid-1930s through the 1960s, Keynesian economic ideas legitimating active government management of economies dominated national policies in the West.3 But after the Second World War, Mises and Hayek were tireless proponents for market liberalism in the United States and the United Kingdom, and they directly inspired such influential followers as Milton Friedman. Hayek lived until 1992, long enough to feel vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the time of his death, he was widely celebrated as the father of neoliberalism—the person who had inspired both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to pursue policies of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization. As early as the 1920s, however, Polanyi directly challenged Mises’s arguments, and the critique of the market liberals continued as his central theoretical concern. During his tenure at Der Österreichische Volkswirt, Polanyi witnessed the U.S. stock market crash in 1929, the failure of the Vienna Kreditanstalt in 1931, which precipitated the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism.


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

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

Deepening, Asymmetrical Eurasian Entente under Xi and Putin During the last years of the Cold War and beyond, both China and Russia reached out actively to the Western industrialized nations, including the United States. Deng Xiaoping normalized relations with Washington in 1979 and spoke later of “hiding our capabilities and biding our time.”46 Gorbachev spoke during the late 1980s of “our common European home” and sought disarmament understandings with Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik and beyond.47 Yeltsin, Medvedev, and the first Putin administration in Russia, as well as Hu Jintao in China, took a similar relatively conciliatory line. In 2012 Vladimir Putin began his third term as Russian president, after a four-year interlude as prime minister.48 And in 2012 Xi Jinping also assumed power in China.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The simulation (and therefore destruction) of authentic discourse, first in the United States, and then spreading to the rest of the world, is what Guy Debord would call the first quantum leap into the "society of the spectacle" and what Jean Baudrillard would recognize as a milestone in the world's slide into hyper-reality. Mass media's colonization of civil society turned into a quasipolitical campaign promoting technology itself when the imagemaking technology of television came along. ("Progress is our most important product," said General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan, in the early years of television.) And in the twentieth century, as the telephone, radio, and television became vehicles for public discourse, the nature of political discussion has mutated into something quite different from anything the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen. A politician is now a commodity, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided via sound-bites and staged events.


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

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. As President Reagan told the nation, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”; Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (January 20, 1981), http://www.reaganlibrary.com/reagan/speeches /first.asp. 12. Case No. T-79/12, Cisco Systems Inc. v. Commission [December 11, 2013] 612 TJ 0079, para. 69. 13. Ibid. 14. United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34, 49 (D.C. Cir. 2001) (noting “significant debate amongst academics and practitioners over the extent to which ‘old economy’ § 2 monopolization doctrines should apply to firms competing in dynamic technological markets characterized by network effects”); United States v.


pages: 759 words: 166,687

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

It still had to solve the old problems of tracking targets, smoothing signals, predicting positions, and directing weapons—problems made more difficult by ballistic missiles and supersonic bombers. 8 SAGE operators used “light guns” to identify targets, recalling the pointer matching and pip matching of earlier generations (Fig. 12.2 ). Indeed, the problems of tracking, predicting, and shooting down aerial attackers are with us still, though in different forms. From Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars dream, to the controversies over the Patriot missile in the Gulf War, to current debates about ballistic missile defense, to the new threat of terrorists turning commercial aircraft into guided bombs, what Vannevar Bush called “the antiaircraft problem” continues to influence our technological world.


pages: 428 words: 138,235

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

He preferred to think about the story of Australian businessman Alan Bond, who, having been beaten three times in a row, persisted with a fourth challenge. He came to America with Australia II and a golden wrench, which he said he would use to unbolt the trophy from the New York Yacht Club. President Ronald Reagan congratulated Bond and his winning team during their visit to the White House. Referring to the Australians and to Conner’s American team, Reagan said, “You captured the imagination of the people, and the world over.” And to Bond, known as “Bondy,” he said, “Alan, you represent the kind of tenacity with which Americans and the Australians identify.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

According to New York Times exit polling of 24,537 respondents, 58 percent of white voters chose the Republican Donald Trump and only 37 percent went for the Democrat Hillary Clinton. While she won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump by the popular count, she attracted a smaller share of the white vote than any Democratic candidate other than Jimmy Carter in his failed bid for reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1980. “The parties have grown so divided by race,” writes the political scientist Lilliana Mason, “that simple racial identity, without policy content, is enough to predict party identity.” There was perhaps no clearer measure of white solidarity than the actions of white women in 2016.


pages: 486 words: 138,878

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

clean water, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low earth orbit, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, urban sprawl

This book is dedicated to my Grandmother and my Grand Mother And – lovingly, loyally, gratefully – to Benedict Douglas-Scott THE CREW OF THE DAMOCLES Senior Astronauts Commander Solomon Sheppard – Commander and Pilot Igor Bovarin – Flight Engineer Dr Margret ‘Maggie’ Millburrow – Flight Surgeon Dr Cai Tsang – Botanist and Hydroponics Expert The Beta Harrison ‘Harry’ Bellgrave – Pilot/Commander-in-Training Poppy Lane – Head of Communications/In-flight Correspondent Juno Juma – Trainee Medical Officer Astrid Juma – Junior Astrobiologist Eliot Liston – Junior Flight Engineer Ara Shah – Junior Botanist Other Jesse Solloway – First Alternate Beta Dr Friederike ‘Fae’ Golinsky – Lead medical officer PART ONE ‘We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God”.’ Peggy Noonan for Ronald Reagan It is just like Earth, Terra-Two. It has turned in silence for millennia on the same spiralled arm of the galaxy. It is enveloped in temperate air, oxygen, nitrogen, noble gases, dark oceans licking empty shores. It’s luxuriant with life. Trees burst from the dirt. Electric-blue fish slalom through coral reefs and the wind is heavy with spores that germinate in shadows.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Having a few business owners—including a bookseller, the owner of the local hardware store, and Staƒel—on board was crucial to giving the campaign legitimacy and visibility early on. When Hoƒman was asked how he recruited business owners and what he said to those who hesitated to take a public stand on a controversial issue, even one that would directly aƒect their livelihoods, he quoted from a speech Ronald Reagan made on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential run in 1964: “If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he’ll eat you last.”7 Members of This Is Our Town began a steady stream of letters to the editor, using the most-read section of the newspaper to highlight major concerns about big-box retail.


pages: 476 words: 138,420

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, Transnistria, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game, éminence grise

By that time, the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan, where it sent its troops in 1979 to support what promised to be a socialist revolution and stop the advance of the West, while the United States had begun its recovery from the psychological shock of Vietnam and the energy crisis of the 1970s, becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric and actions abroad. Under Ronald Reagan, who moved into the White House in January 1981 and stayed in office for two terms, the United States challenged Soviet behavior not only in Afghanistan but also in Poland. Workers’ strikes in that country gave birth to the free trade union Solidarity, which contested Polish communist rule and Soviet political control.


pages: 397 words: 131,375

Sing Backwards and Weep: The Sunday Times Bestseller by Mark Lanegan

clean water, Mason jar, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

Hicks had stood in the sun all afternoon just to meet him face-to-face. The greeting was accomplished guerilla-style with John ambushing and introducing himself to the startled actor completely in character as Barney Fife himself. Don Knotts had laughed nervously and posed with Hicks for a Polaroid. Barney Fife, Gomer Pyle, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon were favorites, but Hicks could uncannily imitate almost anyone, including people we had just met, and all for my personal entertainment. He was a one-of-a-kind character, an undersized, fearless badass. A long-and-greasy-haired, heavily tattooed loner who looked like the kid from the wrong side of the tracks all the straight kids in junior high school had feared.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

After a journey of nine years and five billion miles (8 billion kilometers), it had survived any number of technical mishaps to get there. It was deaf, arthritic, and slightly senile—which, as one bitter planetary researcher remarked, was a bit like the then incumbent in the White House. The slowdown in planetary exploration at the start of the 1980s could be laid at the door of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. One of the worst effects of Reaganomics was a desire to lop off the budget needed to keep Voyager 2 “alive.” Somehow it survived. Alas, the crew of the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle mission did not. They were launched into space at the same time as Voyager 2 departed from Uranus. When Challenger exploded in the skies above Florida on January 28, 1986, so too did America’s ability to send anything into space.


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

The idea of having an outside adult, who didn’t get on her nerves and could help her, was appealing. She approached her mom, an interior designer, and stepfather, who worked in insurance, and asked, “Hey, can we have this guy over?” Miller’s home sat in an affluent enclave one street over from where former president Ronald Reagan had lived as governor. The neighborhood kids, many attending Rio or St. Francis or Jesuit High School, knew one another. College was a huge topic among teens and parents. “Rick became known as the guy you hire,” says Miller, now Kim Perry. “He is going to help you navigate those waters that are so ominous.”


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

His mother and his sister were in court. Elsewhere, his three daughters awaited news. The Honourable I. Leo Glasser commenced proceedings at 10 a.m. on October 23. He had seen plenty of life: won a Bronze Star fighting in Europe, came home and studied law in Brooklyn, named district judge by Ronald Reagan in 1981. It was he who John Gotti had loudly described as ‘that faggot’ at the start of his murder and racketeering trial. At the end of it, Glasser had sentenced Gotti to life without parole. He wore bow ties and spectacles and thought profoundly about the meaning of the law. Felix himself was not short of material from which to compose the autobiography he would place before the judge.


pages: 418 words: 134,401

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, SoftBank, Ted Sorensen, traveling salesman, two and twenty, urban planning

In dozens of calls to friends and acquaintances, he heard plenty of support and commiseration. But that didn’t change his view: His perfect career had been knocked off its trajectory. This time, he felt too depressed to chart a comeback. Vernon Jordan had watched the returns from his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City on election night 1980. Ronald Reagan and his conservative Republican coalition swept the nation, winning the White House, flipping the Senate, and ushering in a generational realignment of American politics. Jordan was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders, and he was concerned what that rightward shift would mean for the future of a movement to which he’d dedicated much of his life.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

And with the victims now buried in the rich and fertile black soil of the land on which they starved. 4 Concentration and Confiscation HERE WE ADMIT A WRONG —CARVED INTO THE SANDSTONE OF THE U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE MEMORIAL TO JAPANESE-AMERICAN PATRIOTISM, WASHINGTON, D.C., FROM A FORMAL APOLOGY BY PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN (1988) It was a Monday morning in late April 1944, and an unseasonably chilly and dust-laden wind was howling down the Idaho plains from the Sawtooth Mountains. It was then, so far as we can reconstruct, that a thirty-one-year-old former strawberry farmer named Akira Aramaki was shaken awake in his prison barracks bed by a party of soldiers.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

The dollar had bounded to unprecedented levels in the middle of the 1980s on the heels of huge Japanese and European purchases of dollar securities and a strong U.S. economy. Foreign investors were attracted to high dollar interest rates, in part driven by record U.S. budget deficits but also by a strengthening of the U.S. economy and the capital-friendly presidency of Ronald Reagan. By February 1985, the dollar became massively overvalued, and U.S. exports became very uncompetitive, severely worsening the U.S. trade deficit. The dollar then reversed course and began a steep decline. Central bankers initially cheered the fall of the overpriced dollar, but they grew concerned when the dollar continued to decline and the U.S. trade deficit, instead of improving, worsened.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

One official called me up and said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Easy. I’m canceling the reception.’ ” Early in the 1976 Presidential campaign, the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the knight-errant of American liberalism, tore into critics of big government while attending a dinner at the Americana: “Ronald Reagan is setting the rules for this campaign. Less is good. Government is too big.… Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not about to fall for it.” Humphrey was getting into the old rhythm, cranking up the old-time religion, whacking the podium first with his right hand, then with his left. “I am not ashamed to tell you I am a New Dealer,” he proclaimed.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Although I’m not aware of representative surveys on this, it could certainly be argued that the constant media drumbeat of overblown claims about scientific and medical breakthroughs, as well as the contradictory conveyor belt of fly-by-night findings from fields like nutritional epidemiology, serve to do more damage to trust in science than any amount of discussion about the replication crisis ever could. More importantly, though, a sophisticated view on science isn’t one of unquestioning trust. It’s one that’s pithily summed up by the motto of the UK’s Royal Society: nullius in verba, or ‘take nobody’s word for it’. (Almost the same notion is expressed by the Russian proverb favoured by Ronald Reagan during Cold War negotiations: doveryai, no proveryai – ‘trust, but verify’.) That’s the idea of Open Science, and of the Mertonian norms of communalism and organised scepticism in a nutshell: reduce our reliance on unthinking trust as far as possible, and share as much checkable, testable, verifiable evidence with the world as we can.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

Could he summon his inner Churchill and save Britain from the threat of the coronavirus pandemic? Twenty-eight million people tuned in to watch Johnson’s address from Downing Street that evening. The camera had framed the doorway of the White Drawing Room – the great state reception overlooking the No. 10 gardens, which has hosted US presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama and was once used by Churchill himself as his bedroom. In the middle of the frame was Johnson looking his most headmasterly as he earnestly leant forward towards the camera with clasped hands – his elbows resting on a polished antique desk. Such was the gravity of the moment, he had even combed his haystack hair into something resembling neatness.


pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas seized power with the support of the Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, Manley made the US nervous. He was friendly with Fidel Castro, and had struck deals with the Soviet Union. So when his party lost power in elections in 1980, the US was determined to support the new government of his rival, Edward Seaga. The mechanism was bauxite. Ronald Reagan, recently elected US president, made Seaga the first foreign leader he invited to the White House. Convinced of the ‘magic of the marketplace’, Reagan directed the huge economic resources of the US to turn the political tide in the region, and Jamaica was the centrepiece of his policy. 12 He ordered the US stockpiling agency to buy a total of 3.6 million tonnes of Jamaican bauxite between 1982 and 1984, equivalent to a sixth of the country’s production. 13 That was helpful, but Jamaica’s need for cash was desperate.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

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

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

A third, the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, gave direct support to those out of work and engaged in protests and lobbying for support for the unemployed. Still others, clustered around the radical leadership of USWA Local 1397 at Homestead Works, campaigned for Jesse Jackson for president in 1984 and engaged in direct action against US Steel management. All came together periodically, as when Ronald Reagan visited to Pittsburgh in 1983. “I’m here to protest against Reagan,” said Andrew Sopko, president of USWA Local 1270 at Ambridge. “This is the worst I’ve seen it in 40 years. Right now, we’ve got 15 people working in the plant. In 1947, we had 4,000.” Protesters demanded an end to cutbacks to social services, accusing Reagan of “turn[ing] his back.”28 The thousands thrown onto public assistance navigated a social policy environment that was increasingly punitive, albeit to different degrees depending on the claims they could make.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

