Unsafe at Any Speed

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How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Written by Ralph Nader, the book was called Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, and just as Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring dramatically raised public consciousness about the dangers of pesticides and toxic chemicals in our foods, so Nader’s 1965 book did the same thing for the deadly dangers of American automobiles. The most interesting presentation at DLD was by a young German entrepreneur called Marc Al-Hames, the co-CEO of Cliqz, the new internet browser and search engine. Al-Hames’s speech, borrowing from Nader’s 1965 bestseller, was titled “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The first slide Al-Hames showed to the DLD audience was of a brand-new two-door convertible red Corvair, a car manufactured by the American automobile company Chevrolet between 1960 and 1969.

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Steven Perlberg, “New York Times Readies Ad-Free Digital Subscription Model,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2016. 12. Ken Doctor, “Behind the Times Surge to 2.5 Million Subscribers,” Politico, December 5, 2016. 13. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19, 1965. 14. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of American Automobiles (Simon & Schuster, 1965), vi. 15. Christopher Jensen, “50 Years Ago, ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’ Shook the Auto World,” New York Times, November 26, 2015. 16. Ibid. 17. Lee Rainie, “The State of Privacy in Post-Snowden America,” Pew Research Center, September 21, 2016. Chapter Eight 1. Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (Oxford University Press, 1996), 6. 2.

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Peter Sunde has learned from his youthful mistakes. Rather than participating in the killing of our culture, he is now working on its rebirth. It might have taken him a while to arrive at More’s Law, but in his attempt to reinvent both himself and the internet, he has become a valuable player on Team Human. Unsafe at Any Speed At Europe’s most prestigious tech gathering, the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich—that same event, you’ll remember, where the EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager confessed to being unconcerned about the fragmentation of the internet—there was speculation about Germany’s chances of winning the second half of the Industrie 4.0 game to control today’s internet of things.

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

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

In 1896 there were only four cars registered in all the United States. Two of them collided with each other in St. Louis. Although the high death toll from widespread car ownership had been the norm decades, it was really the 1960s that saw the first concerted efforts towards improving safety. Ralph Nader’s seminal book, “Unsafe at Any Speed”, exposed the lack of interest in safety matters among major automobile manufacturers. Bridget Driscoll (1851–17 August 1896) has the unenviable position in history of being the first pedestrian victim of an automobile collision in Great Britain. Driscoll was struck by an automobile belonging to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company that was giving demonstration rides.

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However, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents estimate over half a million people had since been killed on UK roads by 2010. “For over half a century, the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” Page 1, Unsafe at Any Speed [149] Published in November 1965, the first sentence of this landmark book from attorney Ralph Nader did not mince words. The rest of the book continued in the same vein decrying the gap between existing design and attainable safety and the auto industry’s ignoring of the moral imperative to keep people safer.

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D=NHTSA-2016-0090-1115 [124] https://www.mckinsey.de/files/automotive_revolution_perspective_towards_2030.pdf [125] http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/SELFDRIVING-SUPPLIERS/010040KW194/index.html [126] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-merging-tech-and-cars/ [127] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/09/ford-aims-for-self-driving-car-with-no-gas-pedal-no-steering-wheel-in-5-years-ceo-says.html [128] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/ford-investing-1-billion-in-ex-google-uber-engineers-startup [129] https://medium.com/@ford/building-fords-next-generation-autonomous-development-vehicle-82a6160a7965#.uojw6ib99 [130] http://fortune.com/self-driving-cars-silicon-valley-detroit/ [131] http://mashable.com/2015/10/22/cadillac-autonomous-driving/#WKolOgN4hgqS [132] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/16/rolls-royce-ditches-the-chauffeur-in-this-futuristic-concept-car.html [133] https://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-race-to-2021-the-state-of-autonomous-vehicles-and-a-whos-who-of-industry-drivers [134] https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwyman/2017/05/17/google-racks-up-more-patents-than-most-automakers-on-connected-and-self-driving-cars/#15cf3e8041ef [135] http://www.theicct.org/blogs/staff/second-million-electric-vehicles [136] http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics [137] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812013 [138] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812348 [139] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/opinion/a-public-health-crisis-that-we-can-fix.html [140] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf [141] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm [142] http://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/07/nearly-80-percent-of-drivers-express-significant-anger-aggression-or-road-rage/ [143] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate [144] http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-will-you-crash-your-car/ [145] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-sharply-2015 [146] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jensen/2016/10/05/going-from-35092-to-zero-a-plan-to-end-roadway-fatalities-auto-makers-are-invited-to-join/#64ed5a294cb8 [147] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812319 [148] http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/intersection/ [149] Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, November 1965 [150] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/new-nhtsa-study-shows-motor-vehicle-crashes-have-871-billion-economic-and-societal [151] http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2011_AAA_CrashvCongUpd.pdf [152] Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Edward Humes, 2016 [153] https://theforum.sph.harvard.edu/events/asleep-at-the-wheel/ [154] http://bit.ly/1PQM6Gu [155] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-advocates-want-to-speak-of-car-crashes-instead.html?

The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“A great problem of contemporary life,” Nader wrote in the preface to Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that made him famous, “is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.” Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Nader’s text was a muckraking indictment of the auto industry’s resistance to installing safety features in cars—resistance that “has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”75 Unsafe at Any Speed may have attracted only a niche audience of insurance adjusters had it not been for a scandal that seemed to validate the author’s assertions of villainy on the part of car makers.

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Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Nader’s text was a muckraking indictment of the auto industry’s resistance to installing safety features in cars—resistance that “has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”75 Unsafe at Any Speed may have attracted only a niche audience of insurance adjusters had it not been for a scandal that seemed to validate the author’s assertions of villainy on the part of car makers. In March 1966, Nader claimed that he was investigated and harassed by agents working for General Motors. This allegation triggered a series of events that resulted in the president of GM apologizing to Nader and settling with the thirty-one-year-old for invasion of privacy.76 Unsafe at Any Speed rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists. With money from the settlement, Nader founded the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which produced a series of colorfully titled monographs in 1970 that hammered home the critique of agency capture: The Interstate Commerce Omission, The Chemical Feast, The Vanishing Air.77 Ralph Nader was far from the only young lawyer energized by the prospects of using litigation in service of environmental and consumer advocacy.

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Ibid. 73. Ibid. For the New Deal-era precedent, see Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 US 388 (1935). 74. W. H. Orrick, Department of Justice, June 17, 1964, Lorillard Records, source unknown, UCSF Library, https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/pfcl0010. 75. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1965), ix, iv. 76. “G.M. Apologies for Harassment of Critic,” New York Times, March 23, 1966. 77. Schiller, “Enlarging the Administrative Polity,” 1414. 78. “Conservationists Press Fight against Pesticides,” New York Times, November 26, 1967. 79.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The question is whether the arrangements that have been recommended or adopted to meet them, to supplement the market, are well devised for that purpose, or whether, as so often happens, the cure may not be worse than the disease. This question is particularly relevant today. A movement launched less than two decades ago by a series of events—the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Senator Estes Kefauver's investigation of the drug industry, and Ralph Nader's attack on the General Motors Corvair as "unsafe at any speed"—has led to a major change in both the extent and the character of government involvement in the marketplace—in the name of protecting the consumer. From the Army Corps of Engineers in 1824 to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 to the Federal Railroad Administration in 1966, the agencies established by the federal government to regulate or supervise economic activity varied in scope, importance, and purpose, but almost all dealt with a single industry and had well-defined powers with respect to that industry.

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That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy. Ralph Nader's attack on the Corvair, the most dramatic single episode in the campaign to discredit the products of private industry, exemplifies not only the effectiveness of that campaign but also how misleading it has been. Some ten years after Nader castigated the Corvair as unsafe at any speed, one of the agencies that was set up in response to the subsequent public outcry finally got around to testing the Corvair that started the whole thing. They spent a year and a half comparing the performance of the Corvair with the performance of other comparable vehicles, and they concluded, "The 1960–63 Corvair compared favorably with the other contemporary vehicles used in the tests." 2 Nowadays Corvair fan clubs exist throughout the country.

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They spent a year and a half comparing the performance of the Corvair with the performance of other comparable vehicles, and they concluded, "The 1960–63 Corvair compared favorably with the other contemporary vehicles used in the tests." 2 Nowadays Corvair fan clubs exist throughout the country. Corvairs have become collectors' items. But to most people, even the well informed, the Corvair is still "unsafe at any speed." The railroad industry and the automobile industry offer an excellent illustration of the difference between a governmentally regulated industry protected from competition and a private industry subjected to the full rigors of competition. Both industries serve the same market and ultimately provide the same service, transportation.

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

While Jacobs’s campaign in New York City was successful, most of the highways proposed elsewhere in the United States were built as planned. Around the same time as people were trying to stifle highway projects, Ralph Nader was also gaining attention as a consumer advocate with a focus on the automobile. In his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader exposed the automotive industry’s disregard for safety, which included ignoring clear safety hazards, investing more in vehicle styling than safety features, and efforts to blame drivers for harms that could have been avoided through better practices on the part of the automakers. Nader’s book, paired with the escalating number of road deaths in the 1960s, finally forced the federal and state governments to address the automotive safety crisis.

