World Values Survey

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Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

We would also like to thank the National Science Foundation for the award for Ronald Inglehart and Jon Miller at the University of Michigan supporting the 2017 US World Values Survey. We build upon the shoulders of giants and it would also not have been possible without many invaluable datasets notably the European Social Survey, developed by the late-Roger Jowell, xiii xiv P­re­fa­ce and Acknowledgments the European/World Values Survey, and the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks. As always, this book also owes immense debts to many friends and colleagues who provided comments and feedback about this book during its gestation, including Nancy Bermeo, Bart Bonikowski, John Curtice, Ivor Crewe, E.J.

Data are from the WVS-­6 (2010–2014) in the following seven post-­industrial societies: Australia, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and United States. Source: World Values Survey 2010–2014, Wave 6. N. 10,576. LGBTQ rights to employment in the military, adoption, and same sex marriage; civil rights for minorities like the Black Lives Matters movement; feminist networks with global mobilization on behalf of gender quotas in elected office; anti-­domestic violence, and anti-­sexual harassment, international assistance for humanitarian disasters and economic development, and human rights around the world.24 Drawing on data from seven post-­ industrial societies from the World Values Survey (6th wave), Figure 4.2 shows the strong association between socially liberal attitudes, as measured on scales monitoring tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and pre-­marital sex, with the 12-­item scale of post-­material values.

After 1992, the ANES no longer included the materialist/post-materialist battery so we turn to data from the World Values Surveys (WVS) to trace the impact of values, using the 12-­item materialist/post-materialist values battery. Being designed for world-­wide comparisons, the WVS monitors Trump’s America 344 100 90 80 Obama Romney 70 60 50 2.2x 8.6x 40 30 20 10 0 Materialist 1 2 3 4 Post-materialist Figure 10.5. The 2012 US presidential vote by materialist/post-materialist values Source: World Values Survey, US 2012. which political party the respondent supports, rather than one’s vote for specific candidates.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Uruguay is omitted from this graph because no respondents born in the 1930s ranked democracy as a “bad” or “very bad” way of governing the country. Data source: World Values Survey (WVS), Wave 5 (2005–2009) and Wave 6 (2010–2014), World Values Survey Association; http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org and European Values Study (Wave 4), European Values Study; http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/page/surveys.html. 110          Percent change, per year, in worldwide respondents who think that “having the army rule” is a “good” or “very good” political system. Data source: World Values Survey (WVS), Wave 3 (1995–1998), Wave 4 (1999–2004), Wave 5 (2005–2009), and Wave 6 (2010–2014), World Values Survey Association; http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. 111          This figure examines survey responses in countries ranked as “free” by Freedom House and “high income” by the World Bank with populations over a million for which we have time series data on this question from either WVS or EVS.

Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) analysis of Federal Election Commission (FEC) data. 85            Lobbying expenditures in the United States, 1998–2016. Source: Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) analysis of Senate Office of Public Records (OPR) data (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0); https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ 100          US respondents who express interest in politics, by decade of birth. Data source: World Values Survey (WVS), Wave 6 (2010–2014), World Values Survey Association; http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. 101          Share of French voters who “fully” or “mostly” have faith in the president to “solve the problems France currently faces,” 1995–2017. Source: Kantar TNS (formerly TNS SoFres) Baromètre/Le Figaro Magazine; https://www.tns-sofres.com/cotes-de-popularites. 105          “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?”

Source: Kantar TNS (formerly TNS SoFres) Baromètre/Le Figaro Magazine; https://www.tns-sofres.com/cotes-de-popularites. 105          “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?” Ranking living in a democracy as “essential” is defined as any respondent who ranks the importance of democracy as a 10 on a scale of 1 (“not at all important”) to 10 (“absolutely important”). Data source: World Values Survey (WVS), Wave 6 (2010–2014), World Values Survey Association; http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. 106          This figure examines survey responses in countries ranked as “free” by Freedom House and “high income” by the World Bank. It includes all countries with populations over a million for which there are data on this question.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The skipping studies more closely track a hedonistic view of welfare: even if people desire to be in their job, for instance, the evidence suggests that many of them do not enjoy it very much, and the skipping study captures that fact. The World Values Survey, which directly asks people whether they are happy, is perhaps most naturally interpreted in a preference-satisfactionist way, but one could imagine that some respondents also interpreted it in a hedonist way. I would tentatively suggest that something like 10 percent of the global population have lives with below-neutral wellbeing. If we assume, following the small UK survey, that the neutral point on a life satisfaction scale is between 1 and 2, then 5 to 10 percent of the global population have lives of negative wellbeing. In the World Values Survey, 17 percent of respondents classed themselves as unhappy.

A distinct cluster of “Confucian heritage” countries like China and South Korea score highly on secular values while scoring about average on survival vs. self-expression. In contrast, “Protestant” European countries are much higher on self-expression, while “Orthodox” European countries score higher on survival values (World Values Survey 7 2020, The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map). This analysis needs a couple of caveats. First, the data used for the World Cultural Map reflect “only a handful” of the beliefs and values covered by the World Values Survey. One could question whether the specific indicators used to build out the “traditional values” factor, for example, accurately reflect the meaning of that term as we typically understand it.