It was not the first moment of modern American malaise. President Carter would become notorious for an address he gave to the American nation on that very topic in the summer of 1979, amid the fallout from the Iranian revolution and the second energy crisis.72 One of the promises of the 1980s market revolution was that Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” would heave the country out of its slump, just as Thatcher promised to do for Britain. Donald Trump, the party boy of 1980s Manhattan, was the living embodiment of that new era of swagger. But Trump also personified the ugly truth about that moment, which is that the market revolution left a large part of American society behind.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

* * * — Such was the legacy, and the mighty influence, that Alan Greenspan inherited when he became chair of the Fed in 1987, a job he would hold until 2006. Greenspan, a New Yorker who had made his reputation in economic consulting, presided over a golden era for the Fed. After two reputationally bruising decades, the central bank had gained an air of mystique. Free market economics had come back into vogue during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in America and Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister in the United Kingdom, and Greenspan’s Fed embraced the philosophy. Gone was the gospel of practiced Keynesianism, with its focus on labor. In was a desire to allow markets to decide what was fair. As in Eccles’s frontier youth, many subscribed to the idea that unleashing businesses and wealth to pursue profits with minimal interference would lead to maximum prosperity.


pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

He was sixty-three years old at the time and had spent most of his career as an Army lawyer, where he rose to brigadier general and became a military judge during the Vietnam War. (He presided over Lieutenant William L. Calley’s appeal in the case of the My Lai massacre.) After retiring from the Army, Alley became dean of the University of Oklahoma law school, before President Ronald Reagan named him to the federal bench in 1985. The federal courthouse in downtown Oklahoma City stands one block south from the Murrah building, with an underground parking garage separating the two structures. The explosion on April 19 vaporized the glass front doors to the courthouse, and Judge Alley’s courtroom and chambers on the third floor were heavily damaged.


pages: 515 words: 136,938

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

fear of failure, ghettoisation, global village, light touch regulation, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the medium is the message, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

•the brain always controls the pain signals we feel: Scientists now think in terms of many pain-responsive regions in the brain, called a “pain matrix,” including the thalamus, somatosensory cortex, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and other regions. 70 percent of the men who were seriously wounded reported that they were not in pain: Study by H. Beecher, cited in P. Wall, 1999. •the brain closes the “gate,” to keep…attention riveted on how to get out of harm’s way: Many people saw the gating phenomenon in 1981, when they saw footage of President Ronald Reagan being shot through the chest with a 9-millimeter bullet, in an assassination attempt. Reagan just stood there feeling nothing. Neither he nor the Secret Service, which slammed him roughly into his car to protect him, knew he had been shot. Reagan said in a CBS documentary, “I had never been shot before, except in the movies.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Best Places to Eat » Minibar at Café Atlantico (Click here) » Blue Hill Tavern (Click here) » Robert Morris Inn (Click here) » Fat Canary (Click here) » Local (Click here) Best Places to Stay » Hay-Adams (Click here) » Bellmoor Inn & Spa (Click here) » Colonial Williamsburg Historic Lodging (Click here) » Martha Washington Inn (Click here) » Greenbrier (Click here) Transportation The region is served by three major airports: Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD), Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI). Norfolk International Airport (ORF) and Richmond International Airport (RIC) are smaller regional hubs. Traveling by train is possible in some areas, with service provided by Amtrak (www.amtrak.com) .

Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) Respected daily city (and national) paper. Its tabloid-format daily Express is free. Check online for events listings. Getting There & Away Air Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD; 703-572-2700) , 26 miles west of the city center, and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA; 703-417-8000) , 4.5 miles south, are the main airports serving DC, although Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI; 410-859-7111) , 30 miles to the northeast, is also an option. All three airports, particularly Dulles and National, are major hubs for flights from around the world.

Union Pacific Railroad Museum MUSEUM (www.uprr.com; 200 Pearl St, Council Bluffs, IA; admission by donation; 10am-4pm Tue-Sat) Just across the river in the cute little downtown area of Council Bluffs, Iowa; this grand museum tells the story of the world’s most profitable railroad, the company that rammed the transcontinental railroad west from here in the 1860s. Look for the pictures of Ronald Reagan and his chimp-pal Bonzo aboard a train. Sleeping There is a good mix of midrange and budget hotels along US 275 near 60th St, at I-80 exits 445 and 449 and across the river in Council Bluffs, IA, at I-29 exit 51. Old Market has several midrange chains. Omaha Magnolia Hotel HOTEL $$ ( 402-341-2500; www.magnoliahotelomaha.com; 1615 Howard St; r incl breakfast $110-200; ) Not far from Old Market, the Magnolia is a boutique hotel housed in a gorgeous restored 1923 Italianate high-rise.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Opposing this tradition is a populist strand that has run through American history since Jonathan Edwards led the Great Awakening against the sophistication that was blossoming in the eighteenth century and Andrew Jackson spearheaded a popular revolt against John Quincy Adams. In fact, the division between populists and the Establishment has been a more fundamental one in U.S. politics than that between left and right, liberal and conservative. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, like many of their predecessors, rode to the White House in large part by tapping an anti-Establishment vein in the populace. This populist resentment of the Establishment—shared by the Old Left, New Left, Old Right, and New Right—accounts for much of the hostility faced by Acheson, McCloy, and their colleagues.

Rarely was the triumph of ideology over pragmatism, of political posturing over serious statesmanship, so vividly demonstrated as during the weeks preceding the summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November of 1985. While Reagan’s aides squabbled with each other, leaking documents and nearly paralyzing White House decision making, Nitze quietly kept searching for a formula that the Soviets and Ronald Reagan could accept. Against the backdrop of incessant propagandizing and infighting, Nitze’s selfless pursuit of real diplomacy seemed noble, if almost forlorn. It is easy, of course, to put too much of a rosy glow on the postwar heyday of the old foreign policy Establishment. It was not always the “Periclean age” that McCloy imagined it to be.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

The assumption was that the government would drop the case, which it did against Gray but not against two other FBI officials, Edward S. Miller, head of intelligence, and Mark Felt, deputy director, who had become Deep Throat, the Washington Post’s key source in the exposure of the Watergate break-in. They were convicted and fined but pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. Frank Dunham, Jr., Felt’s attorney, interview with author, Jan. 4, 2005. 22. One approach, used in the Moussaoui and Abu Ali cases, is the “silent witness rule,” in which a witness may refer to Country A, Person 1, page 14, and the like; only the judge, jury, prosecution, and defense counsel would have keys to this simple code.


pages: 516 words: 157,437

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, cognitive bias, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, financial engineering, follow your passion, global macro, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, microcredit, oil shock, performance metric, planetary scale, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, yield curve

The charts opposite going back to 1940 show the volatility of interest rates and gold. As you can see, there had been nothing like it prior to 1979–82. It was one of the most pivotal times in the last hundred years. The political pendulum throughout the world swung to the right, bringing Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl to power. “Liberal” had ceased to mean being in favor of progress and had come to mean “paying people not to work.” As I saw it, the Fed was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They either had to a) print money to relieve debt problems and keep the economy going (which had already pushed inflation to 10 percent in 1981 and was causing people to dump bonds and buy inflation-hedged assets), or b) break the back of inflation by becoming bone-crushingly tight (which would break the back of debtors because debt was at the highest levels since the Great Depression).


pages: 592 words: 152,445

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Magic , index card, Internet Archive, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, two and twenty, X Prize

“In a few years there will be no place left on earth to bury any one, and before too long, I think, all cemeteries will have to be disposed of,” she wrote. “Why add one jot or tittle to the mess already in existence?” Elizebeth was eighty-eight when her arteries failed. She died on October 31, 1980, in a nursing home in Plainfield, New Jersey, four days before Americans elected Ronald Reagan to his first term as president. The public response to her death was more muted than it had been for William’s eleven years earlier. The Washington Post and New York Times printed respectful obituaries of Elizebeth. None of the obituarists mentioned her feats of codebreaking in World War II; almost certainly none of the writers were aware.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

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

What exactly is that word doing adorning something so subjective (and resolutely middlebrow) as a specimen of genre fiction? Is the book a “perfect” confection like a soufflé, or is it perfect like a piece of mass-produced merchandise, executed impeccably and unimpeachably to spec? In one of the most influential literary endorsements ever tendered, Ronald Reagan helped catapult Tom Clancy to celebrity by pronouncing his first published novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984), “the perfect yarn.”38 Clancy wrote his first draft on an IBM Selectric; always the forecaster of technological trends, however, he gave an Apple computer running WordStar a cameo appearance—his hero Jack Ryan uses it as he pecks away on just such a monograph as might be published by the Naval Institute Press, the small Annapolis-based house specializing in naval history that would in fact acquire Clancy’s own manuscript.39 The book found its way thence to readers inside the nearby DC beltway, and eventually all the way to the Oval Office.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

He couldn’t accept that it was impossible for him to have everything exactly the way he wanted it. In part, this was because he believed his own press. He was a genius, according to the media and his investors. Ross Perot frothingly described Jobs as “a 33-year-old with 50 years’ worth of business experience.” Little did he know how wrong he was. President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of commerce, Malcolm Baldrige, called Jobs for advice. Editors of the most important publications in the land kept sending their reporters to the West Coast to find out what Steve was thinking about all kinds of subjects, not just computing and technology. (I once tracked Steve down for such an assignment, and listened to him confidently opine on industrial policy, competition with Russia, the drug war, and General Manuel Noriega of Panama.)


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

The first involves a small but strategic addendum: “I was wrong, but…”—a blank we then fill in with wonderfully imaginative explanations for why we weren’t so wrong after all. (More on this in Part Three.) The second (infamously deployed by, among others, Richard Nixon regarding Watergate and Ronald Reagan regarding the Iran-Contra affair) is even more telling: we say, “mistakes were made.” As that evergreen locution so concisely demonstrates, all we really know how to do with our errors is not acknowledge them as our own.* By contrast, we positively excel at acknowledging other people’s errors.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

a Mellon's error, Hoover wisely pointed out, was his insistence that this was "just an ordinary boom-slump," which led him to underestimate the seriousness of the European situation. Nevertheless, Hoover's efforts to be pro-active were far too modest in scale to stem the cyclone sweeping around the world. Nor did he ever abandon the conventional notion that people could not look to government to solve their problems, no matter how helpless they felt. Sounding rather like Ronald Reagan fifty years laterunder radically different circumstances-Hoover reminded his audience in a radio address on February 12, 1931, that: The evidence of our ability to solve great problems outside of government action and the degree of moral strength with which we emerge from this period will be determined by whether the individuals and local communities continue to meet their responsibilities....


pages: 547 words: 148,799

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

call centre, land reform, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, urban decay

‘We know from Mike here’s painstaking research that Echevarria junior has, shall we say, a predilection for our transatlantic cousins and they are, unfortunately, far closer to him, both geographically and culturally, than are we. I appreciate, Phil, that you’re factoring in Calders RapCap with the liaison work, and obviously, Martin Meldreck, well he believes in a free market about as much as Ronald Reagan did.’ More laughter, louder this time. ‘So the secondary contractors he brings in will be exclusively US firms. That much is clear. My question is, will this be enough? Will it hold off Conrad Rimshaw at Lloyd Paul, for example? Or the Saunders Group, or Gray Capital Solutions, or Moriarty Mills & Silver?


pages: 552 words: 143,074

Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (Modernist Literature and Culture) by Robert Spoo

invisible hand, Network effects, New Journalism, peer-to-peer, Ronald Reagan, tragedy of the anticommons, transaction costs

In the mid-1950s, the copyright-stripping nature of U.S. law changed after the United States joined the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) and enacted legislation that exempted other UCC countries from the requirements of the notorious manufacturing clause.2 Then, in 1989, after holding out for a century, the United States joined the international Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.3 As a Berne adherent, the United States was required to abolish statutory formalities, such as mandatory copyright notices, as conditions of legal protection. With America’s coming to Berne, the early death sentence for foreign copyrights was commuted by a stroke of the pen of President Ronald Reagan. In 1994, the United States joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).4 These commitments created pressure to grant further concessions to foreign authors, and Congress responded by enacting Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA),5 which restored copyright protection to foreign works that had prematurely entered the American public domain for any of several reasons—notably, “noncompliance with formalities imposed at any time by United States copyright law, including … failure to comply with any manufacturing requirements.”6 In restoring protection to foreign works that had lost copyright because they had not been manufactured on U.S. soil or had run afoul of some other technicality, Congress sought to make belated amends for America’s long history of copyright protectionism.


Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy

California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, land tenure, low cost airline, megaproject, off-the-grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, women in the workforce

Seizing the power gap, General Omar Torrijos becomes Panama’s leader. 1977 The Torrijos-Carter Treaty is signed, allowing for the complete transfer of the canal and the 14 US army bases from the US to Panama by 1999. 1980 Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán beats Sugar Ray Leonard for the world welterweight championship. 1983 Following General Torrijos’ death in a plane crash in 1981, former CIA operative Manuel Noriega rises to power and ushers in an era of repression. 1988 US President Ronald Reagan invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, freezing Panamanian government assets in US banks and prohibiting payments by American businesses to the Noriega regime. 1989 The US invades Panama, and extradites Noriega to Miami where he is later convicted on charges of conspiracy and drug trafficking.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

The rise of the EU and NAFTA underscores an important point: with the end of the Cold War, it is clear that a world power can maintain its dominant position mainly through economic might. Nuclear wars are simply too dangerous to fight, so it is economic might that will largely determine the destiny of nations. One contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the economic stress of competing militarily with the United States. (As the advisers to President Ronald Reagan once commented, the strategy of the United States was to spend Russia into a depression, that is, increase U.S. military expenditure so that the Russians, with an economy less than half the size of the United States’, would have to starve their own people to keep up.) In the future, it is clear that a superpower can maintain its status only through economic might, and that in turn stems from science and technology


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was essentially over, though it was not until the failed Moscow coup of August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus, along with the three big Caucasian republics and the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, became independent states. Few had seen it coming.* For some it was ‘the end of history’, the definitive victory of the liberal capitalist model.108 For others it was the ‘triumph of the West’, the political achievement of three charismatic leaders: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.109 A third view gave the credit to nationalism. But the analyst who was closest to the mark was the Italian apparel executive who started marketing a line in skintight ‘perestroika jeans’. It was above all as consumer societies that the Soviet Union and its satellites had failed.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Jequier, “appropriate Technology: Some Criteria,” in Towards Global Action for Appropriate Technology: Discussion Papers and Proposals of an Expert Meeting on International Action for Appropriate Technology, Geneva, Dec 1977, ed. a. S. Bhalla (Oxford: pergamon press, 1979), 1–22. Caroll pursell notes that shortly after ronald reagan’s inauguration in 1981 he terminated the federal Community Services administration, and by extension, the funding and support for the national Center for appropriate Technology (nCaT). incidentally, reagan took the extra and wholly unnecessary step of having solar panels removed from the roof of the White House during routine repairs in 1982—a fitting end to the energy policies at least partly supported by president Jimmy Carter, who had the panels installed just three years prior. after a decade in storage, the panels were shipped to a liberal arts college in Maine. pursell, “The rise and Fall of the appropriate Technology Movement in the United States, 1965–1985,” 600, 33.


pages: 736 words: 147,021

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

Asilomar, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, confounding variable, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, illegal immigration, out of africa, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, software patent, Upton Sinclair

In response, the USDA agreed to limit its proposal just to ground meat and poultry. It permitted the industry to delay labeling of all other uncooked meat products (except ground meat) from October 15, 1993, until April 15, 1994. Three industry groups, one of them led by John Block, a former USDA secretary in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, thought this delay not nearly long enough. They sued the USDA in a Texas federal court to block safe handling labels on a technicality—the agency’s “emergency rulemaking” had not permitted the amount of time mandated by Congress for the industry to respond to regulatory proposals.29 On October 14, the day before the rule for ground meat was to take effect, the federal court in Austin, Texas (Judge James Nowlin, presiding), issued an injunction that blocked the labeling plan, saying that the Jack in the Box outbreak was insufficient to justify any “departure from the normal rule-making procedures.”