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on carrier bag theory of fiction, 206–7 on Omelas, 226–7 on technology and hi tech, 224–5 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, 202 Levandowski, Anthony, 120–2 Levinson, Herbert, 12 Levitz, Eric, 181, 182–3 Light, Jennifer, 56–7 Lime, 168–9 lithium, 75–6, 78, 79, 80, 81, 226 Loop (Boring Company), 146–51 Los Angeles, CA auto dominance in, 212 Bird in, 169 freeway plan, 22 housing prices in, 212–3 Interstate Highway System in, 140–1 jitneys in, 89–91 ride-hailing services in, 99 Louisville, Kentucky, Bird in, 169 Lower Manhattan Expressway, 26 Lutz, Bob, 70 Lycos, 55 Lyft, 99–100, 101, 104–5, 111, 168–9, 191, 229 Maersk, 49, 129 Marble, 172, 173 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 39 Maughan, Tim, 48, 49–50, 222–3 Infinite Detail, 129 Mazzucato, Mariana, 55 Measure M, 212 Mercedes-Benz, 78 micromobility services, 166–7, 169–70, 171–2, 177–9 Microsoft, 52, 72 military networks, 50 military spending, 38–9, 45–6, 119–20 mining industry about, 72–7, 79 in Australia, 75–6, 80 domestic supplies of minerals, 80–1 mobility, disruption of, by automobiles, 9–35 Model Lab, 230 Monbiot, George, 221–2 Morales, Evo, 76 Morozov, Evgeny, 59 mortgage insurance, 28–9 Moses, Robert, 26, 46 Mosseri, Adam, 61–2 motor vehicle tax, for funding highways, 25 motorways. See Interstate Highway System mouse, 54–5 Musk, Elon, 5–6, 55, 63–4, 70, 73, 76, 116, 123, 128, 137, 138, 143–51, 153, 157, 158, 186, 188, 190, 219 Muzaffar, Saadia, 228–9 Nader, Ralph, 137, 232 Unsafe at Any Speed, 27–8 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 112 National Association of City Transportation Officials, 175 National City Lines, 21 National High-Performance Computer Technology Act (1989), 51 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 137 National Science Foundation (NSF), 50–1 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), 27–8 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 134–6 Navlab autonomous vehicles, 119–20 NBCUniversal, 216 Nelson, Laura, 147 network technologies, 50 Neumann, Adam, 183 New Communalists, 41, 43 New Deal, 28, 46 New Democrats, 50 New Left, 41, 43 New Right, 53 New York City, NY bike lanes in, 171 bus system in, 215 ride-hailing services in, 99 taxi services in, 104 Uber in, 98–9, 103 New York Transportation Company, 66 Ng, Andrew, 126 Nissan, 116 Nixon, Richard, 47–8, 203 North America, train system in, 218–9.

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., 191 Uber Air, 153–4, 155, 157, 159 Uber Copter, 155–6 Uber Eats, 184–5 Uber Elevate, 152, 154, 159 unemployment rate, 95–6 unions, for taxi drivers, 101–2 United Kingdom (UK) docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 ecommerce in, 193 University of Technology Sydney, 75 University Paris-East, 169–70 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 27–8 Untokening collective, 218 Urban Challenge, 120 urban renewal strategy, 26 Urry, John, 32–3, 143 US Air Force, 50 US Department of Defense, 50 US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement (1986), 45 US National Labor Relations Act, 102 VaMoRs, 119 Vansintjan, Aaron, 222 Vasquez, Rafaela, 132, 135 Vélib’ bikeshare system, 210 venture capitalists, 186–7, 199 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (Le Guin), 202 Vietnam War, 39, 40, 43, 49 VoiceOver, 175 Volkswagen, 77, 78, 129–30 Volocopter, 152 Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 Walker, Jarrett, 59, 142–3, 181–2 walking, as means of transportation, 12, 191 Washington, DC, ride-hailing services in, 99 Waterfront Toronto, 228–9, 230, 231 Waymo, 133, 138, 186 web 2.0, 57 WeWork, 181, 182–3 white people, mortgages and, 29 Who Killed the Electric Car?

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

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

Trump (11 May 2017), “Presidential executive order on strengthening the cybersecurity of federal networks and critical infrastructure,” Office of the President of the United States, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-executive-order-strengthening-cybersecurity-federal-networks-critical-infrastructure. 181No agency has yet followed that policy: Nick Marinos (13 Feb 2018), “Critical infrastructure protection: Additional actions are essential for assessing cybersecurity framework adoption,” GAO-18-211, US Government Accountability Office, https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/690112.pdf. 181The rest of the report has been ignored: You could blame it on the dysfunctional administration, but I don’t believe it would have fared much better in a different administration. 182Some observers have noted parallels: Economist (8 Apr 2017), “How to manage the computer-security threat,” https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21720279-incentives-software-firms-take-security-seriously-are-too-weak-how-manage. 182It was the 1965 publication of: Christopher Jensen (26 Nov 2015), “50 years ago, Unsafe at Any Speed shook the auto world,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/automobiles/50-years-ago-unsafe-at-any-speed-shook-the-auto-world.html. 184The GDPR—General Data Protection Regulation: European Union (27 Apr 2016), “Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation),” Official Journal of the European Union, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj. 184For example, the GDPR mandates that: This is a good short summary: Cennydd Bowles (12 Jan 2018), “A techie’s rough guide to GDPR,” https://www.cennydd.com/writing/a-techies-rough-guide-to-gdpr. 184The GDPR’s regulations only affect: Mark Scott and Laurens Cerulus (31 Jan 2018), “Europe’s new data protection rules export privacy standards worldwide,” Politico, https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-data-protection-privacy-standards-gdpr-general-protection-data-regulation. 185If companies have to explain: This is already happening.

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What would such an event look like? That depends on the time frame. Some observers have noted parallels between today’s Internet+ and the pre-1970s automobile industry. Free from regulation, manufacturers were building and selling unsafe cars, and people were dying. It was the 1965 publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed that spurred the government into action, resulting in a slew of safety laws covering seat belts, headrests, and so on. A slew of Internet+ related fatalities could cause a similar regulatory flurry. On the other hand, companies have been killing people via the environment for decades. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, before the EPA was formed in 1970—and almost 50 years later, the EPA’s regulations are still insufficient to combat the threats.

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., 190 wiretapping by, 168 FDA, 137, 145, 151 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 149 FedRAMP, 123 Felten, Ed, 223 financial crisis (2008), 125–26 FinFisher, 64–65 FireEye, 42 flash crash, 85 Ford Foundation, 224 Fort Hood shooting (2009), 202 Freeh, Louis, 193 FTC, 148, 154 Gamma Group, 30, 65 Gartner tech analyst firm, 101 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) [EU], 151, 184–88 Geer, Dan, 163, 217 George, Richard, 170 Gerasimov Doctrine, 71 Germany, BSI and BND in, 173 GGE (Group of Governmental Experts), UN, 158 Gmail, 153 Goldsmith, Jack, 163 Google: Advanced Protection Program, 47 censorship by, 60 controls exerted by, 61, 62 and EU regulations, 185 identification systems in, 199 lobbying by, 154 state investigation of, 187 surveillance via, 58–59, 169, 196 governments, 144–59 asymmetry between, 91–92 censorship by, 60 and defense over offense, 160–79 functions of, 10 and industry, 176–79 information sharing by, 176 and infrastructure, 117 insecurity favored by, 57 international cooperation, 156–59 international espionage, 171–72 jurisdictional arbitrage, 156 and liability law, 128–33 lobbying of, 154–55 mistrust of, 208, 220 policy challenges in, 99, 100–101, 192–206 regulatory bodies, 121, 144, 150–52, 156–59, 192 and security standards, 167 supply-chain attacks on, 87–89 surveillance by, 64–68, 172, 195, 208 vulnerability disclosure by, 163 Greer, John, 126 GTT Communications, 115 Gutenberg, Johannes, 24 hacking: catastrophic, 9, 16, 217 class breaks, 33, 95 contests in, 85 costs of, 102–3 cyberweapons in, 73 increasing threat of, 79 international havens of, 156 through fish tank, 29 hacking back, 203–4 HackingTeam, 30, 45, 65 HAMAS, 93 Hancock Health, 74 harm, legal definition of, 130 Harris Corporation, 168 Hathaway, Melissa, 114 Hayden, Michael, 170 Healey, Jason, 158, 160 Heartbleed, 21, 114–15 Hello Barbie (doll), 106 Hilton Hotels, 185 Hizballah, 93 Honan, Mat, 29 Hotmail, 153 HP printers, 62 Huawai (Chinese company), 87 Human Rights Watch, 223 humans, as system component, 7 IBM, 33 iCloud, 7 hacking of, 78 and privacy, 190 quality standards for, 111, 123, 135 Idaho National Laboratory, 79, 90 identification, 51–55, 199–200 attribution, 52–55 breeder documents for, 51 impersonation of, 51, 75 identity, 44 identity theft, 50–51, 74–76, 106, 171 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 221 iMessage, 170 impersonation, 51, 75 IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity), 168–70 industry lobbying groups, 183 information asymmetries, 133–38 information security, 78 infrastructure: critical, use of term, 116 security of, 116–18 Inglis, Chris, 28 innovation, 155 insecurity, 56–77 cost of, 126 criminals’ benefit from, 74–77 and cyberwar, 68–74 insurance industry, 132–33 integrity, attacks on, 78–82 intellectual property theft, 66, 72–73, 75 interconnections, vulnerabilities in, 28–30, 90 International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 140 Internet: advertising model of, 57, 60 changing concepts of, 5, 218 connectivity of, 5, 91, 105–6 demilitarization of, 212–15 dependence on, 89–90 development phase of, 22–23, 157 explosive growth of, 5, 146 global, 7, 16, 161 governance model of, 157 government regulation of, 152–55 horizontal growth of, 146 industry standards for, 23, 122–23 lack of encryption on, 170–72 maintenance and upkeep of, 143 nonlinear system of, 211 private ownership of infrastructure, 126 resilience of, 210–12 as social equalizer, 214, 217 surveillance and control via, 64–68 viral dissident content on, 158 Internet+: authentication in, 49–51 coining of term, 8 cybersecurity safety board for, 177 risks and dangers of, 217–18 simultaneous vulnerabilities in, 94 Internet+ security: closing the skills gap, 141–42 correcting information asymmetries in, 133–38 correcting misaligned incentives in, 124–28 current state of, 9 defense in, see attack vs. defense enforcement of, 121 funding maintenance and upkeep in, 143 incentives and policy solutions for, 100–103, 120–43 increasing research in, 142–43 liabilities clarified for, 128–33 litigation for, 121 meanings of, 15–17 and privacy, 9 public education about, 138–41 public policies for, 120–21 standards for, 122–23, 140–41, 157–59 as wicked problem, 11, 99 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), 23, 167 Internet of Things (IoT), 5 as computerization of everything, 7 Cybersecurity Improvement Act, 180 in developmental stage, 8 patching of, 37–38 smartphone as controller hub for, 48 Internet Policy Research Initiative, MIT, 224 Investigatory Powers Act (UK), 195 iPhones, 3–4 encryption on, 174, 197 new versions of, 42–43 IPsec, 167 Iran: cyberattack by, 71, 116, 178 hackers in, 45 Stuxnet attack on, 79 Iraq, 212 ISIS, 69, 93 ISPs: connections via, 113–14 Tier 1 type, 115 ISS World (“Wiretappers’ Ball”), 65 jobs, in cybersecurity, 141–42 John Deere, 59–60, 62, 63 Joyce, Rob, 45, 53, 54, 164, 166 Kaplan, Fred, 73 Kaspersky Lab, 29, 74, 87 Kello, Lucas, 71 Kelly, John, 66 Keurig coffee makers, 62 key escrow, 194 KICTANet, Kenya, 214 labeling requirements, 134–35 LabMD, unfair practices of, 130–31 Landau, Susan, 175, 176, 223 Las Vegas shooting (2017), 202 Ledgett, Rick, 163–64, 166 lemons market, 134 Lenovo, 187 letters of marque, 204 Level 3 ISP, 115 liability law, 125, 128–33 Liars and Outliers (Schneier), 101, 209 Library of Congress, 42 license plate scanners, 201 linear systems, 210 Lloyd’s of London, 90 Lynn, William, 198 machine learning, 7, 82–87 adversarial, 84 algorithms beyond human comprehension, 111–12 autonomous, 82–83, 85 Maersk, 71, 94 malware, 26, 30, 196 man-in-the-middle attacks, 49, 169 market economics, and competition, 6 mass shootings, 202 May, Theresa, 197 McConnell, Mike, 198 McVeigh, Timothy, 202 medical devices: bugs in, 41 and government regulations, 151 hacking, 16 and privacy, 151 Meltdown vulnerability, 21 Merkel, Angela, 66 metadata, 174 Microsoft, 57, 190 Microsoft Office, new versions of, 42, 43 military systems, autonomous, 86 Minecraft video game, 94 miniaturization, 7 Mirai botnet, 29, 37, 77, 94, 130 money laundering, 183 monocultures, vulnerabilities in, 31 Moonlight Maze, 66 “movie-plot threats,” 96 Mozilla, 163 Munich Security Conference, 70 My Friend Cayla (doll), 106 Nader, Ralph, Unsafe at Any Speed, 182 National Cyber Office (NCO), 146–50 National Cyber Security Centre (UK), 173 National Cybersecurity Safety Board (proposed), 177 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Cybersecurity Framework of, 123, 147 National Intelligence Council, 211–12 National Science Foundation (NSF), 147 National Security Council, 163 National Security Strategy, 117 National Transportation Safety Board, 177 Netflix, 148 net neutrality, 61, 119 network effect, 60 networks: “air gapped,” 118 collective action required of, 23–24 end-to-end model of, 23 firewalls for, 102 iCloud, 111 secure connections in, 113–14, 125 and spam, 100 telephone, 119 New America, 223 New York Cyber Task Force, 213 NOBUS (nobody but us), 164–65, 169, 170 norms, 157–59 North Korea: cyberattack by, 71 cybercrimes by, 76, 157 hacking by, 54, 71, 78 threats by, 70, 72 Norwegian Consumer Council, 105–6 NotPetya malware, 71, 77, 89, 94 NSA: attribution in, 53–55 BULLRUN program, 167–68 credential stealing by, 45 cyberattack tools of, 165–67 on cybersecurity, 86 cyberweapons stolen from, 73 disclosing and fixing vulnerabilities, 162–67 encryption circumvented by, 171, 193 intelligence-gathering hacks by, 116, 118 missions of, 160–61, 172 mistrust of, 208 reorganization (2016) in, 173 and security standards, 167–70 splitting into three organizations, 172–73 supply-chain attacks by, 87 surveillance by, 65, 66–67, 190, 202 NSO Group, 65 Nye, Joseph, 157 Obama, Barack, 66, 69, 92, 117, 163, 180, 208 Ochoa, Higinio O.