If we take the UK survey on the neutral point at face value, then between 5 and 10 percent of people in the world have lives that are below neutral.19 All in all, although they provide by far the most comprehensive data on life satisfaction, life satisfaction surveys mainly provide insights into relative levels of wellbeing across different people, countries, and demographics. They do not provide much guidance on people’s absolute level of wellbeing. A second line of evidence is from surveys that simply ask people if they are happy. The World Values Survey asks respondents whether they are “very happy,” “rather happy,” “not very happy,” or “not at all happy.” The last survey was in 2014 and included respondents from sixty countries, comprising 67 percent of the world population. It found that in all countries except Egypt (which was undergoing a protracted political crisis at the time), more than half of people rate themselves as very happy or rather happy, and in almost all countries, more than 70 percent of people say they are happy.20 In several countries, reported rates of happiness are extremely high.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

As influential as Inglehart is in some circles, his work deserves to be much more widely known. Space does not allow me to do his work justice. A superb introduction to his work is Inglehart and Welzel (2005). 18.The World Values Survey maintains an active website with all of its surveys, data, and a lot of academic analysis (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). For example, questions from the 2005–2006 wave of the World Values Survey (2005) ask on a ten-point scale, from “not at all” to “a great deal,” how much freedom of choice or control subjects feel they have over their lives. Another series of questions asks respondents to rate family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, and religion on a scale of “not important at all” to “very important.” 19.The bulleted points are excerpted from World Values Survey (n.d.) and slightly edited for readability.

The United Nations Development Programme finds that, between 2000 and 2013, 96 percent of countries tracked saw reductions in overall gender disparities based on indicators of health, education, political representation, and employment.16 So, it seems that individual intrinsic growth piles up and manifests as large-scale societal development. But is there hard evidence? Remarkable data comes from Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.17 Inglehart is the founder and former president of the World Values Survey, a series of large-scale surveys of national values that he and his colleagues had the foresight to begin in the early 1980s. It spans four decades, all six inhabited continents, 97 countries, and 400,000 respondents. The survey asks about people’s values, beliefs, and aspirations. It considers work, family, religion, happiness, government, and environment.18 Over the years, Inglehart and his colleagues have dug deep into this mountain of data and found striking patterns.

It considers work, family, religion, happiness, government, and environment.18 Over the years, Inglehart and his colleagues have dug deep into this mountain of data and found striking patterns. They found, for example, that mass individual aspirations correlate with modernization, economic development, and democratization. Here is the heart of their conclusions, excerpted from the World Values Survey website: •Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.” •Traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience, and marriage.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X. Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes).

Young people take their emancipative values with them as they age, a finding we’ll return to when we ponder the future of progress in chapter 20.40 Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005 Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each country weighted equally). The liberalization trends shown in figure 15-6 come from the Prius-driving, chai-sipping, kale-eating populations of post-industrial Western countries. What about the rest of humanity? Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures. He also took advantage of the absence of a life-cycle effect to extrapolate emancipative values backwards: the values of a sixty-year-old in 2000, adjusted for the effects of forty years of liberalization in his or her country as a whole, provide a good estimate of the values of a twenty-year-old in 1960.

The fate of the black rhinoceros and the well-being of our descendants in the year 2525 are significant moral concerns, but worrying about them now is something of a luxury. As societies get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table or a roof over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs, and the scope of their concern expands in space and time. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, using data from the World Values Survey, have found that people with stronger emancipative values—tolerance, equality, freedom of thought and speech—which tend to go with affluence and education, are also more likely to recycle and to pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment.10 * * * Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the “faith that technology will save us.”


pages: 550 words: 124,073

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

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

Countries: same as in (a). (d) Is competition good or harmful? Notes: Number of observations: 57646. Countries: same as in panel a) but including the UK, Germany, Italy, and Israel; and excluding Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal. Sources: (a–c) ISSP, Role of Government IV, 2006; (d) World Values Survey, 1981–2014. Finally, the World Values Surveys include a question about another key government policy: competition. Here, eighty-one percent answer on the “good” side of the middle when asked whether competition is good or harmful. There is clearly a broad understanding of the economic benefits of competition, even if competition has negative connotations when it comes to interpersonal relations.

Educational institutions matter because they are critical to the economic opportunities of the middle class and their children. 5.4. Evidence We offer several pieces of evidence for our argument. First, we explore the relationship between values and various indicators for education and economic position using survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS). WVS contains several useful variables for measuring values and covers a broad range of advanced countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia. Four of the six waves, carried out in the period 1995–-2012, include a substantial number of advanced democracies, and we pool all four waves when possible.