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

This has happened more often than people think in the United States, where less than a hundred years ago, “good government” progressivism tried to confront corruption and de-politicize city government in ways that still affect urban governance today. And as Lindsay’s frustration makes clear, no mayor can stand in the way of central government officials determined to impede or deny the will of a city (although Ronald Reagan attributed this frustration to Lindsay’s weakness, quipping that being mayor is the second toughest job in America only insofar as “the way he does it, it is”). Even when powerful elected mayors govern their own metropolises forcefully, they can scarcely be said to be ruling the world. The world is not being ruled by anyone, let alone democratically.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Most of the fifteen in attendance were “psychedelic elders,” therapists and researchers like James Fadiman and Willis Harman, Mark Kleiman, then a drug-policy expert at the Kennedy School (and Rick Doblin’s thesis tutor there), and religious figures like Huston Smith, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Jeffrey Bronfman, the head of the UDV church in America (and heir to the Seagram’s liquor fortune). But Jesse wisely decided to invite an outsider as well: Charles “Bob” Schuster, who had served both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Jesse didn’t know Schuster well at all; they had once spoken briefly at a conference. But Jesse came away from the encounter thinking Schuster just might be receptive to an invitation. Exactly why Bob Schuster—a leading figure in the academic establishment undergirding the drug war—would be open to the idea of coming to Esalen to discuss the spiritual potential of psychedelics was a mystery, at least until I had the opportunity to speak to his widow, Chris-Ellyn Johanson.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

In fact, the very rationale for many firms' success may rather be their willingness to undertake these tasks while still remaining in- dependent from government administration, Thus, PMFs provide the advantage of an extra layer of cover from public scrutiny and congressional oversight. In a sense, certain PMF sectors have supplanted the need to set up front companies-2"3 FOUR Why Security Has Been Privatized "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away." —Ronald Reagan The privatized military industry is not just a flashback to historic private military agents. Nor is there any one simple cause behind its emergence. Instead, it is distinctly representative of the changed global security and business environments at the start of the twenty-first century. The end of the Cold War is at the heart of the emergence of the privatized military industry.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

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

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

In academic terms, this reflects the internal/external validity trade-off: UCDP and ACLED don’t achieve the high internal validity we can, but they are able to trace correlations across countries. 21. Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey A. Friedman, and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Testing the Surge,” International Security 37, no. 1 (2012): 7–40. 22. The first RCT of a drug was published in 1948, and the first RCTs of social policies in the United States took place in the mid-1970s. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used them to evaluate welfare reform, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that large-scale RCTs gained wide attention by showing that some long-standing, big-budget programs (such as Head Start, the preschool program for disadvantaged children) had little or no measurable effect, as implemented.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Beginning in 1964 Hutt began sending letters to Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia with his advice about how to ensure that “the pres­ent regime, with all its admitted faults, s­ hall not be 176 GLOBALISTS replaced by an era of black domination.”186 He suggested constitutional protections of property and, again, “weighted franchise arrangements.”187 In an article on “the Rhodesian calumny,” Hutt defended the property restrictions designed to protect white-­minority rule as a bulwark against “ ‘one man, one vote’ tyranny,” calling Rhodesia “the most promising deliberate attempt the world has ever seen at creating a wholly demo­cratic, multi-­racial society.”188 As paradoxical as it might sound, Hutt argued that it was precisely by denying universal suffrage that true democracy could be realized. Through the 1970s and 1980s Hutt kept up a drumbeat of protest against the supposed injustice of the international mobilization against Rhodesia and South Africa. He wrote letters to Governor Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Car­ter praising Rhodesia as “the only genuine anti-­racist democracy in Africa.”189 ­After Portugal withdrew from their colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the United States hardened its position against Southern Africa, with Car­ter reintroducing a ban on the import of Rhodesian chrome in 1977 amid new talk of ­human rights and demands for moves to majority rule.190 Sensitive to the continuing shift away from po­liti­cal models based on race, Hutt proposed to po­ liti­cal leaders in South Africa an innovation of his racially weighted franchise model.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

ABOUT THE AUTHOR © NANCY WARNER RICHARD RHODES is the author or editor of twenty-six works of fiction, history, memoir, and theater, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History; Arsenals of Folly, about the last years of the Cold War; and The Twilight of the Bombs, about the post–Cold War challenges of nuclear weapons and international policy. Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense About Energy assessed the development of and prospects for nuclear energy at the turn of the millennium. His play, Reykjavik, about the 1986 summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, has been read and performed nationwide. Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“MBZ, ABZ, MBN,” he said, citing a few of the Gulf Arab leaders who were similarly known by their initials and who had been lobbying on behalf of Mubarak. “Who are these guys?” Gibbs said. “I don’t know,” I said to Obama, “but they’re not going to be paying for your presidential library.” CHAPTER 10 LIBYA One of my earliest memories of American foreign policy is of Ronald Reagan sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office and explaining, in his grandfatherly way, that we were bombing Libya. I was eight years old. My father loved Reagan, so to me he could do no wrong. If Reagan said we had to teach Gaddafi a lesson for sponsoring terrorist attacks, then surely he was right.


Data Wrangling With Python: Tips and Tools to Make Your Life Easier by Jacqueline Kazil

Amazon Web Services, bash_history, business logic, cloud computing, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, Firefox, Global Witness, Google Chrome, Hacker News, job automation, machine readable, Nate Silver, natural language processing, pull request, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, social web, statistical model, web application, WikiLeaks

With regex, however, you can find more than one pattern, and you can give your found 184 | Chapter 7: Data Cleanup: Investigation, Matching, and Formatting matched groups variable names so it’s easier to read your code and you can be sure you have matched the proper group. Let’s try it out! import re name_regex = '([A-Z]\w+) ([A-Z]\w+)' names = "Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Drew" name_match = re.match(name_regex, names) name_match.group() name_match.groups() name_regex = '(?P<first_name>[A-Z]\w+) (?P<last_name>[A-Z]\w+)' for name in re.finditer(name_regex, names): print 'Meet {}!'.format(name.group('first_name')) Here we use the same capital word syntax twice, putting it in parentheses.


pages: 547 words: 160,071

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

But this discovery shook him up, slapped him in the face, made him realise he was exposed. What would the Secret Service do to him when they found out? Hand him another little traffic ticket titled ‘502C’? No way. Let him tell the jury at his trial everything he knew? Let the newspapers print it? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. This was the era of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, of space defence initiatives, of huge defence budgets and very paranoid military commanders who viewed the world as one giant battlefield with the evil empire of the Soviet Union. Would the US government just lock him up and throw away the key? Would it want to risk him talking to other prisoners – hardened criminals who knew how to make a dollar from that sort of information?


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

Horse racing started at 9:15 in the first class ballroom; the ponies were aluminum, moved by bellboys across the dance floor following rolls of the dice, which moved some horses faster than others. For those who wanted the silver screen, the theater offered She’s Working Her Way Through College, starring Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan.42 The gala began at 10:30 P.M. Revelers in party hats drank champagne and spun around to the strains of the orchestra, whose tunes probably included Cole Porter’s exuberant “Ridin’ High.” In the wee hours of the morning, Laura Franklin, who was “full of champagne,” headed up a conga line consisting of Margaret Truman, Drucie Snyder, and a few newspaper reporters.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

In Iceland Mr Oddsson would become a national hate figure, and the bat-cave would find itself besieged by angry protesters. The roots of Iceland’s woes go back a quarter of a century. In 1986 the world’s two superpowers met on this chilly rock in the Northern Atlantic. The Reykjavik summit proved to be a historic staging post on the way to the worldwide financial crisis, a staging post at which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, representing the West and the Soviet Union, met as equals. But they were not equal. Cold War had turned to economic freeze for the Russians and to hot boom for the United States and Europe. The summit witnessed the birth of a hyperpower, yes, but also the beginning of a hyperbubble, as, in a mood of triumphalism, borrowing, debt and deregulation all swelled to unsustainable dimensions – hence the scale of the subsequent financial calamity.


pages: 514 words: 153,274

The Cobweb by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, computer age, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Neal Stephenson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

They were so busy trying to intuit the White House line—Millikan’s line—and fit their analysis to that procrustean bed, that they totally missed all that you noticed. The question is not whether you are or are not right. The problem is that you scooped them. And they are pissed.” “But what about Millikan—why does he hate me so much?” “Because Ronald Reagan was a big supporter of Saddam Hussein.” “I don’t follow.” “Someone had to get the goods—the weapons, the money, the matériel, the intelligence—into Saddam’s hands. Not as a one-off, you understand—the Iran-Iraq war dragged on forever, and the sheer quantity of stuff we handed over to the Iraqis during those years beggars the imagination.


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Back in California, he changed the company slogan to “Not Just a Cup, But a Just Cup,” and he packaged the Nicaraguan beans he roasted as “Coffee for Peace,” donating 50 cents per pound to the Sandinistas. One month later, the Reagan administration banned the import of all Nicaraguan goods. The flamboyant Katzeff sued Ronald Reagan, and he got around the embargo by having his Nicaraguan beans shipped and roasted through Canada. That year, Katzeff was co-chair of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Without consulting Dan Cox, his co-chair from Green Mountain Coffee, Katzeff invited a Sandinista and two other activists to take part in a panel on coffee and human rights.


pages: 449 words: 123,459

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

Saxon, who enjoyed wordplay no less than The Big Machine 323 Nick Kemmer, had realized that an anagram of Christopher Hubert Llewellyn Smith spelled out his unique ability to convince the government of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: “Tory PM huh. Bet his wit’ll sell her CERN.” As, indeed, it eventually proved. Britain remained a member of CERN, and the laboratory has gone from strength to strength. In January 1987 President Ronald Reagan endorsed the SSC as an American machine, with a price tag of $4.4 billion. However, by May 1990, the cost had risen to nearly $8 billion. The House of Representatives limited the federal contribution to $5 billion, with the host, Texas, putting in $1 billion. The remaining $2 billion would have to come from international partners.15 Once the decision had been made to site the SSC in Texas, it became harder to maintain support from senators and congressional representatives from other states, especially those that had bid to host the facility and lost.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

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

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

Even as the ghosts of Vietnam flitted over Washington, there was a growing sense among defense experts that the strategic consequences of the Iraq war could be far worse than that earlier war. The United States could walk away from Vietnam, a relatively isolated country with few resources, and six years later, with the election of Ronald Reagan, declare it “morning in America.” (Of course, it didn’t feel like that in Cambodia, or in the reeducation camps of Vietnam where former allies of the United States were held.) It was unlikely to be morning in Iraq anytime soon. The Iraq war “makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk,” said retired Air Force Gen.


pages: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Toward the end of 1970, with George Pake’s approval, he took the necessary steps to reel them in. CHAPTER 5 Berkeley’s Second System The year 1968 was not a tranquil one for Berkeley, California. It was the time of riots on Telegraph Avenue, the battle over People’s Park, and the calling out of the National Guard by Governor Ronald Reagan. Buildings on the University of California campus were occupied, barricaded, firebombed. The police oscillated between paralysis and overreaction. Turmoil and radicalism were in the air, along with tear gas and a mysterious white powder dropped from helicopters that made demonstrators’ skin itch and burn as though attacked by hornets.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Turbo finance The implosion of the Communist Bloc and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy initiated a further intensification of globalisation and the high-water mark of the Washington consensus. However, although the main contours were agreed – rolling back the state, deregulation, balancing budgets, setting inflation targets, privatisation and generally extending the ‘magic of the market’, as Ronald Reagan had famously dubbed it – there was still room for debate. Some economists, such as Jagwad Bhagwati, had impeccable free trade credentials but still had doubts about financial deregulation. For them, free trade should have been first in the sequence of priorities; deregulating finance, on account of its attendant risk, last.


pages: 438 words: 146,246

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky by Oleg Gordievsky

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing, urban sprawl, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, working poor

Her role in bringing the Cold War to an end in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was tremendous, but over Germany she took the wrong line. I am glad to say that our personal relations survived this setback. When we met again after she had left office, she was most friendly, and it was a pleasant surprise to find that she gave me a couple of positive mentions in her memoirs. * When I met President Ronald Reagan in 1987, there were two main objectives on our agenda. One was to impress and help the CIA, and the other to secure from Reagan a pledge that he would work for the reunion of my family. A few words would be enough. If the President said, ‘We’ll help you,’ that would do: his word would be his command.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

Just three days after the devastation of Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell began writing his first essay on the implications for the future of humanity.65 And not long after, many of the scientists who created these weapons formed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to lead the conversation about how to prevent global destruction.66 Albert Einstein soon became a leading voice and his final public act was to sign a Manifesto with Russell arguing against nuclear war on the explicit grounds that it could spell the end for humanity.67 Cold War leaders, such as Eisenhower, Kennedy and Brezhnev, became aware of the possibility of extinction and some of its implications.68 The early 1980s saw a new wave of thought, with Jonathan Schell, Carl Sagan and Derek Parfit making great progress in understanding what is at stake—all three realizing that the loss of uncounted future generations may overshadow the immediate consequences.69 The discovery that atomic weapons may trigger a nuclear winter influenced both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce their country’s arms and avoid war.70 And the public reacted too. In 1982, New York’s Central Park saw a million people come together to march against nuclear weapons. It was the biggest protest in their nation’s history.71 Even in my birthplace of Australia, which has no nuclear weapons, we joined the global protest—my parents taking me with them on marches when I was just a small child they were fighting to protect.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Scott Scharfman, a friend of Peter’s from Great Neck High, started the Princeton chapter while another former Great Neck classmate, Richard Sorkin, initiated the Yale chapter. Peter, Scott, and Richard drafted a four-page constitution; started a national petition drive directed at President-elect Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Congress, urging funding for solar power satellite research; created a club logo that included the space shuttle; and sent off a carefully worded letter to Omni, known for its mix of hard science and pseudoscience, stating, “The steady deterioration of the U.S. space program’s goals and budget endangers our future and demands an organized response from our nation’s campuses. . . .