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

82 A Short History of Vote Splitting "Because we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them." Milleron's remarks would have been no surprise to those who followed Nader's career closely. Not many voters did. Nader came to public attention in 1965 with the publication of a bestselling book, Unsafe at Any Speed. In it, he attacked the automobile industry for putting profits above customer safety. The title was intended literally. Nader told of a boy who had gored himself on a Cadillac tail fin and died. It was a parked car. Nader was soon testifying regularly before Congress. He became such a popular figure that, in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful George McGovern asked him to be his running mate.

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There have been 45 presidential elections since 1828. In at least five, the race went to the second most popular candidate because of a spoiler. That's over an II percent rate of catastrophic failure. Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner, it would be recognized for what it isa defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed . . , FOUR The Most Evil Man in America In the past few election cycles, the spoiler effect has taken on un- precedented strategic importance. It is best to begin by saying something of the profession responsible for that. Political consultants are an American invention. At least until recently, other nations with long democratic traditions did not have professional campaign runners.

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Looking Glass (Carroll), 153 Tilden, Samuel, 95 Tillotson, Mal)', 104 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 163 Todhunter, Isaac, 141 Touchstone, David, 15 Treen, David, 5, 8, 9,16 Truman, Harry S" 43, 44,180 Trump, Donald, /61 Turnipseed, Tom, 98--99,105 Tweed, William Marcy "Boss," 181, 182 Twenty.l1r<;tAmendment, 28 United Nations, [99,282 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 83 utilitarian voting, 251-58 Value and Capital (Hicks), 38 Van Bureo, Martin, 62, 63, 63 Van Newenhizen, Jill, 203-204, 207, 208, 210,242-43 Venice, 198-99,282 Ventura, Jesse, 127, 213 Vermont, 63 Vidal, Gore, 83 Vietnam War, 76, 81, 116, 188, 190 Virginia, 122-23,280,281 Vlascenko, Andrejs, 46 Voltaire, 86, 134 von Neumann, John, 31-33,41,42, 178 voter paradox, 244 voter registration forms, 112~13 voter turnout, 199, 266-67 VoteSwap2000,com, 85-86 voting, "above-the-line," 170: abstention from, 59--60, 90, 245--46; ballots in, 20, 47~48, 65, 79, 84, 90, 111-16, 114, 119,124-25,127,129,138,166,170, 211-12,216,220,221,245,246-52, 255,256-58,279,285,286,287,288; blank votes in, 245-46; buHet, 216: 337 Index voting (CO>ll.) computer simulations of, 236-42, 239, 266-67,288; counting of, 166,211-12. 220; cycles in, 144, \57---60, 158, 172-85,225-27.268,286,289; degrees of preference in, 159-60; electronic, 20, 77, 89, 90, 220-24, 245; eV'lluative, 248-49; fairness of, 57-58, write·in, 73; see also specijU:; poting systems 59,130,143--47, 163----6S, ISChSS, 190-92,197,205,216-17,267-69; honesty in, 48, 57-58, 144-47, 167,179,185,191-92,197,200, 212,216,235-36,238-45,251-52; indeterminacy of, 206-207, 210, 212; majorities in, 30, 49, 56,140--41,148, 157,158,163---65,166,182-83,218, 263,286,287; manipulation of, 144-47,181-85,216,224-29,235-45, 254-56,271-72,285; multiple votes in, 191-92,195-96,216-17; negative, 187, 190, 193; opinion polls and, 79, 90-91, 95, 96-99,102,103,123, 125-26,169,194-95,196,213-14, 215,216,218,243,246: paradoxes in, 30,38-40,41,143-44,156,158,169, 176-77, l80-85, 205-206, 214, 237, 244,267---69,270,286,291, protest, 84, 115-86, 89, 245-46; ranked·choice, 47-48,49,60. 140-48, 151-52, 164-71,183-85,197,206, 20S, 212, 221,224,228-29,234-35,251, 254-58,271-72,282,285,286,287; reform of, 3-22, 162-71, 261-78, 282-83,291. scores in, 246-52, 255, 256-58, splitting of, 20-22, 56, 59-91, 64,138-48,168-71,189-90,194. 207-208,213-15,254-56,268-69, 274-75,276,281-82,285,286,287, 288,289; strategic, 48,167,177-78, 184-85,195---96,198,205---206, 216-17,218,238-45,254-56,271-72, 275,287; straw, 216-17; symmetries of, 159,205-207,228; truncated, 212; two,way, lSI-52, 159,220, 221, 286; vote swapping in, 78-79, 85-86, 170; Wales, Jimmy, 221 Wallace, George, 98, 194 Ward, John Quincy Adams, 162 Ware, William Robert, 162-67 Washington, George, 71 Watt, James, 84 Wattenberg, Ben, 41 Wayne, John, 219, 223 Weaver, James, 70-71 Webb, Jim, 280 Weber, Robert]., 187, 190, 191-96, 212, 213-14,216,218,243,261 Welch, Mall, 88, 89 Wells, H, G., 165 Werner, James, 128 West, Darrell, 105 Westinghouse, George. 208 Westlund, Ben, 128 Whig Party, 60, 62, 95 "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Cycle?"

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

Relative to all previous history, people in developed countries are doing remarkably well. Women in more than fifty countries, and men in eleven, have life expectancies of eighty years or more.1 Modern cars may have their problems and their recalls, but they now always have seatbelts; with rare exception cars are no longer—as Ralph Nader opined 50 years ago—“unsafe at any speed.”2 Remarkably, as of February 2013, there had not been a single commercial airline fatality in the United States for four years.3 Not only did the planes themselves have a perfect record; so too did the pilots and the mechanics who keep them in the air. With such records for safety and product quality, the questions arise: Is it purely the market system that brought us this success?

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Chapter Eleven: The Resistance and Its Heroes 1. For 2013. World Bank, “Life Expectancy at Birth, Male (Years)” and “Life Expectancy at Birth, Female (Years),” accessed March 29, 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN/countries and http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN/countries. 2. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Grossman, 1965). 3. Jad Mouawad and Christopher Drew, “Airline Industry at Its Safest since the Dawn of the Jet Age,” New York Times, February 11, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html?