While we recognize the correlational nature of the data, this is the most direct comparative test of the argument that institutionalized access to educational opportunity determines the share of the electorate who are susceptible to populist appeals. We are aware of no other evidence of this nature. Third, we repeat the individual-level analysis, but using populist vote choice as the dependent variable. Of the sixteen advanced democracies included in the World Values Surveys, half had significant populist parties at the time of at least one of the waves. Unfortunately, vote intention was not recorded in France or Italy, so we are left with six countries: Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. Still, this gives us about 9,600 observations and enough populist voters to allow multivariate analysis. 5.4.1.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

In 1980, Bhutan’s GDP per person was 10 percent higher than India’s. Today it is 75 percent higher. In 2009, as the rest of the world slumped, Bhutan grew 6.9 percent. In 2008 the Bhutanese economy grew by a fifth. Like other countries around the world, it has grown happier as it has grown richer. The World Values Survey, a set of polls performed around the world over the past twenty years, found that the happiest country in the world is rich Denmark. The least happy is poor Zimbabwe. The 2006 Gallup World Poll asked adults in 132 countries to rank their satisfaction with life on a scale of zero to ten. The citizens of Togo, whose gross domestic product per person is only $832, ranked their satisfaction at just above three.

., Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Environment and Health, Chennai, India, December 15-17, 2003 (Chennai, India: Department of Geography, University of Madras and Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University), pp. 451-464. Evidence of the different Swiss and Chinese attitudes toward the environment is drawn from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/, accessed 08/01/2010). The relation between sulfur-dioxide emissions and income is found in Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger, “Economic Growth and the Environment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 110, No. 2, 1995 (converted to 2009 dollars using GDP deflator).

The statistic about Japan’s high prices comes from Robert Lipsey and Birgitta Swedenborg, “Explaining Product Price Differences Across Countries,” NBER Working Paper, July 2007. 165-168 Where Culture Comes From: Discussion of the economic implications of trust draws from Jeff Butler, Paola Giuliano, and Luigi Guiso, “The Right Amount of Trust,” CEPR Discussion Paper, September 2009; and the World Values Survey, 2005-2008 wave (www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalizeSample.jsp, accessed 07/18/2010). Different views on the deformed lips of Mursi girls are from Mursi Online, Oxford University Department of International Development (www.mursi.org/); and Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Getting to the bottom of the relationship between governance and circumstance has been a central issue for University of Michigan professor Ronald Inglehart for several decades. His research has focused on which foundations offer the most fertile environment for freedom and the rule of law. To that end, Inglehart helped to devise, promote, and expand what has come to be known as the World Values Survey, a global opinion poll that for thirty years has compared personal attitudes against more traditional indicators such as economic growth and political stability. Inglehart’s work has rendered some remarkable conclusions. Maybe most important, it largely buttresses the anecdotal observation that was made so plain after Saddam Hussein was deposed in Iraq: representative government often takes hold only after a society has satisfied many of its citizens’ more basic needs.

Rather, representative government is more like a flower that needs to be nurtured before it blooms. And amid the sectarian conflagration that emerged in the aftermath of the American-led invasion, it was almost impossible to stand up the kind of dominion many of the operation’s proponents had envisioned. Specifically, Inglehart’s analysis of World Values Survey data reveals that democracy is properly understood as a stop along a continuum that tracks a population’s economic development. As he and his colleague Christian Welzel have argued, once basic concerns about safety and security are satisfied, societies develop an increasing taste for “choice, autonomy, and creativity.”6 By some measure, that insight can explain the broader sweep of American history.

The same shift in attitude has been reflected in who has, in fact, gotten hitched: in 2008, 15 percent of marriages in the United States were between spouses of different races, a figure six times over the percentage in 1960.8 The question is whether this wholesale evolution of American opinion—one that celebrated “choice and autonomy” unlike the previous bigotry—would have emerged without the growing prosperity of American life. We can hope so. But as the World Values Survey reveals, our improving circumstances almost surely played an important role. Had Americans been preoccupied with a different set of worries, the iniquities that prompted the civil rights movement might well have been left unaddressed, as they had been for decades before. Demographic snapshots bear out this distinction, with people living in more and less prosperous circumstances embracing entirely different political agendas even beyond fiscal concerns.


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Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

I am most grateful to Justin Winslett for clarifying my formulation of this point 94. Rawls 2006, 15. The particular sense in which Rawls uses the word ‘reasonable’ is discussed on pages 48–54 95. Rawls 2006, 389 96. World Values Survey, Wave 6, 2010–2014, http://perma.cc/Z2R6-Q3QC; World Values Survey, Wave 5, 2005–2009, http://perma.cc/EG48-B7M9; World Values Survey, Wave 4, 1999–2004, http://perma.cc/TMJ5-5L4Y. In the fourth and fifth waves of the World Values Survey, the third option was ‘Give people more say’. This was changed to ‘Giving people more say in important government decisions’ in the sixth wave. See Figure 7. East Asian Barometer Survey of Democracy, Governance and Development, data for China 2008, data for Taiwan, 2006: http://perma.cc/H9EW-HN6G 97.

The 2010–2014 results for a few selected countries are shown in Figure 7, and the trend across the first years of the twenty-first-century in Figure 8. Figure 7. What priority for free speech? Respondents were asked: ‘If you had to choose, which one of the things on this card would you say is most important?’ Source: World Values Survey, 2010–2014. Figure 8. Support for free speech, 1999–2014 The percentage is formed by aggregating the two free speech answers of Figure 7: ‘Protecting freedom of speech’ and ‘giving people more say’. Source: World Values Survey, 1999–2014. These polling results are no more than suggestive. After all, people were being asked to rank four good things. India, where (in the 2005–2009 polling) only 19 percent opted for one of the two free speech answers, against 27 percent for maintaining order and 40 percent for fighting rising prices, is nonetheless one of the world’s noisiest, most argumentative societies, with a raucously outspoken media.