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

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

But the ban did not really matter, as the United States was a larger importer, and domestically produced oil went directly into U.S. refineries. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter, despite opposition from the liberal wing of his own party, began phasing out a complex, dysfunctional system of energy price controls, which discouraged investment and set different prices for the same type of molecule. Ronald Reagan’s first official act on becoming president in January 1981 was to completely abolish domestic price controls on oil. The following autumn, without any fuss or hullabaloo, the Reagan administration also ended restrictions on exporting petroleum products—gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, and other products that had gone through the refining process.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

If we do so, your contribution to our ultimate victory will have been immense.’ The free market project, started in lonely isolation at Mont Pèlerin in 1947, was now at the heart of British government. Shortly after Thatcher was elected, the Hayekians took America. In November 1980, the former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan was elected US President with the slogan: ‘We can get government off our backs, out of our pockets.’ The mantra perfectly encapsulated what Reagan brought to the movement: an ability to translate laissez-faire economics into simple language with a down-at-home charm and easy manner. ‘Reagan knew Hayek personally,’ the right-wing American politician Newt Gingrich explained.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

In the terminal, March suggests, “Let’s go out the other way, avoid Disney Hell and go find some breakfast.” They find a Latino breakfast joint on Ninth and dig in. “Something on your mind, Maxine.” “Been meaning to ask you this for a while, what was going on in Guatemala back in 1982?” “Same as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ronald Reagan and his people, Schachtmanite goons like Elliott Abrams, turning Central America into a slaughterhouse all to play out their little anti-Communist fantasies. Guatemala by then had fallen under the control of a mass murderer and particular buddy of Reagan named Ríos Montt, who as usual wiped off his bloody hands on the baby Jesus like so many of these charmers do.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

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

Instead, the rhetoric of self-reliance and work are used to justify often arbitrary and punitive tests designed to exclude those deemed unworthy of government assistance. This frame has too often reflected or promoted social Darwinism or the fostering of stereotypes that encourage racial resentment. This was foundational to Ronald Reagan’s ugly trope of the so-called welfare queen.2 Yet even when it avoids these darker subthemes, this frame subverts an open analysis of what policies would be most effective in enabling more Americans to do their part and work and contribute to their family and community in some way. Instead, such conservative thinkers force the entire frame for policies on work as a simplistic and binary choice between self-reliance and what they define as dignity-defying dependency.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

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

“Simulation companies are not so popular as they once were; their proprietors are often regarded as cultists, and the generals who were persuaded to hire them by liberals in the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations are sour on the whole business.”84 Richard Nixon, though, was still interested in the computational political work that Simulmatics had pioneered and that some people believed had contributed to his defeat in 1960. Nixon’s hour had finally come. After his defeat in the gubernatorial race in California in 1962, he’d moved to the right, nominating Barry Goldwater in 1964 and learning from Ronald Reagan’s success at winning the California governor’s office in 1966 by running as a conservative. In 1968, Nixon expected to win the Republican presidential nomination, and with Johnson out of the race and the Democratic Party in disarray, he expected to become the next president of the United States.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

The adoption of a sterilisation policy showed that the authorities in the Philippines at least recognised the problem, but I did not think that sterilisation was likely to work. Some years before I had read a paper by a man with the unlikely name of Beryl Sprinkel. Sprinkel was a monetary adviser to Ronald Reagan and had been part of the Second Armoured Division at the Battle of the Bulge, so I don’t imagine that most people focused on the peculiar nature of his first name! His damning analysis of sterilisation was that it would only act to keep interest rates higher than they otherwise would be and likely attract more yield-seeking foreign capital inflows that would have to be monetised.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

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

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

The notion of “irrational optimism” (or exuberance) would play a major part in forever tying Shiller to the Federal Reserve’s most famous chairman, Alan Greenspan. The Whisper That Moved the Markets Greenspan was sworn in as chairman of the Federal Reserve by Vice President George H. W. Bush on August 11, 1987, during a ceremony at the White House as President Ronald Reagan watched. Greenspan had big shoes to fill, both literally and figuratively, taking the reins of the Fed from the six-foot, seven-inch, Paul Volcker, who was known for his successful inflation-fighting record. Within weeks, Greenspan made his mark by raising the discount rate for the first time since 1984.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

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

A year after the purchase, Fred Ryan, a cofounder of the politics news site Politico, asked Bezos the same question while they were having breakfast in the Amazon building Day 1 North. The conversation would lead to Bezos hiring Ryan to replace Weymouth as the company’s chief executive and publisher. Ryan, a former aide to Ronald Reagan, had been invited to Seattle after sending Bezos an unsolicited email expressing admiration for the paper. He later recalled thinking at the time that “sometimes wealthy people have passions and toys or might want to own a publication so they can influence things.” Bezos surprised him with his response.


pages: 436 words: 148,809

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille

23andMe, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, East Village, experimental subject, fear of failure, medical residency, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, sunk-cost fallacy, white flight

Honan avoided the nights at the theater that were run by Joan Harvey, and he and his friends went down on Tuesday evenings for the music jam. He and other musicians from the Fourth Wall encouraged people in the audience—mostly kids from youth centers and drug rehab facilities—to write raps that his group would then perform. They played political songs from the Fourth Wall repertory, such as “War Machine” or one about Ronald Reagan called “Hitler with a Hollywood Smile.” Most Fourth Wall members were now in their mid- to late thirties, clean-cut professionals working office jobs, and the jam put them in touch with young kids, most of them minority youths, and with the more fun and creative activities that had originally drawn them into the group.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Even though NBC News described the film as having “scary authenticity,” it concluded by advising “all you computer geniuses with your computers and modems and autodialers” to give up. “There’s no way you can play global thermonuclear war with NORAD, which means the rest of us can relax and enjoy the film.” Not everyone was reassured. President Ronald Reagan had seen the movie at Camp David and was disturbed by the plot. In the middle of a meeting on nuclear missiles and arms control attended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, the national security staff, and sixteen powerful lawmakers from Congress, Reagan interrupted the presentation and asked the room whether anyone had seen the movie.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Hip capitalist advertisers helped to channel countercultural impulses toward the creation of “alternative lifestyles” through the assemblage of consumer goods—including expensive gear that could make the purchaser feel and look like an outdoorsman even if he spent sixteen hours a day staring at a screen. The political promise of the early ’70s—the pioneering environmental legislation, the critique of the intelligence agencies’ illegal spying—was stillborn. By the end of that decade, Ronald Reagan was dismissing Jimmy Carter’s warnings about limits to growth and removing the solar panels from the White House. “America is back,” he declared—which meant a return to unfettered economic expansion and unapologetic accumulation. REAGAN’S LEGACY: REGENERATIVE WAR AND IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE Reagan’s victory also meant a return to unabashed saber-rattling, though Carter had done his share.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

A new movement in favour of ‘anarcho-eapitalism’ has emerged which would like to deregulate the economy and eradicate governmental interference. Although in practice they did the opposite, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain tried ‘to roll back the frontiers of the State’, while in the USA President Ronald Reagan wanted to be remembered principally for getting ‘government off people’s backs’. The Libertarian Party, which pushes these ideas further, became the third largest party in the United States in the 1980s. It is the express aim of this book to show that there is a profound anarchist tradition which offers many ideas and values that are relevant to contemporary problems and issues.

They are convinced that the ‘natural laws’ of economics can do without the support of positive man-made law. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market will be enough to bring social order. Anarcho-capitalism has recently had the greatest impact in the United States, where the Libertarian Party has been influenced by it, and where Republicans like Ronald Reagan wanted to be remembered for cutting taxation and for getting ‘the government off people’s backs’. In the United Kingdom, neo-Conservatives argue that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and wish to ‘roll back the frontiers of the State’ – a view adopted evangelically, in theory if not always in practice, by Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.


pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Anne and Terry soon found their way into Scientology, but Tommy was initially raised in his mother’s original faith, Christian Science. His father, William Davis, is a wealthy financier and real-estate developer who was once reported to be among the largest owners of agricultural property in California. He was also a well-known fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and personally contributed an estimated $350,000 a year to Republican causes. Although Tommy grew up in an environment of money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty. He longed to do something to help humanity. Scientology seemed to offer a direction. Paul Haggis met Tommy at the Celebrity Centre in 1989, when he was seventeen years old—“a sweet and bright boy.”


pages: 568 words: 174,089

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

American firms are the leaders in the world’s global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even, as was the case with a ‘Star Wars’ system design to repel incoming missiles, if there is no demonstrable military need for them. At least one recent American president, Ronald Reagan, enhanced his popularity by proclaiming the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’and by demonstrating his willingness to outspend the Russians in the arms race. Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

While industrial age government was based on monopoly power, and structured around rigid hierarchies, today’s governments need to distribute power broadly and leverage innovation, knowledge, and value from the private sector and civil society. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wanted stronger government. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher wanted less. Thanks to the Internet we can now have it both ways. In the United States and many other jurisdictions, government is becoming a stronger part of the social ecosystem that binds individuals, communities, and businesses—not by absorbing new responsibilities or building additional layers of bureaucracy, but through its willingness to open up formerly closed processes to broader input and innovation.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

U.S. secretary of defense Dick Cheney gave the Israelis a satellite photograph of the Osirak reactor remnants, on which he wrote: For General David Ivri, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm! Dick Cheney, U.S. Sec. Def.28 The peace treaty with Egypt also survived the attack on Iraq. No Arab armies responded. The reactor was gone, the peace treaty survived, and everyone understood that even U.S. president Ronald Reagan was not as incensed as he had pretended. The attack was an unmitigated success. Israel now had a policy known as the “Begin Doctrine,” which would endure long after Begin himself was gone from the political arena. It held that Israel would not countenance any of its mortal enemies seeking to develop or acquire a weapon of mass destruction.29 THOUGH ISRAEL HAD PROVEN that it could make peace with nations willing to accept its existence and take on those who planned its destruction, the Jewish state’s new challenge was not standing armies, but terrorism—most notably the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Despite abuse investigations that eventually led to sterilization guidelines on both the island and the mainland, by the 1980s the percentage of puertorriqueñas who had la operación climbed past 45 percent, the highest in the world. Among Puerto Rican women wherever they live, says anthropologist Iris Lopez, “It is now a tradition.” As Ronald Reagan would note with wonder when he first visited Latin America as president, “They’re all different countries down there.” Latin American tastes toward family planning vary by locale, and Costa Rica, unlike Puerto Rico, wasn’t the USA’s colony, but its billboard. A bludgeon approach to population control by foisting tubal ligations on independent Costa Rica would have been no way to treat a poster country.


Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom by van K. Tharp

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, computer age, distributed generation, diversification, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, high net worth, index fund, locking in a profit, margin call, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

These are especially important to keep up with, although it is sometimes difficult to discern exactly what the future effects will be on your markets. However, let me give you a few examples of such changes and how they have impacted the markets. You can then decide for yourself how much you want to keep up with them in the future. Tax Reform Act of 1986: Wiping Out Many Real Estate Investments and the Boating Industry When Ronald Reagan tackled tax reform in the 1980s, he dramatically lowered the top tax rates, which, in my opinion, helped to greatly stimulate the economy. However, he also closed many loopholes. Many real estate partnerships, for example, sprang up in the 1980s in order to take advantage of significant loopholes in the tax law.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The first big shock to postwar prosperity came in the 1970s, when much of the world felt leaderless in the face of stagflation—stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation, triggered by a complex of forces including the excess spending of the welfare states and sharp oil price hikes engineered by the OPEC cartel and the petrostates. The widespread sense that their countries were coming apart prepared many nations to accept the idea of radical change and led to the rise of pioneering free market reformers: Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Deng Xiaoping in China. As is often the case in crisis periods, the promise of these leaders was often obscured by the gloom of the times; early on many observers dismissed Reagan as an ex-actor, Thatcher as a grocer’s daughter, and Deng as a faceless member of China’s collective leadership.


pages: 598 words: 169,194

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

In that, at least, Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes were perfectly in step with the mood of the market and the agenda of regulators in the 1980s. With the nation feeling bruised and cranky from a decade of plunging stock prices, rocketing petrol prices, manipulated silver prices, rising inflation rates, and lagging employment, President Ronald Reagan came into office in January 1981 with a sunny determination to hack away at what he saw as generations of needless government regulation. His deregulatory ambitions would firmly push back against a formidable enforcement appetite at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Indeed, the steady advance of that deregulatory philosophy would ultimately combine with weak management and inadequate budgets to leave the once-respected SEC too timid and unimaginative to cope with a widening brushfire of fraud over the next twenty-five years, including the near-fatal firestorm called Bernie Madoff.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

These changes, while important, are less significant than the other changes on which we have focused. See OECD, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” December 5, 2011. 31. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm. 32. See details in Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 33. See chapter 4 for a more extensive discussion. Critics ask, If it’s so profitable to pay workers high wages, why don’t firms do it on their own? A central thesis of this book is that managerial incentives are not well aligned either with real economic returns or even with the interests of shareholders. 34.


Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

So Akers sat contentedly in his com er office, overlook­ ing the rem nants of an old orchard behind the headquarters building in Armonk, wearing his m onogram med white shirts and using his reading glasses to devour all the reports he was receiving about IBM ’s successes. 158 PAUL CARROLL H e had a bronze statue of basketball player Jerry W est on a book­ case as a rem inder of his interest in sports. He had a picture of him self with Ronald Reagan on his desk, a rem inder of his Republican convic­ tions. H e kept a com puter term inal on his credenza, a rem inder of IB M ’s livelihood— and an unintentional symbol for why IBM hit the wall almost as soon as Akers settled into his office chair. This was a dum b mainframe term inal with no intelligence inside, not one of the PCs that had already reached millions of desktops worldwide and had begun to erode the mainframe underpinnings from IBM.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

And if the only way he could get that done was to go to Washington and get some laws changed, then that’s what he would do. Thus began the quiet war between Lew Ranieri and David Maxwell. Ranieri had strong ties to the Reagan administration and knew he would find a receptive audience there. Like every president, Ronald Reagan professed to stand squarely on the side of the American homeowner. But David Stockman, his budget director; Larry Kudlow, one of Stockman’s key deputies; and a handful of others, didn’t believe that homeownership was necessarily synonymous with Fannie Mae. In particular, they didn’t like the implied government guarantee.


pages: 442 words: 39,064

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, continuous double auction, currency peg, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, Erdős number, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, global village, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, law of one price, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

However, heavy volume kept the NYSE’s computers running hours behind trading. Only about two hours later would investors realize that the day’s total loss exceeded 500 points. Reaction to the crash varied from sentiments that the market was due for a correction to feelings of outright despair. President Ronald Reagan sought to reassure investors, saying: “All the economic indicators are solid. There is nothing wrong with the economy.” And the day after the crash, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave a lucid one-sentence statement indicating the Fed would provide sufficient funds to banks, allowing them to provide credit to securities firms.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A journalist by training who became a political vigilante, he had earlier worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Information Research Department (IRD) disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda. Never doubtful of his own abilities, nor shy in telling others about them, he cultivated contacts inside SIS and courted both Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Belligerently persistent in his approach, Crozier’s aim was simple: to counter Soviet subversion, which he described as ‘the political equivalent of Aids’.28 Alongside Crozier on Shield sat former intelligence officers such as SIS’s Nicholas Elliott and the Special Operations Executive (SOE)’s Harry Sporborg.Together, they sought to advise Thatcher, who was initially receptive, on subversion.29 A year before Thatcher came to office, Crozier even attempted to create a Counter-Subversion Executive, along the lines of the SOE, to, in his words,‘conduct a clandestine offensive against Soviet power’.30 But this time he had gone too far and Lord Carrington, Thatcher’s foreign secretary in waiting, refused point-blank.31 Worried about Crozier’s scheming, Carrington quietly plotted against him and even Thatcher gently warned him off his more ambitious secret activities.32 Once in office, Thatcher sought more private advice, including from the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank to which she had close links.


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

After finishing it, many analysts left to take up enviable jobs at investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The only Sri Lankan in his class, Rajaratnam would play the expected role of reserved math whiz. He started at a salary of $34,000. After limping through the seventies, Wall Street got its swagger back thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s personal and corporate tax cuts and his push to deregulate the American economy. In 1981 the markets began a long rally that except for one interruption, a terrifying one-day crash in October 1987, would rage almost unabated for nearly two decades. The boom and its unprecedented demand for people—brokers to sell stocks, bankers to help raise capital, traders to make money on all the dizzying market moves—transformed Wall Street, changing its complexion from a bastion of all-white men to a colorful mosaic of women, South Asians, and, to a lesser extent, African-Americans.


pages: 687 words: 165,457

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

Let’s begin with what you’re probably doing right now as you read these words—not moving—to explore more deeply the biggest myth of them all: that it’s normal to exercise. ONE Are We Born to Rest or Run? MYTH #1 We Evolved to Exercise It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figured why take the chance? —Ronald Reagan, interview with The Guardian, 1987 I neither am nor want to be an exceptional athlete, and I have no desire whatsoever to swim around Manhattan, bike across America, climb Mount Everest, bench-press several hundred pounds, or pole-vault over anything. Among the many tests of extreme strength or endurance I will never attempt is a full triathlon.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

“Computer technology has left us with a new breed of technologically sophisticated criminal,” Hughes explained, describing a criminal whose tools “are no longer Smith & Wesson, but IBM and Apple.”45 As the measure passed the House, Hughes argued, “Unless we act now, computer crime will be the crime wave of the next decade.” Ronald Reagan signed the legislation in October 1986, and in the years ahead, it became the main cybercrime tool for the government. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act sought to define virtual crime akin to real-world crime. It criminalized computer espionage, trespassing, fraud, theft, and threats, as well as attempts to damage computers, traffic in stolen passwords, or conspiracies to do any of the same.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

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

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

If he had, he might have reflected that with both Leslyn and Campbell gone, no firsthand witnesses remained to the earliest stages of his development as an author. The most memorable episode of his twilight years didn’t involve writing at all. Jerry Pournelle was chairing the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, a loose consortium of writers, scientists, and public figures who prepared white papers on strategic defense for President Ronald Reagan. It was as close as anything ever came to Campbell’s dream of a direct pipeline to the halls of power, and Heinlein joined in avidly—he admired Reagan, who reminded him of Barry Goldwater, and he had registered for the first time as a Republican. Within two years, the council’s work seemed to pay off.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Of course, knowledge expansion still required some level of trust, since it would be unthinkable for every researcher to start from scratch and verify personally every component of a new theory. But, as Shapin (1994, pp. 19–21) notes, skepticism takes place on the margins of trusting systems and, odd as it may sound, skepticism and trust were complementary in the generation of new knowledge—a variant of Ronald Reagan’s famous use of the Russian proverb “trust but verify.” It is on these margins that progress occurs, and these margins were mostly found in the codified knowledge that circulated in the Republic of Letters. It is too easy to dismiss the importance of formal and codified knowledge in technological progress at this time, as Epstein (2013, p. 67) does.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

It became a metaphor for a wimpy presidential leadership style, feeding the legend of the country boy who turned coward in what should have been familiar terrain—the marshy wilds of the Georgia backcountry. Jimmy Carter was not the hero of Deliverance; he was closer to Jimmy Stewart of Harvey, a feebleminded man unable to prove that the supernatural bunny existed or quash a story that made him look like a country bumpkin.33 In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, a man who understood precious little about southern culture, but knew all he needed to about image making. His White House took on the trappings of a glamorous Hollywood set. Reagan could play the Irishman when he visited Ballyporeen, County Tipperary; he could wear a cowboy hat and ride a horse, as he did in one of his best-known films, Santa Fe Trail.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Such a mixed-care, universal system is in place in France, where health care is packaged within the social security program, and social security payments that individuals and companies make fund a universal health care plan that has both the state and insurance companies participating in it. French citizens also have the option of adding on a “mutuel”—a private health insurance company that pays for additional services beyond the universal cover. And as Martin Feldstein—former chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and pension-policy-expert-extraordinaire—notes, offering incentives such as cheaper health insurance for people who make active and more healthy choices, and linking up health histories with social security costs through unique “health savings accounts” would bring preventive health care into focus within our universal solutions.


Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain, Alexis Averbuck

Airbnb, banking crisis, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, post-work, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, undersea cable

Until now, Höfn has been one of the most isolated towns in Iceland. 1975 The third in a series of 'cod wars' takes place between Iceland and the UK. These disputes over fishing rights in the North Atlantic flare up in the 1950s and 1970s, as Iceland expands its territorial waters. 1986 The beginning of the end of the Cold War? General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan agree to meet at a summit in Höfði House, Reykjavík. 2006 The controversial US military base at Keflavík closes down after 45 years in service; the government also approves the resumption of commercial whaling. 2008 The worldwide financial downturn hits Iceland particularly hard, precipitating the worst national banking crisis ever when all three of the country’s major banks collapse. 2009 Iceland formally applies for EU membership – a contentious issue among the population.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts). And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives. But in recent years the Tea Party and other hyperconservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas: climate change is a hoax; evolution never happened; we don’t need immigration reform.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Not only were the barriers between investment and commercial banking abolished, it became apparent that virtually any kind of institution of any nationality that borrowed and lent money could trade with the lightest supervision in London’s financial markets. In the fallout, Wall Street’s greater muscle allowed American investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers to prosper in London, providing an extra inducement to push for the same sort of freedom in the United States. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signaled his own conversion to the Austrian outlook in his much-quoted quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” But under his administration, Hayek’s philosophy of deregulation was bundled up with the conceptually different monetarist theories of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

The EU and Switzerland are regional entities kept together by the perceived need to counter hazards from outsiders, which gives both a reasonable chance of success. A global human union would have no such motivation, and would therefore be far more precarious. One possible means of attaining global unity might be to shift people’s perception of who is an outsider—a point Ronald Reagan made often: “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish,” he remarked in an address to the United Nations, “if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”19 Popular science fiction tales like The War of the Worlds depict all of humankind pulling together against a common enemy.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Violence flared again during the 1980 election campaign, with hundreds of people killed in shoot-outs and open gang-warfare. Amid the carnage, the Jamaican people turned to the JLP for a new vision for their country. The JLP in power 276 The first foreign leader to visit the newly elected President Ronald Reagan in Washington, Edward Seaga’s realignment of the two neighbouring countries was perhaps his most important change in policy. The US took steps to open its markets to foreign imports and to encourage outward investment, most notably with the enactment of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (economic aid in return for free elections and cooperative governments), and foreign capital began to find its way back to Jamaica.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), work began on the ALPHA chemical laser project in 1978, the TALON GOLD targeting system in 1979, and the Large Optics Demonstration Experiment (LODE) in 1980. These programs formed the basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that Ronald Reagan announced publicly in 1983. In the 1980s, the Department of Defense added several programs to SDI including X-ray and chemical lasers as well as the neutral particle beam weapon; reminiscent of Tesla’s “Chinese Wall” claims, SDI weapons were intended to create a “curtain” that would destroy incoming enemy missiles.


pages: 624 words: 189,582

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, call centre, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, independent contractor, PalmPilot, power law, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Ironically, while the United States was supporting one group of Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, the mid-1980s saw a rise in religiously motivated terrorist attacks against American citizens and interests. In 1983, Hezbollah suicide attacks on marine barracks in Lebanon killed more than 250 Americans. Hijackings by terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East also claimed American lives. To address the growing threat, in 1984 Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 138, “Combating Terrorism.” The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) established the Counterterrorism Center the following year. At first it focused largely on Hezbollah and secular leftist terrorist groups, rather than emphasizing Muslim Brotherhood–inspired groups.


pages: 612 words: 181,985

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, death from overwork, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, military-industrial complex, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, éminence grise

That a convicted war criminal had been hired by the Department of Energy sparked indignation, and congressmen and journalists sought further details about Ambros’s U.S. government contract. In a statement to the press, the Department of Energy insisted that the paperwork had been lost. The scandal was brought to the attention of President Ronald Reagan. Letters on White House stationery reveal that Deputy National Security Adviser James W. Nance briefed Reagan about how it was that the U.S. government could have hired Otto Ambros. Nance’s argument to the president was that many others hired him. “Dr. Ambros had contacts with numerous officials from Allied countries,” wrote Nance.


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show. Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don’t believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example, they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes. It was the foxes who scored best in Tetlock’s study, although their performance was still very poor.


Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey

clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, it's over 9,000, loose coupling, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Richard Feynman, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Suez canal 1869, uranium enrichment, wage slave, wikimedia commons

He was afraid of smaller countries using their own fuel reprocessing for this purpose, and he wanted to symbolically show them that if we did not do it, then they should follow our example and not touch their nuclear waste. The rest of the world went on about their business, and there is no record of anyone giving a thought to the President’s symbolic gesture. The Barnwell plant suffered drastically from the lack of an operating license, and although the next president, Ronald Reagan, lifted the ban on commercial fuel reprocessing, the concept of the federal government being able to shut it down at its discretion discouraged any further idea of operating it as a business, and its major customer, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, had also been cancelled by President Carter.


pages: 612 words: 179,328

Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman, had been squeezing liquidity out of the system. The first effect was a recession, the second, an ebbing of inflation. By 1982, Volcker was sufficiently confident to loosen his grip on interest rates. The White House, meanwhile, was a picture of optimism. Ronald Reagan laughed off a would-be assassin and pushed through a tax cut. For so long, Wall Street had known nothing but fear. Now, as if a cat-footed clerk in a basement of its stone fortresses had thrown a master switch, brokers and bankers arrived at their desks with confidence. In the summer of 1982, interest rates tumbled … and tumbled … and tumbled.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

Zumwalt recounted that Kissinger believed that the “U.S. has passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations” and that Americans “lack the stamina to stay the course against the Russians who are ‘Sparta to our Athens.’ ”4 In light of these trends, Kissinger said his job was “to persuade the Russians to give us the best deal we can get, recognizing that the historical forces favor them.”5 Zumwalt disagreed, but found himself shaken by the logic of Kissinger’s argument. Six years later, that conversation became national news. Zumwalt had published the conversation in his memoirs; then Ronald Reagan had quoted the conversation as ammunition against President Gerald Ford in a presidential debate; and, finally, Kissinger denied the quote vociferously: “I am going to nominate the good Admiral for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,” he said.6 While Zumwalt certainly had reason to exaggerate—he was running for Senate in Virginia—Kissinger had in fact openly written about American decline in the 1960s and spoken of it frequently in interviews with the press throughout the 1970s.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

The Phreak had to make the guy believe he was a Joint Chief of Staff. A nasal tenor came on the line, heralded by an amazing overture of clicks, beeps, and tones. “General, for whom are you placing this call?” “For Ronald Reagan,” said the Phreak. I felt like I had been stabbed. What an idiot! But I couldn’t hang up, because the operator would hear the beeps. I listened instead. “Ronald Reagan?” asked the voice disbelievingly. “Sir, what is the code on this call?” “I’m at the White House right now,” said the Phreak coolly. I knew he was stalling for time as he flipped through stolen AUTOVON manuals. “Sergeant, I have the code right here.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

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

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

Even in the United States, with its First Amendment forbidding Congress to make any law abridging the freedom of the press, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for decades enforced a Fairness Doctrine on radio and television. This required each broadcaster to provide coverage of ‘controversial issues of public importance’ and ‘to present opposing viewpoints as a condition of retaining its license’. It was abolished in 1987, under the deregulatory free market administration of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s head of the FCC described television as ‘just another appliance . . . a toaster with pictures’.27 Since then, American radio and television have become ever more ideologically polarised and partisan, so a listener to one station often only gets one point of view. Most of these twentieth-century regulatory structures treated each medium—radio, television, newspapers, etc.


pages: 752 words: 201,334

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

Israelis stopped vacationing abroad, and Arkia’s charters to Europe were canceled. Only recently the company had bought its first jet, which now sat idle. Arik’s partner, Dadi, had bought another two jets that were scheduled to be delivered in a few months. What were they going to do with them? And how would they pay for them? Even worse for Arkia, President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of the American aviation industry was overwhelming the market with used planes—and selling used planes was a major source of Arkia’s profits. The collapse of the Israeli tourism industry was temporary, a result of the war; but the devaluation of the market for used aircraft was long-term.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

These values include a countercyclical buffer of 2.5%, which may not always be at full value. APPENDIX K The U.S. Economy Before, During, and After the Financial Crisis Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. —Ronald Reagan Since the financial crisis in 2008, the big worry has been the health of the U.S. economy. Unemployment figures have risen and do not seem to be going down, growth is sluggish, and people’s retirement savings have suffered. The principal cause of the financial crisis was not Wall Street, as many claim, but was in fact a particular segment of Main Street—the housing market.


pages: 694 words: 197,804

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis by Julie Holland

benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, confounding variable, drug harm reduction, intentional community, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, traumatic brain injury, University of East Anglia, zero-sum game

PART TWO Risks of Use and Harm Reduction Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself, and where they are they should be changed. JIMMY CARTER I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast. . . . If adults want to take such chances (with marijuana) that is their business. RONALD REAGAN I wouldn’t call myself a pothead. I mean, I enjoy it once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everything in moderation. JENNIFER ANISTON Introduction to Part Two It is human nature to search for ways to alter our consciousness. Most animals, and every society, every culture, and nearly every indigenous tribe have devised methods to induce altered states.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Trust, then Verify Remember that financial con artists thrive by talking you into trusting them and by talking you out of investigating them. Before you place your financial future in the hands of an adviser, it’s imperative that you find someone who not only makes you comfortable but whose honesty is beyond reproach. As Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, then verify.” Start off by thinking of the handful of people you know best and trust the most. Then ask if they can refer you to an adviser whom they trust and who, they feel, delivers good value for his fees. A vote of confidence from someone you admire is a good start.2 Once you have the name of the adviser and his firm, as well as his specialty—is he a stockbroker?