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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Mulligan, Thomas S. “Spiegel Found Not Guilty of Looting S & L.” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1994. Accessed May 1, 2015. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-12-13/news/mn-8437_1_thomas-spiegel. Nader, Ralph. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. New York: Grossman, 1965. Nash, Nathaniel C. “Savings Institution Milked by Its Chief, Regulators Say.” New York Times, November 1, 1989. National Association of Realtors. “Code of Ethics.” Accessed March 15, 2015. http://www.realtor.org/governance/governing.

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business by Bob Lutz

An Inconvenient Truth, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, flex fuel, Ford Model T, medical malpractice, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, scientific management, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, Toyota Production System, transfer pricing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, value engineering

Sure, some voiced concern and resentment, and best-selling books, like Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers and John Keats’s The Insolent Chariots, reflected a small but growing nucleus of concern over whether all this arrogant opulence and the ever-shorter fashion cycle were really of benefit to society. But these books were written by intellectual elitists . . . so who cared what they said? One incident that caused GM lasting harm was a 1965 book by a young lawyer and consumer advocate by the name of Ralph Nader. Unsafe at Any Speed accused the Corvair, different from other American cars with its rear-engine design, of being inherently unstable and accident-prone. Nader’s work gained huge notoriety and effectively shut down Corvair sales in the mid-1960s. Unaccustomed to being dented by a lone ideologue, GM hired investigators to delve into Nader’s personal life, seeking any salacious information that would silence him.

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socialism Spielman, Joe Stempel, Bob Sticht, Paul Stronach, Franz Subaru subprime mortgages Summers, Larry Sun Yat-sen suppliers SUVs Hummer used Suzuki Tesla Motors “Total Quality Excellence,” Toyota Camry Corolla environmentally responsible reputation of Matrix Prius RAV4 recalls by Sequoia Tundra trucks full-size pickup “turn-on” products UAW (United Automobile Workers) unions Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader) value Vauxhall Insignia selling of VLEs (vehicle line executives) VMA-133 Volkswagen Phaeton Von Holzhausen, Franz Wagoner, G. Richard “Rick,” at congressional hearings electric and hybrid vehicles and GM’s bankruptcy and Lutz’s note to media and resignation of Walkuski, Mark Wallace,Tom Washington Times Waste Makers, The (Packard) Weber, Frank Welburn, Ed Whitacre, Ed Who Killed the Electric Car?

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, first-price auction, German hyperinflation, Golden Gate Park, information asymmetry, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, means of production, price discrimination, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, statistical model, the scientific method, Unsafe at Any Speed

Virtually all economists agreed that if the price were allowed to rise freely, people would buy less gasoline. Many noneconomists believed otherwise. The economists were right: When price controls were lifted, the lines disappeared. The economist's faith in the power of incentives serves him well, and he trusts it as a guide in unfamiliar territory. In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book calling attention to various design elements that made cars more dangerous than necessary. The federal government soon responded with a wide range of automobile safety legislation, mandating the use of seat belts, padded dashboards, collapsible steering columns, dual braking systems, and penetration-resistant windshields.

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Bridgman, 83-85 Styrofoam, 144-145 Supermarkets, discount coupons, 161-162,165 Surrogate motherhood, 125 Swift, Jonathan, 153 T-shirts, 13, 17 Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, 166 Tariffs, 62 Taxes, 60-62 and cost-benefit analysis, 95-96 ex post facto, 151-152 who should pay, 142-143 Taxi prices, 166 Theft, cost-benefit analysis of, 97-98 Thomson, William, 58 Tipping, in restaurants, 19 Tipping busboys, 32-33 Tivoli Coffee Shop, ix Trash disposal, 144-145 Truman, Harry, 187 Unemployment statistics, 129-131 Unsafe at Any Speed, 3 Veil of ignorance, 57-58 Volunteer army, 65-66 Voting as a riddle, 11, 18 Voting procedures, 52-54 Weil, Andre', 18 Wheat prices, 164 Whiteman, Charles, 235 Will, George F., 126, 141 Winner's curse, 175, 179-180 Wonks, 44 Yakoboski, Paul, 233 Yeats, William Butler, 11

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

The complicated consequences of helmets that so vex professional sports is part of a much larger debate that has long preoccupied and divided engineers and ecologists. The federal government had begun to assert its oversight over the economy and the environment during the Progressive Era, and in the 1960s, that oversight expanded significantly, most noticeably onto the highways. The catalyst was the publication in 1965 of Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader. Nader had worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the Department of Labor, and his book exposed how the auto manufacturing industry had knowingly built dangerous features into their cars, such as chrome on the dashboard that reflected sun into drivers’ eyes and hood ornaments that were unnecessarily dangerous to pedestrians.

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Nader might have remained an obscure activist and author of an unread book had General Motors not embarked on a campaign to challenge his credibility, hiring a private investigator to dig into his background. The result was a lot of publicity for Nader and his book. GM’s president later apologized to Nader. Unsafe at Any Speed triggered several congressional hearings and was instrumental in the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which for the first time gave the federal government authority to set standards for automobile and highway safety. Among the first standards passed were rules requiring seat belts for all occupants, energy-absorbing steering columns, a padded instrument panel, and dual braking systems.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

Marx (1976: 254). At the time of writing this is all too real. For example, until they faced strong international competition that forced them to change, the American auto industry was criticized for “planned obsolescence”. The poor quality of some American cars was finally exposed by books like Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965). Marx (1976: 358). Read any good history of trade union organizing for many examples. Many of the welfare state gains and gains of trade unions in the 1950s and 1960s were later rolled back. For an interesting discussion of temporality and capitalism see Postone (1996). Marx (1976: Part V).

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Mull, D. and Kirkhorn, S. (2005) “Child Labor in Ghana Cocoa Production”, Public Health Report Vol. 120, No. 6 [online] <www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ anticlererder.fcgi?artid=1497785>. Murray, B. (2001) “Fast-food culture serves up super-size Americans” Monitor On Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 11, December [online] <www.apa.org/monitor/ dec01/fastfood.html>. Nader, R. (1965) Unsafe at Any Speed, New York: Grossman. Nature (2006) “Climate change reducing the productivity of phytoplankton”, November 7. Ndiaye, P. A. (2007) Nylon and Bombs: Dupont and the March of Modern America, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press. Nestle, M. (2002) Food Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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 achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower. “Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism. That is what his early stuff was, such as Unsafe at Any Speed,” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me:The big books they put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, “We see how you do this. You gather material, you get people who are articulate, you hone how you present this.”

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The hollowing out of communities and the movement of jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point, you do not have a moral compass. The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy, and the best of the liberal class, was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the collapse of Bear Sterns, however, there is still no adequate financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks, from Citibank to Goldman Sachs, are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to engage once again in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second.

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

Pertschuk was sympathetic—but smugly lectured this strange young man why the sort of reforms he had in mind were politically impossible. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile came out in November 1965. The New York Times acknowledged it in a short item on page 68. Eight months later, Times Book Review included it last in a wrap-up of eight other new automotive books that better reflected how Americans thought of their cars—titles like The Gallery of the American Automobile and The Motor Car Lover’s Companion Unsafe at Any Speed sold respectably, and the modest, quiet community of auto safety advocates welcomed Nader into their ranks.

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Eloquently, he proved that GM’s engineers knew the Corvair was unsafe but had no institutional power to make changes; documented how cost and styling concerns trumped safety in automotive design; explained how a bought-and-paid-for automotive press reported on the Corvair’s handling irregularities as a charming sports-car quirk; and how Detroit sold necessary safety features as costly options, and GM buried the life-and-death fact information that the Corvair’s rear tires should be inflated at approximately twice the pressure as the front ones (if owners didn’t want the car to flip over) deep inside the owner’s manual, like instructions on how to open the trunk. He scourged industry safety propaganda that focused obsessively on driver error—“It’s the nut behind the wheel” was a slogan of the industry-captured National Safety Council—even though most injuries, Nader rivetingly explained, were caused by what Unsafe at Any Speed called the “second collision”: knobs that protruded like daggers, steering wheels that shot forward like projectiles, dashboard edges so sharp they might as well be shards of glass. Government was complicit. The President’s Committee for Traffic Safety, Nader said, was an agency staffed by civil servants but funded by the auto and insurance industries.

…

He then complained that Nader was “using this forum to sell his book.” Robert F. Kennedy replied that “the person who sold the most books today for Mr. Nader was the Senator from Nebraska.” * * * THE BUMPTIOUS GENTLEMAN FROM NEBRASKA was not, it soon arrived, Ralph Nader’s only harasser. While he was working on Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader had complained to friends that strange men were following him. That an attractive woman approached him, seeking his company. That, the night before his congressional testimony, at the $80-a-month boardinghouse where he rented a room, he got several harassing phone calls. Ralph Nader had always been an odd duck.

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

Nader became America’s most famous anticorporate crusader thanks to the bumbling way that General Motors, America’s biggest car company, tried to silence him. Nader had first written about automobile safety in a student paper at Harvard Law School, which he expanded into a book after graduation. Published by a startup publisher in 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed was a wonky policy book filled with data about what Nader called the “designed-in dangers” of American cars. The book was an exhaustive muckraking critique of one of the nation’s iconic commercial products. It showed that carmakers spent millions of dollars on comfort and styling but did little to improve car safety, despite nearly 40,000 fatalities and 1.5 million injuries per year.

…

On Nader, see Evan Osborne, The Rise of the Anti-Corporate Movement: Corporations and the People Who Hate Them (2007), 59; “The U.S.’s Toughest Customer,” Time, December 12, 1969, 89; Charles McCarry, “A Hectic, Happy, Sleepless, Stormy, Rumpled, Relentless Week on the Road with Ralph Nader,” Life, January 21, 1972, 45; Jack Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader, 1965–1971,” PopHistoryDig.com, March 31, 2013, available at http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=ralph-nader-time-magazine; Barbara Hinkson Craig, Courting Change (2004), 1–32. See Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1966). 11. Justin Martin, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (2002), 57. 12. See Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader”; “The U.S.’s Toughest Customer,” Time, December 12, 1969, 89. 13. Charles McCarry, Citizen Nader (1972), 29; Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader” (quoting the Washington Post); McCarry, “Relentless Week,” 91; “Nader’s Zenith,” Washington Post, August 30, 1966, A18. 14.