Another way of trying to get at foundational differences is therefore to look at aggregated individual opinions, through opinion polls. The evidence here is not abundant, partly because authoritarian regimes seldom allow sensitive questions about free speech to be put to their citizens, but we do have some. The World Values Survey has asked the following question in a number of countries across three successive ‘waves’ of polling: If you had to choose, which one of the things on this card would you say is most important? • Maintaining order in the nation • Giving people more say in important government decisions [or, in the two earlier waves, simply ‘give people more say’] • Fighting rising prices • Protecting freedom of speech Perhaps unsurprisingly, a larger proportion of people in democracies tended to favour some combination of ‘protecting freedom of speech’ and ‘giving people more say’ over ‘maintaining order in the nation’ and ‘fighting rising prices’.


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Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

World Bank, World Development Indicators online. 21. Ferguson, ‘Economics, Religion and the Decline of Europe’. 22. Data from the Conference Board Total Economy Database, September 2010, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/. See also OECD.Stat and various OECD publications. 23. World Values Survey Association, World Values Survey. 24. Chesterton, Short History, p. 104. 25. Bruce, God is Dead, p. 67. 26. Data from http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr2009.html. 27. See Brown, Death of Christian Britain, esp. p. 191. See also the essays in McLeod and Ustorf (eds.), Decline of Christendom. 28.

., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York, 1926) Taylor, James Hudson, Hudson Taylor: The Autobiography of a Man Who Brought the Gospel to China (Minneapolis, 1987) Thompson, Phyllis, China: The Reluctant Exodus (Sevenoaks, 1979) Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich, The Kingdom of God is within You (Charleston, SC, 2008 [1894]) Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘Religion, the Reformation and Social Change’, in Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 1–46 Viner, Jacob, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, 1978) Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005) Weber, Marianne, Max Weber: A Biography (New Brunswick, 1988) Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. P. Baehr and G. C. Wells (London 2002 [1905]) Woodberry, Robert D., ‘The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of North Carolina (2004) World Values Survey Association (www.worldvaluessurvey.org), World Values Survey 1981–2008 Official Aggregate v.20090901 (2009), Aggregate File Producer: ASEP/JDS, Madrid Yihua Xi, ‘Patriotic Protestants: The Making of an Official Church’, in Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin (eds.), God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church–State Tensions (Washington, DC, 2004), 107–21 Young, Cristobal, ‘Religion and Economic Growth in Western Europe: 1500–2000’, working paper (Princeton, 2009) Zakaria, Fareed, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2003) Zhao Dunhua, ‘Recent Progress of Christian Studies Made by Chinese Academics in the Last Twenty Years’, in H.

They quarrelled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith. Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. According to the most recent (2005–8) World Values Survey, 4 per cent of Norwegians and Swedes and 8 per cent of French and Germans attend a church service at least once a week, compared with 36 per cent of Americans, 44 per cent of Indians, 48 per cent of Brazilians and 78 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans. The figures are significantly higher for a number of predominantly Catholic countries like Italy (32 per cent) and Spain (16 per cent).


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The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch

behavioural economics, endowment effect, experimental subject, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, loss aversion, public intellectual, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Deeper satisfaction comes not from feeling good, he taught, but from doing good: from cultivating and maintaining virtuous habits that balance one’s own life and create and deepen ties with others. Aristotle’s insights have held up remarkably well. Helliwell and colleagues regularly mine a vast data set called the World Values Survey, which asks people in more than 150 countries about their satisfaction with life and provides much other information about them and their social and economic environments. When Helliwell and other researchers crunch the data, they find that six factors account for three-fourths of reported wellbeing: • social support: having someone to count on in times of trouble • generosity: people are happier when they do generous things and live among generous people • trust: corruption and dishonesty are bad for life satisfaction • freedom: feeling that you have sufficient freedom to make important life decisions • income per capita • healthy life expectancy If you look at that list, you will notice, again, that of the six factors, four have to do with social interaction.

See also interviews and interviewees British life satisfaction depression and anxiety Easterlin on entrepreneurship life satisfaction self-reported happiness in significance of research and stress and happiness curve successful aging Wethington midlife crisis on wisdom World Poll on life satisfaction by age World Values Survey on wellbeing Sutin, Angelina R. Taj Mahal “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity” (Carstensen/Isaacowitz/Susan). 130–31 tax returns, Norway’s online data on teenagers Thaler, Richard “The Theory Behind the Age-Related Positivity Effect” (Carstensen/Reed) therapy time aging and happiness curve and paradox of aging and peer group perspective on selectivity and U curve and de Tocqueville, Alexis The Transition Network transition peer groups trough.