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

We used the word visually in our opening, and then someone online decided it meant “freedom” without having to “do” anything — without any responsibility or action. The show seemed so fully formed right from the beginning; it always had a tremendous amount of confidence. I remember a joke Stephen told the first week about James Brady, who was seriously injured during the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt. That takes a bit of nerve. That also happened in the very first show. There was legislation in Florida dealing with the issue of being able to shoot another person in self-defense. James Brady was obviously a critic of this legislation, but Stephen just did not understand why Brady would be against guns.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Hashim 1997: 75–122; Adam 2008: 7–79; Kapteijns 2013: 75–130 offer general accounts of Barre’s rule. 40 Nenova and Harford 2005; Leeson 2007: 695–701; Powell et al. 2008: 661–665. Cf. already Mubarak 1997 for Somalia’s postcollapse economic resilience. 41 Inequality: Nenova and Harford 2005: 1; SWIID; Economist Intelligence Unit 2014. I paraphrase from President Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address of January 20, 1981, “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” 42 Public goods: Blanton and Fargher 2008, a pioneering global cross-cultural survey. Model: Moselle and Polak 2001. Part V PLAGUE Chapter 10 THE BLACK DEATH THE FOURTH HORSEMAN: MICROBES, MALTHUS, AND MARKETS So far we have focused on human-on-human violence and its effect on inequality: mass mobilization wars that encouraged bargaining in favor of the masses and that soaked the rich; blood-drenched revolutions that destroyed “landlords,” “kulaks,” and the “bourgeoisie” alongside genuine “one-percenters”; and the collapse of entire states that wiped out wealthy elites who had extracted and hoarded as much of the available surplus as they could.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams, pp. 372-3. 124 . Suisheng Zhao, ‘Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Zhao, Chinese Foreign Policy, p. 15. 125 . Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 95; Mann, The China Fantasy, pp. 1- 2. 126 . Ibid., pp. 11-12. 127 . George W. Bush, ‘A Distinctly American Internationalism’, speech at Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, 19 November 1999. 128 . Thomas I. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), p. 154. 129 . Mann, The China Fantasy, p. 12. 130 . Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 96. 131 . Ibid., pp. 96-7. 132 .


pages: 762 words: 206,865

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

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

In the pages that follow are clues and cautions that are particularly timely during the first term of another young and relatively inexperienced commander in chief, President Barack Obama, who, like Kennedy, came to the White House with a foreign policy agenda aimed at engaging our adversaries more skillfully and understanding more reliably what lurks beneath seemingly intractable conflicts in order that we can better solve them. I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bush’s White House. The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart. Despite labeling the Soviets “the evil empire,” President Reagan engaged in five summit meetings with Gorbachev and worked on countless concrete agreements that helped build confidence between the two countries.


pages: 602 words: 207,965

Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears by Frank Zammetti

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, corporate raider, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, full text search, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, leftpad, loose coupling, Ronald Reagan, web application

Arthur", "Grover Cleveland", "Benjamin Harrison", "Grover Cleveland", "William McKinley", "Theodore Roosevelt", "William Howard Taft", "Woodrow Wilson", "Warren Harding", "Calvin Coolidge", "Herbert Hoover", "Franklin Delano Roosevelt", "Harry S. Truman", "Dwight D. Eisenhower", "John F. Kennedy", "Lyndon B. Johnson", "Richard Milhous Nixon", "Gerald Ford", "Jimmy Carter", "Ronald Reagan", "George Bush", "Bill Clinton", "George W. Bush" ]; // Override drag-and-drop events as necessary. Ext.override(Ext.dd.DDProxy, { // Event when the user starts dragging an item. startDrag : function(inX, inY) { // Show contents of item when dragging so it looks nicer. var item = Ext.get(this.getDragEl()); var el = Ext.get(this.getEl()); item.update(el.dom.innerHTML); item.addClass(el.dom.className + " dd-proxy"); }, // Event when an item hovers over a drop target. onDragOver : function(inElement, inTargetID) { // Only do something if item is over the drop target. if (inTargetID == "destinationContainer") { // Record this as the drop target for when dragging stops. var dropTarget = Ext.get(inTargetID); this.lastTarget = dropTarget; // Style the drop target. dropTarget.addClass("cssDDHover"); } }, // Event when an item leaves a drop target. onDragOut : function(inElement, inTargetID) { // Clear the recorded drop target. this.lastTarget = null; if (inTargetID == "destinationContainer") { // If leaving the destination container, remove the hover style.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

America’s new federally directed state nationalism supported left-modernism by the early 1940s: the CIA even funded modernist art and the New York Intellectuals as a form of anti-Soviet propaganda. The US, which had rejected the League of Nations in 1918, now strongly endorsed the new United Nations. World Federalism became a popular movement for global governance in the 1940s, counting a future Republican president, Ronald Reagan, among its members.40 The Holocaust itself was not a force multiplier for left-modernism until it was pressed into service two decades later. The social penetration of left-modernist ideas would take a great leap forward only in the 1960s as television and university education soared. In America, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds in College increased from 15 per cent in 1950 to a third in 1970.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

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

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

The skillful use of transitive and intransitive constructions can thus be used to frame a moral argument. Though causative constructions ordinarily finger a guilty party, they can jettison their subject when expressed in the passive voice. That makes the passive a convenient way to hide the agent of a transitive verb and thus the identity of a responsible party, as in Ronald Reagan’s famous non-confession “Mistakes were made,” now a cliché for evasion by a public figure. But the intransitive alternative to a causative goes one step further. It doesn’t just hide the cause; it refuses to admit that there was one. While The ship was sunk (passive) entails that there was a perpetrator, possibly unknown, The ship sank (intransitive) is consistent with its just happening, perhaps through a lack of preventive maintenance, a stroke of bad luck, or a proverbial “act of God” (though without the god).


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

In sum, the story of Tom’s of Maine illustrates the many difficulties and complexities that founders encounter in attempting to maintain virtuous practices as their companies grow. And Tom Chappell is living proof of how hard, indeed, it is to do good. 15 Lever Redux Ben Cohen (1951–) An improbable event occurred at the White House in 1988: President Ronald Reagan bestowed the National Small Business Person of the Year Award on Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the famously hirsute founders of Ben & Jerry’s. The beliefs of the conservative chief executive and those of the counterculture ice cream moguls were diametrically opposed on almost every subject (with the possible exceptions of a fondness for good ice cream, and belief in the merits of entrepreneurship).


Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The converter, however, was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Sega, the much bigger problem was Sonic The Hedgehog. The character had been only a mild success in Japan for Sega’s Mega Drive but was an instantly adored phenomenon in America. It was as if after a decade of conservative politics under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Sonic’s combination of speed, attitude, and energy seemed to embody the promise of the 1990s. Although Minoru Arakawa would never admit it to Kalinske (he wouldn’t even meet with Sega’s president) nor ever voluntarily proclaim it in public, on the witness stand he had to tell the truth.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

To this day, it is unclear if the order came directly from Coard – although most believe that it did. Meanwhile, America became ever more nervous of another potentially destabilizing communist nation in the Caribbean, and six days later 12,000 US marines (along with soldiers from half a dozen Caribbean countries) were on Grenadian shores. US President Ronald Reagan cited the risk to the safety of students at the US-run St George’s University as a justification for the invasion; 70 Cubans, 42 Americans and 170 Grenadians were killed in the fighting that ensued. Most of the US forces withdrew in December 1983, although a joint Caribbean force and 300 US support troops remained on the island for two more years.

Businesses pulled out, the economy went into sharp decline and the country lived virtually under siege. Almost 700 people were killed in the lead-up to the 1980 elections, which were won by the JLP’s Edward Seaga. Seaga restored Jamaica’s economic fortunes somewhat, severed ties with Cuba and courted Ronald Reagan’s USA. Seaga was ousted in 1989 and replaced by Manley, who took a short, second crack at the prime ministerial office. He retired in 1992, handing the reins to his deputy, Percival James Patterson, Jamaica’s first black prime minister. Present & Future In 2007 Bruce Golding of the JLP was elected prime minister, ending 18 years of PNP rule.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

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

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

I look up and there he is, Gorby. He’s a little older than I remember, about 77 at the time. He was in town to speak about nuclear weapons and why they should be abolished. We sit down. I’m looking at him, and I just know he’s expecting my first question to be about nuclear arms, world politics, perestroika, Ronald Reagan. He’s just ready. So I looked at him and I said: ‘What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?’ He is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about this. It’s as if, after a little while, he’s seeing this movie of his past on the ceiling, and he starts to tell me this story.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

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

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

East Germany could effectively be made part of West Germany overnight. Angry Soviet critics denounced the plan as “Anschluss,” a western annexation of the east. Just before leaving for a meeting with Gorbachev off the coast of Malta on December 2–3, Bush consulted with former president Richard Nixon. Nixon thought Ronald Reagan had been misguided in getting too chummy with Gorbachev, given the yawning gap in strategic interests between Washington and Moscow. Gorbachev wanted “the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Western and Eastern Europe,” which was unacceptable. Bush should therefore not “negotiate German reunification or the future of NATO.”


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

The society of engineers, so hopeful in the America of Feynman’s childhood, had given way to a technocracy, bloated and overconfident, collapsing under the weight of its own byzantine devices. That was one message read in the image replayed hundreds of times that day on millions of television screens—the fragmenting smoke cloud, the twin rockets veering apart like Roman candles. President Ronald Reagan immediately announced his determination to continue the shuttle program and expressed his support for the space agency. Following government custom, he appointed an investigatory commission that would repeatedly be described as independent—the White House officially declared it “an outside group of experts, distinguished Americans who have no ax to grind”—although in actuality it was composed mostly of insiders and figures chosen for their symbolic value: its chairman, William P.


Frommer's London 2009 by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Edmond Halley, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, young professional

All are generously cut with long tails and finished with a choice of double cuffs or single-button cuffs. A small pink square in the tail tells all. 85 Jermyn St., SW1. & 020/7930-6364. www.thomaspink.com. Tube: Green Park or Piccadilly Circus. Turnbull & Asser Over the years, everyone from David Bowie to Ronald Reagan has been seen in custom-made shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Excellent craftsmanship and simple lines—plus bold colors—distinguish these shirts. The outlet also sells shirts and blouses to women, a clientele that has ranged from Jacqueline Bisset to Candice Bergen. Note that T&A shirts come in only one sleeve length and are then altered to fit, a ritual that takes only a few days and costs £10 ($20).


pages: 420 words: 219,075

Frommer's New Mexico by Lesley S. King

Albert Einstein, clean water, company town, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, machine readable, off-the-grid, place-making, post-work, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, SpaceShipOne, sustainable-tourism, trade route, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

When the popularity of the railroads declined, Gallup turned briefly to the movie business as its boom ticket. The area’s red-rock canyons and lonely desert were perfect for Westerns of the era, such as Big Carnival, with Kirk Douglas; Four Faces West, with Joel McCrea; and The Bad Man, starring Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, and Ronald Reagan. These stars and many others stayed in a Route 66 hotel built by R. E. Griffith in 1937. Today, the El Rancho Hotel is one of Gallup’s most notable landmarks and worth strolling through (see “Where to Stay in Gallup,” and “Where to Dine in Gallup,” below). Gallup now relies on trade and tourism, due to its central location within the Navajo Reservation and the Zuni lands, as well as its proximity to the ancient ruins at Chaco.


pages: 897 words: 210,566

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire, Brent Beardsley

airport security, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, global village, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, land reform, risk/return, Ronald Reagan

It was a perfect job, with a tolerant boss, General Richard Evraire, who gave us guidance, a te,m of near and the advice of a small inner cabinet to help us keep thin the tolerances of the friction war we were fighting with the air and with the federal bureaucrats. In response to increasing pressure from the United States, which er Ronald Reagan was spending trillions to win the Cold War, an Mulroney's Conservative government announced that it was tnmitted to increase defence spending. The government asked for a paper that would plot a fifteen-year strategy to bring the adian military up to scratch. At National Defence Headquarters, were jubilant.