…

., 305 United Negro College Fund, 300 United States: agriculture of, 40, 106, 118, 198 budget of, 213 citizenship of, 44, 53–54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65, 74, 97–103, 109–10, 115, 125, 128, 135–36, 254, 257–58, 265–67, 309, 368, 392 colonial period of, 3–19, 20, 24–25, 26, 28, 76, 270, 399–400 concentration of wealth in, 4, 40, 145, 196–97, 212–16, 285 corruption in, 36, 90–91, 103–4, 123, 129, 142, 149–50, 165, 173, 176, 196–97, 197, 202–8, 212 215–17, 226–27, 236, 286, 309, 314, 315–16, 320–23, 329, 361 currency of, 38 democratic system of, 5, 14, 15, 17, 18–19, 21–22, 31, 90–92, 101, 192, 212, 222, 232, 248, 249, 251, 252–55, 263, 293–94, 319, 320, 337, 356, 365–68, 374–75, 389–95 economy of, 25, 26, 38–39, 44, 69, 90, 93, 97–103, 117–18, 122, 140–41, 154, 163, 198, 233, 235, 256, 285, 308, 344, 359–60 federal government of, 177, 218, 240 immigration to, 153–54, 199, 232, 238, 239–40 industrialization of, 106, 117–18, 140–41, 213–14, 247 living standards in, 140 mass media in, 326–27, 360 national debt of, 25, 38–39, 70 national enterprises of, 35–36 northern states of, 40, 69, 90 partisan politics in, 94, 148, 208, 217–18, 302–4, 308–9, 326–28, 329 polarization in, 326–27 southern states of, 123–28, 131, 158, 159, 217–18, 256–75, 284, 327 territories of, 261 two-party system of, 36, 39, 40 unemployment rate in, 118, 344 United States Brewers Association, 223–26, 402 United States Court of Claims, 149–50 United States Reports, 149–53, 157, 231 United States v. Carolene Products Co., 231, 256, 264, 269, 276–77, 278 United States v. Cruikshank, 129 United States v. Reese, 129 United States v. United States Brewers Association, 223–26, 402 University of California v. Bakke, 277, 278 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 285–86 unwritten rights, 182 US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 137, 153–54 US District Court of New York, 263 U.S. Steel, xxi, 302, 304, 374 Utah, 261 Valentine, Lewis J., 293 Valentine v. Chrestensen, 292–93, 294, 295, 297, 402 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 121, 161, 181 Van Devanter, Willis, 251, 252 Verizon, 305 Vermont, 124, 375 Verne, Jules, 139 vetoes, 93 video-on-demand documentaries, 351–52 Vietnam War, 349 Virginia, 103–4, 260–62, 275, 284, 289, 290–300, 318 Virginia, University of, Law School of, 393 Virginia Company of London, 5–19, 12, 15, 26, 31, 63, 86, 90, 281, 391, 399 Virginia Massacre (1622), 18 Virginia Pharmacy Board v.

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

In total, the auto industry built some 4,131,000 engines (including 450,000 aircraft engines and 170,000 marine engines), 5.9 million guns, and 27,000 aircraft for the war effort—crushing the Axis against the anvil of U.S. industrial might and establishing the military prerequisites for a new Pax Americana during the latter half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the market for automobiles roared and it fueled the astounding growth of America’s suburbs. But in 1965, Ralph Nader put the brakes on this unfettered expansion when he published the book Unsafe at Any Speed, which caused a sensation in its treatment of the dangers of modern cars. This as much as anything symbolized the beginning of an arms race between auto producers and regulators—in safety, efficiency, emissions, and quality—that continues to this day. Fixing the problems outlined in Nader’s book would not be easy.

…

., 231 Tzero (AC Propulsion EV), 147 Uber (car service), 272 Uchiyamada, Takeshi, 82–83 United Kingdom: auto production in, 23 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 206 United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (Kyoto, 1997), 83–84 United States auto industry-government relationship in, 37, 170 bailout/subsidies for auto industry in, 159–61, 166–84, 238, 239–40 bank bail out in, 158 Bush administration and, 109–11 and California’s prelude to the Great Race, 34 CARB relations with, 37–39, 73–74, 75, 142, 152, 153 and “cash for clunkers” program, 209 and characteristics needed to win Great Race, 27–28 Chinese relations with, 2, 16, 19, 20, 212, 237 Clinton administration and, 81–82 commercialization of EVs in, 257 competition and, 41, 47–49, 78, 108, 150–51, 170, 212, 237 economy of, 153, 157–61, 165, 166–69, 178, 254 environmental issues in, 56, 64–65, 161, 172 EV debate in, 238–39 and EV sales, 184 and EV tax subsidies, 179–81 fears of, 274 and foreign technology, 215 future mission of, 254 future of auto industry in, 274 and gasoline price, 153 and history of global auto industry, 23 image of, 212 industrial policy in, 7–9, 102–3 and Japanese ban on auto imports, 52, 103 Japanese exports to, 41, 55, 59, 81 Japanese relations with, 41, 44, 47–49, 78, 108, 170 Japan’s imports from, 42–43 labor in, 59 leadership in, 254 lobbying by auto industry in, 38, 161, 177, 262 Nissan sales/exports to, 138, 228 and Obama’s support for auto industry, 170, 172 as Pacific superpower, 44 politics and, 153, 161, 173–76, 274 post-World War II years in, 7, 19, 23 prelude to the Great Race in, 16, 20, 21, 23, 27–28 resurgence of, 82 role in Great Race of, 237 success of, 238 and technology in the future, 274 and Tillemann’s research about auto industry, 5 Toyota and, 81–85, 150–51 and winner of Great Race, 252, 254 See also specific person, agency, manufacturer, or topic Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 23 UQM Technologies, 78 USSR. See Russia/USSR Vantage Point Venture Partners, 221 “Vehicle to Home” (V2H) system, Nissan’s, 196, 258 venture capitalists. See investors, equity; specific investor Vermont: GM lawsuit against, 142 Volt (Chevrolet), 20, 150, 161–63, 164–65, 166, 180, 215, 234–35, 239, 244, 245, 260, 261 Volvo, 241, 250, 271 Wada, Kenichiro, 129, 134 Wagoner, Rick, 160, 166 Wall Street Journal, 174, 241 Wan Gang at Audi, 16, 95, 96, 99–101 and China’s prelude to the Great Race, 15–16, 17, 18 EVs and, 16, 18, 112–13, 203, 204, 207, 224, 235, 249, 250, 251 and fuel cell technology, 115, 207 influence of, 112–13 “leapfrogging” plan of, 103, 210, 211 as minister of science and technology, 203, 204 motivation of, 102 Ouyang’s dispute with, 224 personal and professional background of, 16, 95–96, 98–101, 113 return to China of, 102–3, 113 as sea turtle, 112–13 and Shanghai World Expo (2010), 15–16, 17, 18 Wang Chuanfu, 229–30, 231 Wang Daheng, 113 Wang Dazhong, 227 Wang Ganchang, 113 Wanxiang Group, 178 Wen Jiabao, 199 Who Killed the Electric Car?

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

The Rise of Safetyism In the twentieth century, the word “safety” generally meant physical safety. A great triumph of the late part of that century was that the United States became physically safer for children. As a result of class action lawsuits, efforts by investigative journalists and consumer advocates (such as Ralph Nader and his exposé of the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed), and common sense, dangerous products and practices became less prevalent. Between 1978 and 1985, all fifty states passed laws making the use of car seats mandatory for children. Homes and day care centers were childproofed;choking hazards and sharp objects were removed. As a result, death rates for children have plummeted.13 This is, of course, a very good thing, although in some other ways, the focus on physical safety may have gone too far.