values U curve and The Voyage of Life (Cole) age undertow purpose in light of help from previous voyagers missing in missing fifth painting social connections and time matters view and V-shaped curve The Wage Curve (Blanchflower/Oswald) waiting, wisdom of Webber, Alan M. Weil, Andrew Weiss, Alexander wellbeing. See also subjective wellbeing World Values Survey on Wethington, Elaine whining Whitbourne, Susan Krauss William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation Wilson, John F. Winter, William wisdom as active aging and balance and biological basis of collective benefits of domains of as increasing with age in interviewees Jeste’s study of neuroscience of as package deal reflective nature of scholarly consensus on test of waiting Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development (Sternberg) within-person changes Wolf Shenk, Joshua World Happiness Report world sample, life satisfaction by age 2010–2012 World Values Survey World War II Wozniak, Steve Yang Claire Yang young adulthood, great expectations during “Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers” youth forecasting error in life satisfaction overestimated by Youth Also by Jonathan Rauch Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japabn Praise for The Happiness Curve “The Happiness Curve delivers on the promise of its title, with wise insights and practices to help you become the best you can be.


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The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 3. R. Layard, Happiness. London: Allen Lane, 2005. 4. World Bank, World Development Report 1993: Investing in health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 5. European Values Study Group and World Values Survey Association, European and World Values Survey Integrated Data File, 1999–2001, Release 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2005. 6. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 7. G. D. Smith, J. D. Neaton, D.

INCOME INEQUALITY AND TRUST Figures 4.1 and 4.2 show that levels of trust between members of the public are lower in countries and states where income differences are larger. These relationships are strong enough that we can be confident that they are not due to chance. The international data on trust in Figure 4.1 come from the European and World Values Survey, a study designed to allow international comparisons of values and norms.5 In each country, random samples of the population were asked whether or not they agreed with the statement: ‘Most people can be trusted.’ The differences between countries are large. People trust each other most in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands; Sweden has the highest levels of trust, with 66 per cent of people feeling that they can trust others.

(p. 359) In another article, Putnam says: the causal arrows are likely to run in both directions, with citizens in high social capital states likely to do more to reduce inequalities, and inequalities themselves likely to be socially divisive.26 Taking a more definite stance in his book, The Moral Foundations of Trust, Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, believes that it is inequality that affects trust, not the other way round.27 If we live in societies with more social capital, then we know more people as friends and neighbours and that might increase our trust of people we know, people we feel are like us. But Uslaner points out that the kind of trust that is being measured in surveys such as the European and World Values Survey is trust of strangers, of people we don’t know, people who are often not like us. Using a wealth of data from different sources, he shows that people who trust others are optimists, with a strong sense of control over their lives. The kind of parenting that people receive also affects their trust of other people.


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The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Higher values of potential caloric yield are indicated by darker shadings.[28] Empirical evidence suggests that, within each continent, countries whose populations originated in areas with higher potential return on crop cultivation do tend to be more long-term-oriented, even taking into account other geographical, cultural and historical factors.[29] Moreover, analysis based on polls conducted by the European Social Survey (2002–14) and the World Values Survey (1981–2014) suggests that people who come from regions with higher potential return to crop cultivation are predisposed to be more future-oriented.[30] As ever, these findings might be driven by reverse causality. This correlation could reflect the fact that societies with greater long-term orientation are the ones that choose to cultivate crops that require longer-term investment.

In regions that made use of hoes and rakes, meanwhile, men and women have tended to share the farm work – from land preparation to sowing and harvesting, as well as other tasks, such as ferrying water, milking cows, or collecting firewood – although most household work has remained predominantly in the domain of women. As such, it appears that the plough gave rise to a division of labour not just in ploughing but in a whole range of activities. Analysis based on polls conducted by the World Values Survey in the years 2004–11 suggests that a range of present-day gender biases are associated with the adoption of the plough. This may partly explain why in regions that historically used the plough earlier and more intensely, such as Southern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, there are fewer women in the workforce, company boardrooms and the political arena.[35] The impact of the plough on attitudes towards women is also evident among children of immigrants currently residing in Europe and the United States.

Regions of Planet Earth that resemble Volatilia, therefore, can be expected to contain a lower proportion of the loss-averse type, while regions that resemble Uniformia can be projected to have a greater proportion.[38] Experimental evidence, as well as polls conducted by the European Social Survey (2002–14), the World Values Survey (1981–2014) and the General Social Survey (1972–2018), provides estimates of the variation in the degree of loss aversion within and between countries. When combined with climate data from the past 1,500 years, and accounting for possible confounding factors from geography, culture and history, the evidence suggests that volatile climatic conditions have indeed contributed to the emergence of cultures with relatively low levels of loss aversion, while regions where climatic fluctuations are relatively uniform have contributed to more loss-averse cultures.[39] Again, of course, this association between climatic volatility and loss aversion may reflect the fact that loss-averse individuals and societies are more likely to settle in less volatile environments.


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Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

The European Crime and Safety Survey found that a binge-drinking culture, urbanization and large numbers of young people are closely related to violent crime, which are features the UK and Denmark have in common,5 but Britain and Denmark differ when it comes to fear and happiness, with Denmark emerging as the happiest country in the world, according to the data from the World Values Survey.6 Jack Smith, my young insurance executive in his gated complex, is someone who has become far more worried about crime and feels intimidated even looking out of the window at the nearby estates on the Isle of Dogs. As a result he has bought lots of security products to make him feel safer, but the problem is that the more he has, the more he wants.