Lonely Planet Iceland by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, banking crisis, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Until now, Höfn has been one of the most isolated towns in Iceland. 1975 The third in a series of 'cod wars' takes place between Iceland and the UK. These disputes over fishing rights in the North Atlantic flare up in the 1950s and 1970s, as Iceland expands its territorial waters. 1986 The beginning of the end of the Cold War? General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan agree to meet at a summit in Höfði House, Reykjavík. 2006 The controversial US military base at Keflavík closes down after 45 years in service; the government also approves the resumption of commercial whaling. 2008 The worldwide financial downturn hits Iceland particularly hard, precipitating the worst national banking crisis ever when all three of the country’s major banks collapse. 2009 Iceland formally applies for EU membership – a contentious issue among the population.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

They still utilized full-scale, multimillion-dollar, full-motion cockpit flight simulators, and actual flying, of course, but PLATO played a key role in teaching the pilots how to use the various instruments and readouts on the then-new jet. Another group that benefited from PLATO was the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). When President Ronald Reagan fired the striking members of the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the FAA was suddenly forced to hire a large number of new personnel and train them as quickly and effectively as possible on air traffic control so the skies would continue to be safe for travel. CDC swept in and sold the FAA a PLATO system and a large bank of terminals that were installed at its main Oklahoma City facility to train the new controllers.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The poet Archibald MacLeish, hailing him as among “the very few by whom the greatness of our society would be judged,” had furnished a statement of support: “If there is a living contemporary who truly knows what it is to be an American, Buckminster Fuller is that man.” On February 23 Fuller received the medal from President Ronald Reagan. With Anne unable to travel, he was accompanied by Allegra, Jaime, Gabel, Applewhite, Calvin Tomkins, and his secretary Ann Mintz. The other recipients included the Reverend Billy Graham and, remarkably, Clare Boothe Luce, who had resisted his advances nearly five decades earlier. At the ceremony, Reagan praised Fuller as “a true Renaissance man, and one of the greatest minds of our times,” as well as proof “that America is a land of pioneers, haven for innovative thinking and the free expression of ideas.”


pages: 934 words: 232,651

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

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

In February 1955, the party Central Committee in Berlin declared that all new construction was to go forward under a new slogan: “Better, cheaper, faster.”60 Prefab tower blocks—the infamous Plattenbau—began going up in Stalinstadt and other East German cities not long afterward. In the end, the town hall with the soaring spire planned for Stalinstadt was never built. Nor was the cultural center on Nowa Huta’s central square, a space that has been renamed Ronald Reagan Plaza and today marks the intersection of streets named after General Władysław Anders, Pope John Paul II, and the Solidarity trade union. Only half of the main square in Dunaújváros was completed, leaving the “square” somewhat lopsided and causing architectural controversy in the city even today.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

In countries where the economy is ravaged by sanctions, many ordinary citizens have been unable to afford such basic necessities even when available. For two decades, U.S. sanctions on Iran could have been a case study for the ineffectiveness of sanctions. America began sanctioning Iran after the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. President Ronald Reagan lifted the sanctions when the hostages were released, but put them back in place in 1984 after Hezbollah, a Shiite militia funded by Iran, killed 241 American servicemen in a Beirut attack. Over the course of the next two decades, the United States imposed a range of sanctions aimed at blocking Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.58 But by 2005, decades of sanctions had produced little, if any, progress.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Space has long been a location for satellites that provide military advantage back on Earth, such as spying or beaming GPS locations, but it has yet to be a battleground itself. However, plans for conflict taking place in space go well back to the antisatellite programs of the United States and the Soviets during the cold war and Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program in the 1980s. In 2000, these received a new injection of funds by the U.S. Space Commission, which was chaired by a retired Ford administration official named Donald Rumsfeld. The commission sought out media attention by hyping a rising threat to U.S. space assets in the form of a “space Pearl Harbor.”


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

After reviewing the budget, Bezos asked to meet privately with Weymouth in her office. He told her that she was being replaced by Fred Ryan, the publisher of Politico, the news site that had stolen the Post’s talent and cachet in political journalism. Katharine Graham had known Ryan when he was Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff after the president left the White House. The choice of Ryan, viewed by some as a political has-been who was not the real driving force behind Politico, was surprising and disappointing to some who expected Bezos to appoint a digital visionary to lead the operation. Bezos and Ryan were only casual acquaintances, having been recently introduced by Jean Case, the wife of AOL cofounder Steve Case, after a black-tie gala at which Ryan spoke up for the job.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Note that in the United States, but not in the United Kingdom and most other jurisdictions, the expert psychiatric testimony in a criminal case may not extend to the defendant’s state of mind with respect to one of the ultimate issues to be decided by the jury, such as one of the elements of the crime. Rule 704(b). This exception arose as a consequence of the trial of John Hinckley, Jr. for the attempted assassination of former US President Ronald Reagan. The defendant’s psychiatric experts were able to testify as to the accused’s state of mind such that he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. That result was not popular with the public, and hence the Rule 704(b) exception was created. 5 Edelman 1992: 16–17. Professor Edelman observes here that the human brain “is the most complicated material object in the known universe” and thus we should not be surprised that it uniquely gives rise to consciousness.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

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

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

The income shares of the top 1 percent, the top 0.1 percent, and the top 0.01 percent have roughly doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in recent decades. Over the same period, the top marginal tax rate has fallen by more than half, from over 90 percent throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, to 70 percent when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, to below 40 percent today. Even as elites get richer and richer, government takes smaller and smaller shares of their income and wealth. The biggest losers from these developments, moreover, are not the poor, who (even in a democracy) face obstacles to concerted political action.


pages: 2,238 words: 239,238

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Internet Archive, Ronald Reagan

If you were not premature, what sort of anti-fascist were you supposed to be?63 It was not until the Vietnam War, when Lincoln Battalion veterans found themselves feted as they joined protest marches behind their own banners, that International Brigaders became particularly visible again in the United States. That did not stop future president Ronald Reagan from claiming they had fought ‘on the wrong side’.64 Western European veterans, if they survived the Second World War (and lists of former members held by, amongst others, Dutch police found their way to the Gestapo), were amongst the few not to suffer immediate consequences, though communist infighting would eventually see even André Marty shunned by his former ideological comrades.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

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

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

“We are apes in every way.”959 By cannibalizing our fellow primates, we are exposing ourselves to pathogens particularly fine-tuned to human physiology. Human outbreaks of Ebola, for example, have been traced to exposure to the dead bodies of infected great apes hunted for food.960 Ebola, one of humanity’s deadliest infections, is not efficiently spread, though, compared to a virus like HIV. The year 1981 brought us Ronald Reagan taking the oath, MTV’s first broadcast, Pacman-mania, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the release of IBM’s first personal computer. In June, the Centers for Disease Control issued a bulletin of nine brief paragraphs. Five gay men in Los Angeles had died with a strange cluster of symptoms.961 From humble beginnings, AIDS has killed millions.962 The relaxation of sexual mores, blood banking, and injection drug use aided the spread of the AIDS virus, but where did this virus come from?


China: A History by John Keay

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, invention of movable type, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, éminence grise

Ostensibly the work of Hua Guofeng, Mao’s nominated successor (the fourth by most counts), this rejection of all that remained of the Cultural Revolution depended on PLA support as orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping. For the third time, the diminutive Deng was bouncing back. In 1977 he was reinstated in the Politburo and in 1978 he sidelined Hua Guofeng to launch the reform programme that would shape contemporary China. A year later he was in America being feted by Ronald Reagan and anticipating China’s becoming a superpower; a year after that, while authorising the creation of the first Special Economic Zone at Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), he lit on the formula that would turn China into ‘the workshop of the world’. The five years 1977–82 launched the country on a new trajectory as revolutionary in its way as any in its long history.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

You can complete the frontier experience by joining yesterday’s stars of the silver screen and booking a room at the El Rancho Hotel on Route 66. Built in 1937, it is a shrine to Hollywood’s golden age of Westerns, when it served as a home away from home for stars such as Kirk Douglas (here to film Ace in the Hole in 1951) and Ronald Reagan and Lionel Barrymore (The Bad Man in 1940), as well as Gene Autry and Mae West, to name but a few. Signed photos line the hallways of this National Historical Site, and Native crafts, mounted deer heads, and a gigantic geode fill the lobby. Rooms are Western-rustic, with names that recall their former guests.

The idyllic setting nestled in the hillside just north of Santa Barbara (see p. 854) and inland from the glistening Pacific has been ranked by industry insiders as one of the world’s most promising wine regions. Before its latest 15 minutes of fame in the 2004 movie Sideways, the Santa Ynez Valley was known as the locale of President Ronald Reagan’s western White House ranch in the ’80s and later as the site of Michael Jackson’s Neverland compound. But even before that, tourists driving the California coastline discovered a bounty of roadside attractions, most notably the Danish-themed village of Solvang. Windmills, half-timbered houses, and great bakeries were cornerstones of this borderline kitsch but undeniably cute town founded in 1911 by Danish immigrants.


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

Not all stumbled, but television could tame even the biggest egos, with the little screen outgunning the “silver screen” time after time. In 1962, MCA’s dominating presence in Hollywood ran smack into the Department of Justice. Its investigation into the company’s “monopolistic practices” resulted in a face-off between Wasserman (whose beloved allies included Ronald Reagan, then in the midst of leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican) and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To avoid criminal and civil penalties for alleged antitrust violations, MCA agreed to divest itself of its talent agency at the same time that the company bought struggling Universal Pictures and Decca Records.


pages: 734 words: 244,010

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

Its age is not known for certain but the species is known to survive more than 3,000 years. General Sherman's age could be ascertained exactly to the nearest year if we cut it down -- a major undertaking, for the bark alone is about a metre thick.* Let us hope this will never happen, in spite of Ronald Reagan's notorious opinion, when he was Governor of California: 'If you've seen one, you've seen them all.' How is it that we can know the age of a large tree, even one as old as General Sherman, accurately to the nearest year? We count the rings in its stump. Ring counting, in a more sophisticated form, has given rise to the elegant technique of dendrochronology, by which archaeologists working on a timescale of centuries can precisely date any wooden artefact.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

Churchill’s Iron Curtain remained until November 1989 and so from 1946, if not earlier, successive British governments believed and so geared their defences to the possibility that an East–West European trip wire would snap and Soviet forces would be at the Channel ports within four to ten days. In these forbidding times of the 1940s, the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan spent their formative years. By the time they reached the heights of political power in the late 1970s, nothing that had happened during the intervening years – the Berlin airlift between 1948 and 1949, the Korean War that started in 1951, the creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization in 1954, the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, the Soviet lead in intercontinental warfare technology in 1957, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the invasion into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and so on – changed their minds about the threats to their societies.


Cuba Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, cuban missile crisis, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Kickstarter, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, urban planning

Traditionally, sporadic rapprochements between the Cuban and US governments have been limited and ephemeral. President Jimmy Carter loosened the regulations for licensed travel to Cuba for religious, educational and cultural groups in the late 1970s but, following the Mariel Boatlift and the accession of Ronald Reagan in 1980–81, the doors quickly shut. The Clinton administration attempted a second relaxation in 1995 and by the early 2000s an estimated 150,000 licensed US travelers were visiting Cuba annually (along with another 50,000 illegal ‘tourists’). However, following Castro’s crackdown on Cuban dissidents in 2003’s ‘Black Spring’ and the ensuing diplomatic finger-wagging, the George W Bush administration closed the doors to all but the most determined American travelers.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

“One of the graduate students who write me letters noted that there is poison in some of the writing about Vietnam,” Ed wrote to Pat in 1979. “I guess maybe that’s why I keep working at trying to get a straight account of it made. I sure see the poison of some of the things said about me. Maybe I’ll never be able to get it all antidoted with truth.”7 He never did get the truth out to his satisfaction. THE HISTORIC election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated a renewed push to win the Cold War. In the process there was revived interest in Edward Lansdale and his teachings, with some Reaganites eager to apply lessons from his days in the Philippines and Vietnam to fresh fights against Communist forces in Latin America—specifically, the FLMN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) in El Salvador and the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua.


pages: 1,056 words: 275,211

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, defense in depth, European colonialism, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869

Hirohito, like many other Japanese, worried less about China than about Japan’s worsening relations with the United States. The United States was buffeted by rising inflation, and the American public had come to feel that their country was stagnating under President Jimmy Carter. In 1980 they elected Republican Ronald Reagan as president. Reagan and his advisers immediately rekindled the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and inaugurated an aggressive policy of imperial interventions. Japan’s elites responded by increasing defense spending on the premise that the United States’ global economic and military hegemony was declining and it was time for Japan to prepare to stand on its own.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

The truly global forum for trade policy was the WTO. It was an original creation of the founding moment of American globalism in the 1940s.105 The United States had long been its most powerful backer. President Trump did not attend the party to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of its founding in November 2017 at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, DC, but he sent his ill wishes by way of Fox News. “The WTO was set up for the benefit [of] everybody but us. . . . They have taken advantage of this country like you wouldn’t believe,” he told the news channel.106 As his trade representative, Trump appointed the veteran trade warrior Robert Lighthizer, who in the 1980s had been responsible for extracting the agreements by America’s major competitors to voluntarily restrain their steel exports to the United States.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

.… FOR NOW 582–83 economic output estimates: National Intelligence Council 2008, p. 6; Wilson and Stupnytska 2007; Hawksworth and Cookson 2008; Maddison 2006; Fogel 2007. 583 “If the courses” and “He became”: Dickens, Christmas Carol, Staves 4 and 5. 585 “Chimerica”: Ferguson and Schularick 2007; Ferguson 2009. 586 2010 growth predictions: International Monetary Fund 2009, Table 1.1. 586 Congressional Budget Office: Douglas Elmendorf, cited from “Falls the Shadow: The Deficit and Health Care,” The Economist, July 25, 2009, p. 25 (available at http://www.economist.com). 586 “After … 1989”: cited from “May the Good China Preserve Us,” The Economist, May 23, 2009, p. 47 (available at http://www.economist.com). 587–88 2030 and 2040 incomes calculated from Maddison 2006, Table 5, and Fogel 2007, Tables 1, 2. Maddison expresses GDP in 1990 US$; I have converted these to 2000 US$ using Bureau of Labor Statistics values (http://stats.bls.gov/). 588 “Soothing Scenario”: J. Mann 2007, p. 1. 588 “Trade freely”: George W. Bush, speech at the Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California (November 19, 1999), cited in Dietrich 2005, p. 29. 589 “contested modernities”: Jacques 2009, p. 100. 591 “Our way of life”: Jeremy Rifkin, from an interview conducted in 2000, cited from Singer 2009, p. 105. 592 “a future period”: Kurzweil 2005, pp. 5, 24. 593 “the Rapture for Nerds”: an expression coined by the science fiction novelist Ken MacLeod in his novel The Cassini Division (1998). 593 “criticism from incredulity”: Kurzweil 2005, p. 432. 593 “When a scientist”: Richard Smalley, cited from Nicholas Thompson, “Downsizing: Nanotechnology—Why You Should Sweat the Small Stuff,” Washington Monthly, October 2000 (http://washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0010.thompson.html). 594 “We can rebuild him”: The Six Million Dollar Man, ABC Television, 1974–78. 595 “We’re not playing”: Craig Venter, cited from Carr 2008. 595 “network-enabled telepathy”: Roco and Bainbridge 2002, p. 19. 599 “Altered frequencies”: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007, pp. 12–13. 600 “the really scary stuff,” “the even scarier stuff,” and “global weirding”: T.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

And as Isak Dinesen wrote, “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?” But oddly enough, humor is also a prized tactic of rhetoric and intellectual argument. Wit can be a fearsome rapier in the hands of a skilled polemicist. Ronald Reagan’s popularity and effectiveness as president owed much to his facility with one-liners that quashed debate and criticism, at least for the moment; for example, when deflecting questions about abortion rights he would say, “I notice that everyone in favor of abortion has already been born.” Philosophers relish the true story of the theoretician who announced at a scholarly conference that while some languages use a double negative to convey an affirmative, no language uses a double affirmative to convey a negative.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They reported again and again on various public statements that had not been coordinated with them, including vocal demands to annex the territories and excessively enthusiastic support for Johnson’s policy in Vietnam.23 Israel hoped Johnson would be reelected. Eshkol was afraid of a Nelson Rockefeller presidency, and even more wary of Ronald Reagan, another contender for the Republican nomination. “A Johnson defeat would be a thoroughly bad thing for us,” he said. But he did not lose heart: “I would still like to hope that, with our help, Johnson will be reelected.”24* The atmosphere at the ranch was warm and informal, and Johnson seemed friendly.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

The most costly and influential installment of Star Wars, after all, failed to come to fruition. It was otherwise known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, but not until it acquired its enticing nickname was the interest of the public—and, more important, of the president—aroused. You cannot help thinking that it was images of Han, Luke, and Leia that spun round inside Ronald Reagan’s head as he approved funding for the program—one of those rare occasions when he did not see eye to eye, or dream to dream, with the unfanciful Margaret Thatcher, who was not known as a moviegoer. (Another instance was the US invasion of Grenada—again, more of a bad war picture than a serious military undertaking.)