…

., 74 Sacks, Jonathan, 53, 64 safety, 6–7, 9, 14, 24–25, 29–30, 96, 148 and actual versus imagined risk, 167–68 crime and, 167, 186, 238, 266 improvements in child safety, 168–69 meaning of, and concept creep, 24–25, 27, 246–47, 259 threats and, 138–40, 260–61 safetyism, 29–30, 85, 104, 121, 125, 164, 165, 194, 203, 246–47 on campus, 12, 24–26, 96–97, 125, 145–46, 148, 195–212, 268 cognitive distortions and, 177–78 dangers of, 168–71 exclusion and, 246–47 iGen and, 30–31, 156, 158, 161 overprotective parenting, 126, 148, 164, 165, 167–72 rise of, 24–26, 121 safe spaces, 26–31, 96, 145, 210, 259 school and, 236 trigger warnings, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 Salem witch hunts, 99–100 San Bernardino attack, 12 Sanders, Bernie, 213 Savio, Mario, 84 schemas, 36–38, 57, 150, 177 Schill, Michael, 92 school (K–12), 59, 185–89, 194 college admissions and, 189–91, 194, 235, 236, 257–58, 268 debate teaching in, 248 discussions on coursework in, 248 first-grade readiness checklists, 186–87, 238 grades in, 190 homework, 185–86, 245 ideas for elementary schools, 245–47 ideas for middle schools and high schools, 247–49 identity politics and, 244 influencing policies at, 245–49 kindergarten, 185, 187–88 phones at, 247 recess at, 245–47 safetyism and, 236 year of service or work between high school and college, 250–51, 257 Schulz, Kathryn, 244 “see something, say something,” 203–4 Seligman, Martin, 158 September 11, 2001, attacks, 200, 203 Service Year Alliance, 251 sexism, 6, 44, 71 sexual misconduct and assault, 27 law education and, 205 #MeToo Movement and, 12, 27 Shakespeare, William, 34 Shapiro, Ben, 83 Sheskin, Mark, 218 shoulds, 277 Shuchman, Daniel, 238 Shulevitz, Judith, 26–28 Silverglate, Harvey, 74 Simmons, Ruth, 259 Singal, Jesse, 106 Skenazy, Lenore, 163–65, 169, 171, 172, 177, 185, 211, 238 sleep, 250 smartphones, see phones Smith College, 72 snowballs, and danger, 236 social class: parenting and, 173–76, 179 universities and, 174, 176 social justice, 111, 125, 126, 213–32 and correlation as causation, 227–29, 231–32 definition and use of term, 217, 220–21, 223 equal-outcomes, 223–27, 230, 231 major news stories related to, 214–16 proportional-procedural, 220–23, 231 social media, 5, 10, 30, 130, 133, 139, 145, 194, 203, 259 call-out culture and, 71–73 curation and comparisons in, 154–55, 161 Facebook, 49, 55, 105, 107, 130, 146–47, 207, 265 impact on girls, 154–56 and limiting device time, 249–50 mental health and, 146–47, 152–56, 159–61, 265 positive trends in, 265–66 professors and, 137, 141, 201 Twitter, 81, 130, 135–37, 147, 265 virtue signaling and, 73 Socrates, 49, 50 Solomon, Andrew, 143 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, ix, 243 Soviet Union, 130, 243 Spellman, Mary, 54–55, 57, 71, 102–3, 105–6, 134 Spencer, Richard, 139 Spock, Benjamin, 174 sports, 152, 189, 225–26 Title IX and, 224–25 spurious correlations, 152, 228 Stalin, Joseph, 243 Stanger, Allison, 87–88, 103, 127, 140 Starmans, Christina, 218 statues, Greco-Roman, 136–37 “sticks and stones” saying, 210 Stoicism, 95–96, 98 Stone, Geoffrey, 255, 279 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 84 Sue, Derald Wing, 40–42 suicide, 5, 24, 30, 143–44, 152 academic competition and, 190 rates of, 150–51, 160, 183, 190 sharing thoughts of, 195–96 Suk Gersen, Jeannie, 205 summer camps, 240 Supreme Court, 61 Tajfel, Henri, 57–58, 76 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 22–23, 28, 164, 170 Tannen, Deborah, 154 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 135–36 Tea Party, 129 telos, 253–55 Tenbrink, Tyler, 139 terrorism, 11–12, 204 September 11, 2001, attacks, 200, 203 Tetlock, Phil, 229 Texas State University, 63–64, 67 Theodoric, 34 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 213 Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Duke), 248–49 threats, 138–40, 260–61 Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Silverglate), 74 Thucydides, 108–9 Title IX, 206–8, 223–25 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 191, 195 tolerance, 65–66 transgenderism, 104–5, 205–6 transracialism, 104 trauma, 25–26, 28–29, 31–32, 33 PTSD, 25, 28–29 Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (Leahy, Holland, and McGinn), 37 tribalism, 57–59, 76, 130, 131, 153, 267 see also groups trigger warnings, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 Trump, Donald, 12, 82–83, 87, 96, 112, 114, 127, 135, 139, 140 Charlottesville and, 91, 94 supporters of, 75–76, 81, 83 truth, 253–55, 268 Tucker Carlson Tonight, 118, 133, 134 Turning Point USA (TPUSA), 138 Tuvel, Rebecca, 104–7, 121, 127 Twenge, Jean, 30–31, 146–49, 152–54, 159, 160, 164, 185 Twitter, 81, 130, 135–37, 147, 265 Tyler, Tom, 219–20 Tyranny of the Majority, The (Guinier), 222 UCLA, 92 Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Lareau), 173–75 unfair comparisons, 278 universities, 5, 8, 10, 11, 59, 125–26, 214 admissions to, 189–91, 194, 235, 236, 257–58, 268 amenities at, 199, 211 bureaucracy at, 125, 126, 192, 194, 195–212 canon wars at, 7 Chicago Statement and, 255–56, 268, 279–81 consumerist mentality at, 198–200, 211 corporatization of, 197–98, 211 cross-partisan events at, 261 distorted thinking modeled by administrators at, 200–203 diversity among professors in, 108–13, 121, 258 diversity among students in, 43, 258, 260 expansion of, 197–98 freedom of inquiry at, 255–57 free speech at, 5–6, 31, 65, 84, 200–203 heckler’s veto and, 257 iGen and, 31, 145, 148, 156–59, 174–75, 185 intellectual virtues and, 258 intimidation and violence at, 81–98 mental health and, 156–59 as multiversities, 197, 253 political orientation and, 110–13, 121, 126–27, 132–38, 141, 199, 258 preparation for life following, 8–9 productive disagreement in, 258–60 regulations at, 192, 200–203, 211–12 and responding to pressure campaigns and outrage, 256–57 retraction demands at, 103–4, 107–8, 121 safe spaces and, 26–31, 96, 145, 210, 259 safetyism at, 12, 24–26, 96–97, 125, 145–46, 148, 195–212, 268; see also safetyism school spirit at, 260 social class and, 174, 176 speakers at, 6, 27, 47–51, 87, 199 suggestions for, 253–62 trigger warnings and, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 trust between professors and students at, 205–6, 212 truth and, 253–55, 268 wisdom and, 253–62 University of California, 197 Berkeley, 12, 81–87, 90, 94, 120 Los Angeles, 92 University of Central Florida, 207 University of Chicago, 119, 251, 253, 268 Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression, 255–56, 268, 279–81 University of Cincinnati, 203 University of Connecticut, 202 University of Iowa, 136–37 University of Michigan, 184, 207 University of Missouri, 11 University of Northern Colorado, 205–6 University of Oregon, 92 University of Pennsylvania, 107, 108 University of Virginia, 12, 188, 223–27 University of West Alabama, 202 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 24 us versus them; good people versus evil, 3–4, 14, 53–77, 85, 90, 92, 119–20, 132, 177, 206, 243–44, 247, 259–60 see also groups vaccination, 21 Valenti, Jessica, 26–27 Venker, Suzanne, 49 victimhood culture, 209–10 victimization, 41–42, 46, 57, 126 viewpoint diversity, 11, 109, 112–13, 121, 248, 258 vindictive protectiveness, 10, 235 violence, 81–98 definition of, 85–86 words as, 84–86, 89, 94–98, 145, 158 Virginia Rowing Association, 223 virtue signaling, 73 vulnerability, culture of, 209, 210 see also fragility Wall Street Journal, 222 Walsh, Adam, 165–66 Walsh, John, 166 Ward, Douglas Turner, 114 War on Cops, The (Mac Donald), 88 Washington Post, 93, 199 Wax, Amy, 107–8, 121, 126 Weinstein, Bret, 114–19, 127, 133 “what if” questions, 278 Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (Bruni), 190 white genocide, 135, 136 white nationalists and white supremacists, 12, 86, 87, 89–91, 94, 135, 136, 139, 140, 266 Will, George, 48 William & Mary, 92 Williams College, 49–50 Wilson, E.

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

Carruthers, “Automobile Accidents to Children,” Safety Engineering 49 (May 1925), 189–193 (189); “The Murderous Motor,” New Republic 47 (July 7, 1926), 189–190 (189); “The War after the War” (editorial), Detroit Free Press, August 23, 1927, 6; “The Motor More Deadly Than War,” Literary Digest 94 (August 27, 1927), 12. Notes to Chapter 1 269 14. For a brief review of the historical scholarship on auto safety in America, see introduction. Ralph Nader and Joel W. Eastman have concentrated attention on vehicle design, extending a critique of safety in the 1960s back to the 1920s; see Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965); Eastman, Styling vs. Safety: The American Automobile Industry and the Development of Automotive Safety, 1900–1966 (University Press of America, 1984). Finding little concern for safe vehicle design in the the 1920s, they concluded that safety was not an important issue.

…

Clark), “The White Line Isn’t Enough,” Saturday Evening Post 210 (March 26, 1938), 12–13, 32, 37, 39, 41 (12). 42. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, 719. 43. In this development, Ralph Nader played the role of a latter-day J. C. Furnas, with greater long-term success. See Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965). 44. For a study of MADD, including a brief history of its origins, see Craig Reinarman, “The Social Construction of an Alcohol Problem: The Case of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Social Control in the 1980s,” Theory and Society 17 (Jan. 1988), 91–120.

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

MOTOR VEHICLE SALES BY ORIGIN 1931 – 2011 They weren’t even very good at doing what they regarded as their core business, devoting far too little attention to the bread and butter of the industry, reliability and safety. A striking number of these “ocean liners of the road” ran into technological icebergs as they cruised down Eisenhower’s highways and left their passengers stranded by the side of the road. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) became a bestseller because it diagnosed a national catastrophe. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than 2.5 million Americans were killed in car accidents, and several millions injured. Detroit also devoted far too little attention to fuel efficiency: even after the first oil shock of 1973–74, it continued to produce giant gas-guzzlers, on the assumption that high fuel prices were simply a passing peculiarity, and the world would soon return to the Elysian days of the 1950s.

…

See trade unions Union Station (Chicago), 96 Union Station (Washington, D.C.), 96 United Auto Workers (UAW), 261, 289 United States Bicentennial, 299 United States Rubber Company, 212 United States v. E. C. Knight Company, 159 United Steelworkers (USW), 314–16 University of Chicago, 126 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 313 urbanization, 58, 168, 172, 175–76, 195–96, 427 U.S. Steel, 12, 101, 144, 145 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 125, 139, 167, 170–71 Vanderbilt, George, 170–71 Van Hise, Charles, 241 Varian Associates, 352 Varney, Walter, 200 Varney Airlines, 200 Veblen, Thorstein, 169–70 venture capital, 352–53, 355 Victorian era, 94–95, 311 Vietnam War, 267, 300, 304, 305 Virginia Company, 8, 134 Visa International, 324 Volcker, Paul, 324–25, 329, 343 Volkswagen Beetle, 318 Volta, Alessandro, 104 von Stade, Francis Skiddy, 364 voter participation rate, 157–58, 158 wages, 174, 175, 301–2, 304, 416.

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

Back then, fuel was cheap and American car designers indulged their imaginations, creating monster vehicles with grilles that looked like shark’s teeth and tailfins that resembled rockets. In the subsequent decades, the drawbacks of our enthusiasm for cars began to be revealed. In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed, a book that detailed the poor safety records of many cars, which at the time lacked seat belts, airbags and other features later regarded as standard. In 1967, the British introduced a legal limit for drivers’ alcohol consumption; US states followed suit in the late 1970s. These safety measures did reduce road fatalities, which peaked in absolute terms in the US at 55,000 per year in the late 1960s; in terms of fatalities per mile travelled, the rate has halved since that period.43 Big changes also came in the 1970s when the surge in oil prices that followed the Yom Kippur War (between Arab nations and Israel) encouraged fuel-efficient cars.