Putnam calls this ‘bridging capital’ and he claims that more ‘bonding capital’, the trust between groups who are similar, will strengthen ‘bridging capital’, but there is no evidence of this. Researchers looking at trust ask the same question, about trust between strangers. The standard question used by the World Values Survey is, ‘Would you say that most people can be trusted – or would you say that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?’ In 1959 56 per cent of Britons said yes, most people can be trusted, but by 1999 the figure had fallen to 30 per cent.90 The US showed a similar drop, from 56 per cent in the mid 1960s to 33 per cent.

Appendix 2 shows that the mean prevalences of emotional distress in six English-speaking nations is 21.6 per cent, compared to a mean of 11.5 per cent for nations in mainland Western Europe, plus Japan. The US tops the league for emotional distress, followed by the UK and Australia. 3. Duffy, Bobby, Wake, Rhonda, Burrows, Tamara & Bremner, Pamela, Closing the Gaps: Crime and Public Perceptions, Ipsos MORI, 2007 4. Ibid. 5. Van Dijk, et al., ‘Burden of Crime in the EU’ 6. The World Values Survey is compiled at the Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan, www.worldvaluessurvey.org 7. Waterhouse, Keith, ‘The British Crime Survey: It’s All Lies, Damned Lies and Crime Figures’, Daily Mail, 20/7/08 8. A Summary of Recorded Crime Data from 2002/3 to 2007/8, Home Office research development statistics, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/recorded-crime-2002-2008.xls 9.


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Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Elite forms of national identity are strongly performance-based, tightly attuned to the opinions of elites elsewhere. Rather than identify with ascribed characteristics – history, physical appearance, religion, language – performance-based forms of nationalism focus on achieved status. In the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Social Survey (ESS), those with lower levels of education across the world – or who believe discipline is important for children – are significantly more likely than the well-educated or liberals to say that sharing the same religion as the majority or having ancestors from the country is important for citizenship.

As the work of Ron Inglehart – the doyen of value-change researchers – shows, social liberalism has been accepted, or is well on its way to becoming accepted, across the West.24 Attitudes to immigration and the European Union, by contrast, have either remained static or gone in a more conservative direction since the 1960s. Thus questions pertaining to secular nationalism are following a different cohort trajectory from religion and social conservatism. 5.4. Tolerance of homosexuality and ethnic nationalism (WVS) Source: World Value Surveys 1981–2007 (aggregated) Does rising diversity lead to a backlash? Most surveys are taken at a single point in time, which makes it difficult to assess whether a higher share of immigrants is linked to more hostility to immigration. In 2010, Sweden, with its relatively large immigrant population, was more pro-immigrant than low-immigration Greece.

Do those in the New World have a more open attitude to immigration than those in Europe? A major review of cross-country research on immigration attitudes using data up to 2003 finds Canadians to be the most pro-immigration, followed by Australians and New Zealanders, Americans, West Europeans and East Europeans.9 Against this, the World Values Surveys of 1995, 1999 and 2006 find Americans to be more restrictionist than either Europeans or those from other Anglo nations. Some studies find Americans to be no more open to immigration than West Europeans10 The questions on large-scale surveys don’t allow us to probe many aspects of cross-national differences, so I do this in a limited way by examining Britain and North America.


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Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

If you take a snapshot of the world today, you notice that emancipative values, like freedom of choice and equal rights, are much more common in the Western world than in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But a snapshot misses changes in direction. All cultures are embracing more emancipative values as their populations become richer and better educated. An analysis of World Values Survey data shows that young Middle Easterners, in the world’s most traditional societies, are now similar in their values to the young in the most liberal Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their parents thought that their nihilism and narcissism (and ‘whatever they call music nowadays’) was ruining everything that was holy and pure.58 And again, it ignores how the most open-minded often selfselect to migrate, and how meeting with more open and democratic cultures accelerates this process (for most, if not for everybody).

In 2007 just 27 per cent of US Muslims said that homosexuality should be accepted by society. Ten years later, this had almost doubled, to 52 per cent. This means that US Muslims are now more tolerant than the average American was in 2006 (five years after Baptist preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had blamed 9/11 on God’s vengeance on gays and lesbians). A World Values Survey of Middle Eastern immigrants to Sweden shows that they hold less emancipatory views, such as tolerance and gender equality, than native Swedes but more than people do in the countries they came from. They are somewhere halfway between origin and destination, and close to the views of citizens of Catholic south European countries.

If we could only die from sudden accidents and violence, life expectancy in the US – the country of firearms and heavy traffic – would increase from seventy-eight years to an average of 8938 years!13 We also picked up more emancipatory, libertarian values along the way, as Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggested, and which has been documented by Ronald Inglehart and the World Values Survey project. Once we had food, warmth and physical safety, the need for self-esteem and self-actualization took up more of our thinking. The Industrial Revolution, modern technology, mass education and urbanization made it possible for most people to take physical and material survival for granted for the first time in history.