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

But the command Sharon gave the IDF was perfectly clear: “We have to finish off the southern part” of Beirut, where the refugee camps and PLO bases were located, he said at a meeting in his office on July 11, “to destroy whatever can be destroyed…to raze it to the ground.” — THE FULL-SCALE INVASION OF Lebanon and the siege of Beirut would become a quagmire for Israel, an occupation that would last—at least in the south—for another eighteen years. The whole world, even President Ronald Reagan, who had a good relationship with Begin, came out against Israel. “You are causing a holocaust in Beirut,” said Reagan in an angry phone call to Begin. “Please, Mr. President,” Begin responded, no less angry, “don’t teach me about holocausts. I and my people know very well what ‘holocaust’ means.”


pages: 992 words: 292,389

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

Greenspan and Summers listened as Davis laid out his political dilemma. The words made it obvious that the power problems in California would become much worse. Economics and politics were in conflict. And for now, politics would rule. Two days later, a black sedan pulled to the front of the Ronald Reagan State Office Building in downtown Los Angeles. Ken Lay emerged from the back, followed by Steve Kean, his chief of staff and Enron’s government-relations specialist. They had interrupted their vacations for this quick trip to California to meet with Gray Davis. Lay and Kean headed to the fifteenth floor and were taken to the Governor’s conference room.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

In the summer of 1982 labourer Michael Fagan made two uninvited entries into the grounds and buildings, scaling a drainpipe and wandering at will around the palace corridors during his first visit, on 7 June 1982, and entering Room 108, where he helped himself from a bottle of Californian Riesling and waited for the Duke of Edinburgh. When nobody came Fagan made his way out, just before a helicopter containing the US president Ronald Reagan landed on the palace lawn. A month later, on 8 July, Fagan broke into the palace grounds at four in the morning, scaled a wall and entered the building through the Stamp Room. In the Throne Room he tried different seats for size, urinated in the corgis’ food bowl, and accidentally made his way into a bedroom where his movements woke the Queen who shouted: ‘What are you doing here?


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, a permanent state of international impasse was reached under the name of ‘détente’.63 Neither the United States nor the USSR was winning the arms race. The Soviets’ former pupil, Communist China, was brought to the fore in the international arena in 1972 by an American diplomatic manoeuvre following the Sino-Soviet split.64 In the 1980s the Soviet leadership grew more rigid in response to the challenge from US President Ronald Reagan, who spoke openly of the ‘evil empire’. Poland’s Solidarity movement was crushed, as previous acts of defiance in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been. The Soviet bloc appeared to be gripped in the same vice that had gripped the Soviet Union for three generations.65 Throughout the post-war era the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) was the smallest of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics.


pages: 970 words: 302,110

A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, hiring and firing, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South of Market, San Francisco, walking around money

"Oh, that's not true, not if they've got money." "It's not? Whatever happened to the first Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller? Whatever happened to the first Mrs. Aristotle Onassis?" It occurred to her that this might be ancient history to Joyce, and so she tried to bring the evidence up-to-date. "Whatever happened to the first Mrs. Ronald Reagan—and she was once a movie star! They're all invisible. They're superfluous." Joyce just looked at her. "I wasn't prepared for that," said Martha. "We had a lot of friends, and I really thought a lot of them were much more my friends than Charlie's. Like the parents of the children in Wallace's class at Lovett.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Saunders, The Middle East Problem in the 1980s (Washington, D.C., 1981). For particular problems, see P. Jabber, “Egypt’s Crisis, America’s Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 64, no. 5 (Summer 1986), pp. 960–80; and R. W. Tucker, “The Arms Balance and the Persian Gulf,” in The Purposes of American Power (New York, 1981), ch. 4. 209. A. F. Lowenthal, “Ronald Reagan and Latin America: Coping with Hegemony in Decline,” in Oye et al. (eds.), Eagle Defiant, pp. 31 Iff; R. Bonachea, “The United States and Central America,” in Kaplan, Global Power, pp. 209–41; P. A. Armella et al. (eds.), Financial Policies and the World Capital Markets: The Place of Latin American Countries (Chicago, 111., 1983). 210.


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, a permanent state of international impasse was reached under the name of ‘détente’.63 Neither the United States nor the USSR was winning the arms race. The Soviets’ former pupil, Communist China, was brought to the fore in the international arena in 1972 by an American diplomatic manoeuvre following the Sino-Soviet split.64 In the 1980s the Soviet leadership grew more rigid in response to the challenge from US President Ronald Reagan, who spoke openly of the ‘evil empire’. Poland’s Solidarity movement was crushed, as previous acts of defiance in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been. The Soviet bloc appeared to be gripped in the same vice that had gripped the Soviet Union for three generations.65 Throughout the post-war era the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) was the smallest of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics.


pages: 1,335 words: 336,772

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bolshevik threat, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, death from overwork, Dutch auction, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, interest rate swap, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, paper trading, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the payments system, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War, young professional

After years toiling in the vineyard of freelance magazine work, I decided to take a breather from that hectic world in the mid 1980s and landed a job in a public policy foundation called The Twentieth Century Fund, where I was put in charge of financial policy studies. During this heyday of the bull market that roared through Ronald Reagan’s presidency, huge numbers of people were swept into the financial world for the first time, whether as foot soldiers in investment banks or small investors dabbling in common stocks, and they had little historic perspective on the new world they inhabited. As I dipped into the rich literature of financial history, I was struck that the old Wall Street—elite, clubby, and dominated by small, mysterious partnerships—bore scant resemblance to the universe of faceless conglomerates springing up across the globe.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

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

Mitte (Berlin) Top Sights Altes MuseumE5 Brandenburg GateB6 FernsehturmG5 Hamburger BahnhofA2 PergamonmuseumE4 ReichstagA5 Sights 1Alte NationalgalerieE4 2BebelplatzD6 3Berliner DomF5 4BodemuseumE4 5Deutsches Historisches MuseumE5 6Hackesche HöfeF3 7Holocaust MemorialB6 8Humboldt UniversityD5 9Neue Synagogue & Centrum JudaicumE3 10Neues MuseumE5 11World Time ClockH4 Sleeping 12Arcotel VelvetC3 13Circus HostelF2 14Circus HotelF2 15EastsevenG1 16Garden Hotel HonigmondC1 17Hotel Adlon KempinskiB6 18Hotel HonigmondD2 19Lux 11G3 20Wombat's City HostelG3 Eating 21AsselD3 22La FoccaceriaF1 23Monsieur VuongG3 24Sankt OberholzF2 Drinking 25ReingoldC2 Entertainment 26Berliner EnsembleC4 27Kaffee BurgerG2 28Staatsoper Unter den LindenE6 29WeekendH4 Shopping 30Berlin Art & Nostalgia MarketE5 31Galeries LafayetteD6 Sights Brandenburg Gate LANDMARK (Brandenburger Tor; Click here ; Pariser Platz; S-Bahn Unter den Linden) Finished in 1791 as one of 18 city gates, the neoclassical Brandenburg Gate became an East-West crossing point after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. A symbol of Berlin’s division, it was a place US presidents loved to grandstand. John F Kennedy passed by in 1963. Ronald Reagan appeared in 1987 to appeal to the Russian leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’. In 1989 more than 100,000 Germans poured through it as the wall fell. Five years later, Bill Clinton somewhat belatedly noted: ‘Berlin is free’. The crowning Quadriga statue, a winged goddess in a horse-drawn chariot (once kidnapped by Napoleon and briefly taken to Paris), was cleaned in 2000 along with the rest of the structure.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

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

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

“If you go into any quad,” Dean Sue Wasiolek told Bliwise in 1995, “the hope is that you will find a fraternity, maybe a selective house, maybe a single-sex residence and a coed residence, so that you see a balance.” Another key aspect of Keohane’s efforts to transform the influence of fraternities at Duke was to implement a new policy regarding the consumption of alcohol on campus. Ever since President Ronald Reagan signed into law, in July 1984, a bill requiring states to increase the legal age to twenty-one, college campuses across the country had been forced to grapple with the growing problem that although social life on campus revolved around drinking alcohol, most of the people on campus doing the drinking were below the legal drinking age.


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

This diaspora established large Irish communities in other countries, especially Britain (where ten percent of the population are now thought to have an Irish grandparent) and the USA, where Irish-Americans played a major role in supporting moves towards independence and still remain a powerful lobbying group. The list of US presidents with Irish roots now runs into the low twenties (including Ulysses S. Grant, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and perhaps more tenuously Barack Obama), and over forty million Americans, one fifth of the white population, claim Irish descent. Other countries with significant populations of Irish descent include Australia, Canada, South Africa and, perhaps more surprisingly, Mexico and Argentina, the latter explaining how the great Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara came to have an Irish grandmother.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Thirty-three out of 44 Costa Rican presidents prior to 1970 were descended from just three original colonizing families. In 1979 the rebellious Sandinistas toppled the American-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Alarmed by the Sandinistas’ Soviet and Cuban ties, fervently anticommunist President Ronald Reagan decided it was time to intervene. The Cold War arrived in the hot tropics. The organizational details of the counterrevolution were delegated to Oliver North, an eager-to-please junior officer working out of the White House basement. North’s can-do creativity helped to prop up the famed Contra rebels to incite civil war in Nicaragua.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

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

At the Wujek coal mine in Katowice, workers resisted takeover and were shot at by government forces (nine died, twenty-one were wounded). Gorbachev: Democracy from the Stalinist Apparatus? The chill of martial law had descended at a frosty low point of the Cold War, the first year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Central Europeans watched as the superpowers stationed or promised to station new generations of weapons of mass destruction astride the Iron Curtain, in West as well as East Germany. In the fall of 1982, the aged and infirm Brezhnev died, and rule passed to one (Yuri Andropov, d. 1984) and then another (Konstantin Chernenko, d. 1985) aged and infirm Soviet leader.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

The Soviets were determined to enlarge their nuclear arsenal to match ours—a decision they made in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was able to back them down by threatening nuclear war—and the closer they came to parity the more belligerently the American right howled for blood. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1980, proceeded to more than double the U.S. defense budget while coining such provocative characterizations of the other nuclear superpower as “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The Soviets shot down a Korean airliner that had wandered into their airspace, killing all aboard.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

The decisions Buffett had made about stocks in the 1970s were defiant bets against pessimism in the great bear market, plagued by rampant unemployment and consumer prices that rose at an intolerable fifteen percent a year. Now that bet suddenly paid off, thanks to a desperate President Carter, who had appointed a new Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, in 1979. Volcker ratcheted up the central bank discount rate to fourteen percent to get inflation under control. In 1981, new President Ronald Reagan began to cut taxes sharply, started deregulating business—and supported Volcker despite the howls of pain his policies were causing. The economy and markets had been going through a seizure for two and a half years. Then, in late 1982, the bull market of the 1980s began its stampede as the prices of stocks started catching up with the growth in corporate earnings.4 Much of the money used for Buffett’s late seventies spending spree came from a bonanza of float from insurance and trading stamps.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Five cuts of beefsteak are featured on the menu: onglet or flank steak, ribeye, sirloin, filet, and T-bone. These steaks are tender and full of flavor. You can select from such sauces as béarnaise or green peppercorn. Vegetarian dishes and daily market specials are also served. You can down cask-conditioned ales, such as Adams, taking in such poster art as Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan in Cattle Queen of Montana. 51 Eagle St., WC1. & 020/7404-0200. www.thebountifulcow.co.uk. Reservations required. Main courses £9.50–£21. AE, MC, V. Mon–Sat 11am–11pm; Sun noon–8pm. Tube: Holborn. 152 08_615386-ch05.indd 15208_615386-ch05.indd 152 8/24/10 2:07 PM8/24/10 2:07 PM Covent Garden & the Strand EXPENSIVE Rules TRADITIONAL ENGLISH If you’re looking for the most quintessentially British restaurant in town, eat here.


pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

There were so many cases when alerts expired after nothing had happened that we grew accustomed to them, and indifferent: ‘Oh, it’s just another training exercise.’” The year 1981 came and Jimmy Carter was no longer in office to consider thawing out his “frozen” troop-withdrawal plan. Worse, from Pyongyang’s perspective, Ronald Reagan had replaced Carter—and Reagan quickly put on a showy display of support for Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s new dictator. Pyongyang-was not delicate about expressing its feelings. The Voice of the Revolutionary Party for Reunification, a North Korean radio station that masqueraded as an underground South Korean outlet, reported a 1982 assassination attempt against Reagan as a punishment “deserved by a warmonger and a strangler of human rights.”24 That illustrates one of the problems a democracy such as the United States encounters in dealing with a country ruled by a single-minded, all-powerful individual.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

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

Outside the northern S-Bahn station entrance, several Berlin Wall segments provide information about other wall memorial sites and future wall-related projects. Continue north to the Brandenburger Tor where construction of the wall began in the wee hours of 13 August 1961. Many statesmen exhorted against communism in front of it, including Ronald Reagan who, in 1987, uttered the famous words: ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’. Two years later, the Berlin Wall was history. Tours Bus You’ll see them everywhere around town: colourful buses (in summer, often open-top double-deckers) that tick off all the key sights on two-hour loops with basic taped commentary in eight languages.


Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

Facilities: Historic building, visitor center, exhibits, restrooms (uu). Activities: Guided tours. Special Features: Built by hardware store owner Albert Gallatin in 1878, mansion became the official residence for California’s governors in 1903 and was used by all subsequent governors (13 in all) until 1967 when Ronald Reagan became the last governor to reside there. The mansion is an example of Second Empire-Italianate architecture and has more than 30 rooms. ★1599★ GRIZZLY CREEK REDWOODS STATE PARK c/o North Coast Redwoods District Office PO Box 2006 Eureka, CA 95502 Web: www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=421 Phone: 707-777-3683 Size: 429 acres.