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“Madeira, sugar and the conquest of nature in the ‘first’ sixteenth century: Part 1: from ‘island of timber’ to sugar revolution, 1420–1506”, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 32, no. 4, 2009 Morris, Edmund Theodore Rex, HarperCollins, 2002 Morris, Ian War: What Is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots, Profile Books, 2015 Nader, Ralph Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, Pocket, 1965 Nagarajan, K.V. “The Code of Hammurabi: an economic interpretation”, International Journal of Business and Social Science, May 2011 Nairn, Alasdair Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond, John Wiley & Sons, 2002 Neal, Larry, and Williamson, Jeffrey G.

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

An exposé of the dangers of synthetic pesticides, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, had become a number-one bestseller for months and introduced the idea of “the environment” to millions of Americans, which led directly to the creation of the EPA. There was young Ralph Nader, the tenacious lawyer-investigator-activist out of Harvard Law School, whose own damning exposé of corporate irresponsibility, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, became a bestseller in 1966 and by the end of the year inspired a new federal regulatory bureaucracy to improve car safety. As the 1970s began, Nader was an immensely effective antibusiness celebrity expanding his purview and appeared on the cover of Time for a story about “The Consumer Revolt.”

…

So with ERA ratification stopped in its tracks, the freshly mobilized cultural right now turned its attention to trying to recriminalize abortion. But those kinds of backlash by the religious and the provincials weren’t directly doing besieged corporate America and the serious right, the economic right, any good at all. Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed—and then in the fall of 1970, denouncing big business more existentially, Reich’s Greening of America. It appeared with every possible mainstream blue-chip imprimatur: Yale law professor, prestigious major publisher, Times bestseller list for nine months—and a third of the book filled almost an entire issue of The New Yorker, so that tens of thousands of members of the business classes could have a savage countercultural attack on their oppressive and doomed capitalist system delivered directly to their doorsteps.

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

People took U.S. economic growth for granted, and they wanted higher standards, better quality, and greater transparency from industry. More than any other single person, Ralph Nader put middle-class consumer activism on the political map. A public figure of no small ego, Nader knew how to work the press, the public, and politicians. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, captured public attention with the charge that America’s Big Three carmakers were responsible for many automobile accidents because they were marketing cars that were mechanically and technically unsafe. Nader’s network ranged widely. His Center for the Study of Responsive Law, whose staff proudly called themselves “Nader’s Raiders,” grew from just five people in 1967 to two hundred in 1971.

…

AUGUST 1965—Voting Rights Act is pushed through Congress by President Johnson, on the momentum of massive grassroots civil rights demonstrations. The act removes legal obstacles to the right to vote for African Americans, especially in southern states. 1965—Consumer advocate Ralph Nader publishes his searing attack on U.S. auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, charging automakers with marketing defective cars, and giving consumer activism new political leverage. The burgeoning consumer movement presses Congress and the White House to create new watchdog agencies and standards for truth in packaging and truth in lending. NOVEMBER 1967—Pat O’Neill, at nineteen, starts a thirty-five-year career with United Airlines as a jet airline mechanic, working the overnight “graveyard shift” at Chicago’s O’Hare field.

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

Finally, late in 2019, the NHTSA announced that it would be updating its five-star rating system to “consider new technologies tied to the safety of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users such as cyclists.”43 Exactly what is in the new rule will not be known until it is released, but according to the NHTSA news release, it seems that the agency will limit its ratings to whether or not cars include partially automated features like automatic emergency braking or automatic pedestrian detection. The NHTSA will likely stop short of evaluating how different body designs and different vehicle styles affect pedestrian safety. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, after Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, these kinds of improvements—passive safety features, features that protect someone from devastating injury even in the event of a crash—were added to the interior of cars. Additions like airbags, seat belts, and padded dashboards all help absorb the impact of the blow when someone seated inside a car is in a crash.

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

Dodd-Frank mandated the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2011 in order to “make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans.” Elizabeth Warren had conceived of this idea in 2007, before the crisis. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, she wrote an article titled “Unsafe at Any Rate,” a reference to Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed. Warren argued for a government consumer-financial-protection agency akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission created under President Nixon in 1972. To make her point, she likened credit cards and mortgages to toasters and microwaves: It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house.

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

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

—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and co-editor of Boing Boing “Many algorithms are slaves to the inequalities of power and prejudice. If you don’t want these algorithms to become your masters, read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil to deconstruct the latest growing tyranny of an arrogant establishment.” —Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe at Any Speed “Next time you hear someone gushing uncritically about the wonders of Big Data, show them Weapons of Math Destruction. It’ll be salutary.” —Felix Salmon, Fusion “From getting a job to finding a spouse, predictive algorithms are silently shaping and controlling our destinies. Cathy O’Neil takes us on a journey of outrage and wonder, with prose that makes you feel like it’s just a conversation.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

“It is now possible to drive across the face of the nation without feeling you’ve been anywhere or that you’ve done anything,” he wrote. But his claim that Americans had finally fallen out of love with the automobile turned out to be incorrect. Car sales, and the economy, rebounded later in the year. The anti-car books in the 1960s, most famously Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), focused on safety problems, and the industry’s failure to address them. Rather than calling for the end of the car, though, these books (with titles including Highway Homicide and Licensed to Kill) took for granted the central place of the automobile in modern life and demanded action to make it safer.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

“Huh?” I replied. (I wasn’t a very smooth talker.) Was that even a field? Brian told me MIT had been studying traffic and maybe that’d suit me. I did have an interest in traffic safety after my friend’s brakes failed on his ’55 Chevy and we crashed into a tollbooth. I had read Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. So I investigated graduate programs in the study of traffic and transportation and discovered them hidden away in the departments of civil engineering. I applied to a few schools and was accepted by MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. The choice wasn’t especially difficult: Penn offered me a full fellowship, plus a stipend of $75 a week.

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

A young management consultant, Peter Drucker, doubted that a company could forecast its ability to meet such obligations decades into the future.6 In the 1950s and early 1960s, the immense profitability of GM and favorable economics supported the schemes. In the late 1960s, GM's profitability declined. With car ownership having reached very high levels, the market was saturated. In 1965, Ralph Nader's bestselling Unsafe at Any Speed drew unwelcome attention to the auto industry's safety issues, mechanical defects, and quality problems, placing additional pressure on earnings. Then came the oil shocks of the 1970s and an increased demand for compact, fuel-efficient vehicles, which US car makers had shunned in favor of ever larger, more powerful dream machines.

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

The auto industry, once a magnet for the boldest designers and most expert technologists, was forced to grow up and face the consequences of a world where cars were no longer a novelty. Cars and highways had become a practical tool of everyday life. Consumer advocate Ralph Nadar’s instant 1965 classic book Unsafe at Any Speed exposed the shoddy engineering practices at the big auto companies, meticulously detailing the safety problems of the Chevy Corvair and the auto industry’s overemphasis on styling and profit margins over driver safety. The book was a best seller, and it motivated the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the passage of seat-belt laws in 49 states (the sole holdout being New Hampshire).

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

Is he a crazy driver?’” Influential research done in the 1960s by Detroit doctor Clair Straith and engineer Hugh DeHaven shifted the focus by pointing out that vehicle reengineering—softening rigid dashboards, eliminating sharp buttons, and adding restraining belts—would save lives. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), the consumer rights movement more generally, and what one historian calls “the smoldering dissatisfaction with Detroit’s marketing and design policies,” including rampant dealer fraud, “banded into a ‘perfect storm’ of regulatory reform in the early 1960s.”22 Americans thereafter would come to rely on car engineers to keep them safe; they expected scientists to make it, as crazy as it sounds, “safe to crash.”

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

Nelson and the cause of patent reform entered the 1970s with a new ally at their side: the national consumer rights movement. The face of this movement was a young lawyer named Ralph Nader, famous for challenging the automobile industry with the public safety argument described in his 1965 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed.31 The industry’s recent success in loosening the Kennedy patent policy at HEW, meanwhile, was a limited one. The Nixon administration adopted a relatively hard line on antitrust similar to its Democratic predecessors. In 1970, a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department announced a “watch list” of nine patent and licensing practices that would be prosecuted as anticompetitive restraints of trade.

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

See, for example, Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American 105 Inger 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 106 L. Sto l e Women (New York: Doubleday, 1994), first published by Crown Publishers in 1991; Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Doubleday, 1994), first published by William Morrow in 1991. See, for example, Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1965); Ralph Nader, ed., The Consumer and Corporate Accountability (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). For an excellent discussion of the rise of commercial mass media, see Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

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

As for Porter’s written work, the once feisty and fearless creator of the personal finance genre was now putting her name on fuddy-duddy articles about budgeting secrets, and was more than once caught publishing corporate press releases under her own name. Her practical money management tips were no longer unique. Moreover, the nature of what we wanted from a public personal finance guru was changing, too. The consumer movement, which burst into prominence with Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, his 1965 exposé of the automobile industry, began to shove personal finance in a new direction, one that questioned the powers that be more than Porter had done in years. There was an irony here. Porter’s ever-increasing wealth and rapaciousness ultimately left her cut off, unable to connect with the concerns of all too many of us, a pattern we would see repeat with other personal finance gurus over the years.

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

He finished twenty-sixth out of twelve hundred riders. 12 Blood Money Samya Stumo came from a family that had an unusually good grasp of how power is wielded in Washington. Her mother, Nadia Milleron, is the niece of Ralph Nader, the lawyer, former Green Party presidential candidate, and famed consumer crusader. His bestselling 1965 exposé of the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, led to seat-belt laws. The book had enraged General Motors and made the Chevrolet Corvair—the car whose steering wheel tended to impale its driver in crashes—infamous. Nader is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the great number of consumer-focused regulatory agencies that emerged in the early 1970s—among them the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

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

You go fast into a corner (I use the term “fast” in a purely subjective way), lift off the throttle to get a little forward weight transfer while simultaneously jerking the steering wheel, and the rear steps out. Now you’re steering into the slide and feeling like an action hero at twenty miles per hour. The quirky handling that results when you combine a rear-mounted engine with a swing axle is what led Ralph Nader to famously proclaim the Corvair “unsafe at any speed.” What he didn’t mention is that such a car is also “fun at every speed.” My sweetest teenage memories are of driving up to the posh Claremont Resort, whose white tower shines resplendent over Berkeley, and honing my skills in a sloppy slalom through the parking lot amidst the Jaguars and Mercedes.