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The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

., International Economic Relations: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Economic Association (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 1–11, quoted at http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/ reser_e/cadv_e.htm. The mathematician in question was Stanislaw Ulam. 5 Frank W. Taussig, “Abraham Lincoln on the Tariff: A Myth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 28, no. 4 (August 1914), pp. 814–20. 6 World Values Survey online database (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/). 7 This can be seen in the cross-tabs that World Values Survey makes available online—ibid. 8 Anna Maria Mayda and Dani Rodrik, “Why Are Some Individuals (and Countries) More Protectionist Than Others?” European Economic Review, 49 (August 2005), pp. 1393–1430. 9 So Adam Smith was not correct when he famously wrote, in defense of free trade, that “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom”—Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Bk.

What was supposed to have unleashed global engagement and networks had instead strengthened local social ties. As powerful as information and communication technologies are, we should not assume that they will lead us down the path of global consciousness or transnational political communities. Distance matters. Our local attachments largely still define us and our interests. The World Values Survey periodically polls random samples of individuals around the world on their attitudes and attachments. A recent round of surveys asked people in fifty-five countries about the strength of their local, national, and global identities. The results were similar across the world—and quite instructive.

., The Cybercities Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 256–62. I owe the reference to this study to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). 24 The data that I summarize here come from the World Values Survey databank at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ services/index.html. 11. Designing Capitalism 3.0 1 For a detailed statistical analysis of differences between European and American attitudes toward inequality, see Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch, “Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?”


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

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

Surely these are different? Values are tricky things to measure, but there’s a group of professional pollsters and analysts who have spent more than twenty years trying to do exactly that. Consolidating and cross-checking the responses of more than 120,000 people in 81 countries, in the latest round of the World Values Survey, Ronald Inglehart has drawn a cultural map of the world along what seem to be two key axes.71 The result is printed on page 237 below. As you will see, there is no single, solid bloc of Europe versus America. Instead, Inglehart identifies distinctive though adjacent groupings of Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe, English-speaking, and ex-Communist countries.

Comparative opinion polls show a high level of support for democracy even in Arab and Muslim countries where hostility to the United States is most acute, especially in the wake of the Iraq war.49 A commentator in the Arabic international newspaper Al-Hayat captures this ambivalence in a single sentence: “We need to reform our educational systems even though the Americans tell us to.”50 Most remarkably, data from the World Values Survey show that rejection of authoritarian rule and belief that “democracy is the best form of government” are higher in the Arab countries than in any other region of the world, including Western Europe, the United States, and other English-speaking democracies.51 Those who have freedom least want it most.

., The State of Working America 2002–03 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 411–16. 52. Here I follow Will Hutton, The World We’re In (London: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 149. 53. Quoted by Minxin Pei in “The Paradoxes of American Nationalism,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2001, based on figures from the World Values Survey. 54. Estimates for 2000 put gun ownership in the U.S. at 83–96 per 100 inhabitants, compared to around 30 for France and Germany and 10 in Britain. Report by Stephen Castle in The Independent, July 2, 2003. 55. These figures are based on a British Home Office comparative study for the years 1998–2000, see http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb502.pdf.


Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey

Putnam has been very ingenious in coming up with a wide variety of statistical measures of social capital, both in Making Democracy Work and in “Bowling Alone.” These include information on groups and group membership, such as that coming from the General Social Survey, survey research on values (such as the World Values Survey) concerning perceptions of honesty and trust, and measures of political participation such as voter registration and newspaper readership. Putnam has collected time-series and cross- 38 4 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values sectional data on groups from sports clubs and choral societies to trade unions and political parties.

Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, or the series of scandals that engulfed American presidents from the late 1960s on. That there has been a massive cultural shift in many postindustrial societies from greater emphasis on community to greater emphasis on individualism should be obvious to anyone who has lived through this peroid.51 Ronald Inglehart’smassive and longrunning World Values Survey at the University of Michigan docu49 In a survey of the existing empirical studies of the relationship between welfare and illegitimacy in the United States, Murray himself notes that the relationship is weak for the period after the mid-1970s when average benefit levels in real terms began to decrease, and weaker for blacks than for whites.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

A simple crossing of the border of the European Union is more attractive than any utopia. For so many of today’s damnes de la terre, change means changing your country by leaving, not changing your government by staying put. In 1981, when researchers at the University of Michigan conducted the first world values survey, they were surprised to learn that a nation’s happiness was not determined by material well-being.15 Back then, Nigerians were as content as West Germans. But thirty-five years later, the situation has changed. Everyone now has a TV set, and the spread of the Internet has made it possible for young Africans or Afghans with a click of a mouse to see how Europeans live and how their schools and hospitals function.

,” openDemocracy.net 13 (September 2001). https://www.opendemocracy.net/people-newright/article_306.jsp. 13. Ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 14. Slavoj Žižek, “The Cologne Attacks Were an Obscene Version of Carnival,” New Statesman 13 (January 2016). 15. “History of the World Values Survey Association,” http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=History. 16. Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 17. Slavoj Žižek, “We Can’t Address the EU Refugee Crisis without Confronting Global Capitalism,” In These Times, September 9, 2015. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18385/slavoj-zizek-european-refugee-crisis-and-global-capitalism. 18.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Despite this truncated sample, a strong relationship still shows through. The problem with the data on Asch Conformity and “tightness” is that they come from a small number of countries. To capture a broader swath of humanity, let’s consider two questions about people’s adherence to tradition and the importance of obedience from a global survey—the World Values Survey. The first question asks people to rate on a scale from 1 to 7 how similar they are to the person described in this statement: “Tradition is important to her/him. She/he tries to follow the customs handed down by her/his religion or her/his family.” The second question allows us to calculate the percentage of people in each country who think that it’s important to inculcate “obedience” in children.