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

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

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had appeared in 1962 and become a New York Times best seller, setting off public interest that would lead to the environmental movement. Ralph Nader had written his first attack on the auto industry in the Nation, and two years later would found the consumer advocate movement with Unsafe at Any Speed. The cultural landscape of the Sixties was already taking shape in 1963. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—all theme songs for what we think of as the Sixties—had been released six months before Kennedy died. In November 1963, the Beatles had played for the queen, were the hottest group in England, and were planning their first U.S. tour.

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

The symptoms of the illness were a heightened sensitivity and an abandonment of normal behaviour among otherwise happygo-lucky businesspeople; in other words, a terror in the face of the damage that consumer activists could do to the food industry.136 Plenty of manufacturers were suffering from this malaise. Ralph Nader’s main target, famously, was the automobile industry. From 1965 onwards, Nader had attacked General Motors for producing cars that were “unsafe at any speed.” Since then, his advocacy of consumer causes had widened out to include drug companies, air pollution, and foods that were unsafe in any amount. In 1970, Nader’s Study Group published The Chemical Feast, a blistering attack on the American food supply and the FDA’s failure to police it. Nader directly compared his work to that of Upton Sinclair.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

In "The American Way of Death," published in the New York Review of Books in April 1966, Mumford reprised his attack on "that religion for whose evidences of power and glory the American people, with eyes devoutly closed, are prepared to sacrifice some 59,000 lives every year, and to maim, often irreparably, some three million more." Most of the article, a review of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, was a diatribe against the automobile itself, which "could have made an invaluable contribution in creating a regional distribution of population" but instead accounted for some of the greatest crises facing city and countryside alike—"the nightmare of the air becoming toxic with poisonous exhausts, including the highly lethal carbon monoxide; of the water supply polluted with deadly lead from gasoline exhausts already half way to the danger point even in the Arctic wastes; the nightmare of diurnal mass commutation by car... ."

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

“In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”36 As America enters its own period of consequences, we need to sound the alarm as well. Before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, most Americans had only the faintest inkling that big agricultural companies were poisoning the environment. Before Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, most consumers were only vaguely aware that Americans were dying at appalling rates in automobile accidents. But once Americans were awakened to the danger, they were able to focus on the problem and craft creative solutions. The time has come to open our eyes fully to the threat we face from autocracies like Russia and China in cyberspace—a danger that some Americans may sense but few truly understand.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The cause was determined to be pilot error, as the pilot’s aggressive use of the rudder caused the tail of the plane to snap off, and before the aircraft hit the ground, both engines had fallen off the wing. These three incidents with their very different causes—inadequate air traffic control, faulty maintenance, and pilot error—appear to have taught airlines and aircraft manufacturers many lessons. To quote the title of Ralph Nader’s famous book, air travel was initially “unsafe at any speed” but now is safer than walking across the street. AIRLINE PRICES AND THE INITIAL PROMISE OF AIRLINE DEREGULATION In the history of the U.S. airline industry since World War II, one theme stands out. Air travel rapidly made the transition from a travel mode that was relatively dangerous and expensive to one that opened the world as an affordable destination for millions of Americans.

…

Cray Inc. webpage on “Company History.” www.cray.com/About/History.aspx. Cronon, William. (1991). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York/London: W. W. Norton. Crossen, Cynthia. (2007). “Before WWI Began, Universal Health Care Seemed a Sure Thing,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, p. B1. Crossen, Cynthia. (2008). “Unsafe at Any Speed, with Any Driver, on Any Kind of Road,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, p. B1. Cutler, David M. (2006). “An International Look at the Medical Care Financing Problem,” in David Wise and Naohiro Yashiro, eds., Issues in Health Care in the U.S. and Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 69–81.

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

Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees: Government: Federal, Except U.S. Postal Service [CES9091100001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091100001. Accessed Jan. 24, 2019). 10.This was the case before auto safety legislation, as documented by Ralph Nader in his classic book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Pocket Books, 1965). 11.A president who claims an unfettered right to pardon himself and those who serve him is a president who claims unbridled authoritarian power, to be reined in by the single ultimate check provided by the Constitution, impeachment; and with such solid support among his own party (removing a president from office requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate), and with such overbearing confidence that he could claim that he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and still not lose his loyal voters, he seems to have little to fear from that quarter. 12.Many important ones have received little notice: a simple change that removes the deference previously given to one’s own physician in disability proceedings may result in large numbers being denied disability payments. 13.According to OECD data, in 2017, US real GDP per capita grew somewhat slower than the average of the OECD, but in 2018 it was somewhat greater. 14.In Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, my coauthors and I describe globalization and technology as the large underlying global forces that then get translated through the rules that structure our economy into our daily experiences, including those that lead to inequality and exclusion.

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

NO MORE “APPEASEMENT” Nader also played a key role in fomenting a boomerang effect of far broader dimensions, causing the new, expanded use of the First Amendment to upend the balance of power in America between those at the top and everyone else. Nader had risen to prominence in 1965, with the publication that year of his attack on the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, which focused on General Motors. He then achieved star status because of media reaction to GM’s clumsy attempts to smear him by hiring private investigators to look into his personal life. His reach had since expanded on multiple fronts. Donors contributed millions of dollars to support Nader’s Raiders—teams of students coming out of college and law school organized to do research and issue reports (with headline-grabbing press releases) on all varieties of alleged business abuses, which the Raiders’ legal teams then brought suits to stop.

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

In a court ruling on whether General Motors was negligent for not including widespread safety features in a 1961 station wagon, the court rejected the claim because a “manufacturer is not under a duty to make his automobile accident-proof or foolproof.” But in 1966, a year after Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he charged car companies with resisting safety improvements, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, refocusing automobile safety on the vehicle, rather than the driver. Today, similar concerns are expressed about software liability: tech is too important to our society to be slowed down, yada yada yada.

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

All summer long, he clipped magazine and newspaper articles documenting the political threat. He was particularly preoccupied with Ralph Nader, the young Harvard Law School graduate whom Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, had hired to investigate auto safety hazards. Nader’s 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, accused the auto industry of putting profits ahead of safety, triggering the American consumer movement and undermining Americans’ faith in business. Powell was a personal friend of General Motors’ corporate counsel and regarded this and other anticorporate developments with almost apocalyptic alarm.

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

Waiting in the wings were hundreds of experts who had been studying just how destructive the twentieth century had been to the planet that we inhabit. Environmentalists mounted one of the most successful political movements in history. In 1962 Michael Harrington in his The Other America: Poverty in the United States reminded the public that not everyone was prospering. Three years later Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed took on America’s automakers; its subtitle delivers the message: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. Their words seemed even more prophetic with the multiple blows of an oil crisis, rising unemployment, and an inflation rate spiraling upward. A younger generation took up the causes of the degrading environment, product safety, and the persisting plight of the poor and made them their own.

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

The Scales More than fifty thousand Americans died in car crashes each year during the mid-1960s, a spectacular volume of carnage that inspired its own sound track, most famously “Last Kiss,” in which the singer heads “out on a date in my daddy’s car.” The government tried for years to reduce road deaths by emphasizing the personal responsibility of drivers, but the very word “accident” implies the limits of that approach. In 1965, Ralph Nader’s bestselling book, Unsafe at Any Speed, reshaped the public debate. Nader argued accident victims were hurt not by the initial crash but by the “second collision” with the interiors of their own vehicles. Accidents were inevitable, but injuries could be prevented — and car companies were hardly trying. The industry had an appalling record of indifference to the lives of its customers.22 Nader’s attack on the car companies was an attack on the primacy of markets.

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

In consequence, the political and economic landscape of the United States looked very different by the 1970s than in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gone was the overwhelming political and economic clout of mega-businesses, such as the Carnegie Steel Company and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Emblematic of these changes was the consumer protection activism led by Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965, was a manifesto for keeping corporations accountable. In this instance, activism focused on automobile manufacturers, although Nader’s target was all misbehaviors by business, especially big business. Several iconic government regulations resulted from consumer activism.

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

Gary Reback was on the program, pointing out the flattering entries about Gates in Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, Encarta. Netscape lawyer Roberta Katz warned that Microsoft was boxing competitors out of its new online shopping center. Ralph Nader’s star had been fading, but the fight against Bill Gates gave him a way to reclaim his old mantle as America’s #1 fighter for the little guy. The software giant was unsafe at any speed, Nader warned, and it should not be allowed to take over the online future. “Not content with its enormous market share in PC software, Microsoft wants to hold our hand as we navigate the information superhighway,” Nader wrote, “and to push us—not so subtly—toward its own partners or subsidiaries by strategically placing desktop or browser links to its products and services.”

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

Every Beirut driver knows the radio lexicon: a road described as amina is totally secured by army or police; a road described as salika is free of snipers or kidnappers, but not policed; hatherah means the road is passable, but with a roughly 30 percent chance of kidnapping or sniping; and finally, ghair amina means the road is unsafe at any speed. Part of learning how to view one’s environment selectively is learning to make oneself numb to some of the more grotesque scenes that are part of the texture of life in Beirut. Terry Prothro, the American University psychologist, used to say that in Beirut, at least, the ability to repress things was not necessarily pathological.

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

Over the short run they sometimes pushed against each other, but over the long run they collectively pulled the death rate down, down, down. At times there were moral crusades to reduce the carnage, with automobile manufacturers as the villains. In 1965 a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a j’accuse of the industry for neglecting safety in automotive design. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was established and legislation was passed requiring new cars to be equipped with a number of safety features. Yet the graph shows that steeper reductions came before the activism and the legislation, and the auto industry was sometimes ahead of its customers and regulators.