But in some places, strangers are treated relatively more like family and friends than in other places. Unfortunately, we are again lacking data for most of Africa and much of the Middle East, which means that we are surely not capturing the full spectrum of global variation. FIGURE 6.5. Map of Out-In-Group Trust based on six questions from the World Values Survey covering 75 countries. Darker shading indicates less distrust of strangers, foreigners, and adherents of other faiths relative to a person’s family, neighbors, and people they know. Hatched areas indicate a lack of data. The higher a country’s KII or cousin marriage, the more people distrust strangers, new people, and adherents of other religions (Figure 6.6).

Notably, the amount of money across countries was set to deliver equal purchasing power in each place. 36.  Adapted from Gächter and Schulz (2016). 37.  Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998. Thanks to Dan Hruschka for the data (Hruschka and Henrich, 2013b). 38.  Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998. 39.  This map combines data from Algan and Cahuc (2013) and two surveys, the World Values Survey (Inglehart et al., 2014) and the Afrobarometer (www.afrobarometer.org). 40.  Algan and Cahuc, 2010, 2013. 41.  Johnson and Mislin, 2012. For another large-scale study establishing this relationship, see Fehr et al. (2002). For work linking the GTQ to laboratory economic experiments measuring cooperation and fairness, see Francois, Fujiwara, and van Ypersele, 2011; Herrmann, Thöni, and Gächter, 2008; Peysakhovich and Rand, 2016. 42.  


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The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

While many people equate middle-class with middle-class consumption, discussions about exactly what constitutes the middle class rarely address income. Being or feeling middle-class is about much more than numerical data. It’s a world view, a sensibility, a sense of self. But, curiously, it’s a sense of self that cuts across incomes. In a 2006 World Values Survey, more than a thousand Americans were asked which income decile they thought they were part of, with each decile representing 10 percent of the population (that is, the highest decile contained the top 10 percent of the population’s income earners, and each subsequent decile contained the next, lower, income group).

On the face of it, these seem like exactly the kinds of values a just and fair class identity should be based on and are in line with the principles expressed by most existing progressive organizations and people. However, in a section of his book called ‘Post-Scarcity Effect,’ Florida looked at the work of Ronald Inglehard, a political science professor at University of Michigan who conducted his own world-values survey that found there was ‘a worldwide shift from economic growth issues to lifestyle values, which [Inglehard] sometimes refers to as a shift from “survival” to “self-expression” values.’ This can happen in industrial work too. Thinking back to the collective world view I shared with my fellow Windsorites, survival was always part of our identity – when would the ‘big one’ happen and what would we do?


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Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Twenty-three percent of the respondents to the Veolia urban lifestyles survey reported “diversity of the population” to be among the factors they liked most about their city. This is not because we value diversity in the abstract. Many people are drawn to open communities on the assumption that they can be themselves there. This conforms to the research of Ronald Inglehart, whose detailed World Values Survey of more than fifty countries has found the value of individual expression to be a defining element of today’s society.12 In this regard the Place and Happiness Survey generated another surprising finding. When people rated their city’s openness to various groups, guess which group came in at the bottom of the list?

Bloomsbury USA, 2004. 9 Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark, “The City as an Entertainment Machine,” Research in Urban Sociology: Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment 6, 2002, pp. 357-378. 10 Mercer Human Resource Consulting, Worldwide Health and Sanitation Ranking, 2007. 11 Taylor Clark, “The Indie City: Why Portland Is America’s Indie Rock Mecca,” Slate, September 11, 2007, Slate.com/id/2173729. 12 Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies, Princeton University Press, 1997. For more detail on the World Values Survey, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org. 13 Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Knopf, 2005. Chapter 11 1 Psychologists have found that three main factors shape the fit between people and their environment. The first they call “selection.” People seek out social and physical environments that satisfy and reinforce their psychological needs.

Washington Post Waterloo, Ontario Watters, Ethan Weak ties Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Weber, Alfred Weber, Max Wellesley College Wellington West, Geoffrey Wharton “Where factor” White, Jack White Stripes Wilkinson, Will Wolfers, Justin Wonder Years, The (television series) Woodstock World Bank World Intellectual Property Organization The World Is Flat (Friedman, T.) World Values Survey World War II World Wide Web Xerox Yale University Yankelovich Young and the Restless, The Yuppie elderly Zipf, George Zucker, Lynne Zurich(fig.) Copyright © 2008 by Richard Florida International edition published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved.


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The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

So we shall just have to continue believing that bankers’ bonuses and preposterous remuneration packages for chief executives are bad for society, not that they are bad for the bankers and chief executives.46 THE SOCIAL CORROSIVENESS OF INEQUALITY The second area in which there is evidence for the damage caused by great inequality is trust. As I will point out in chapter 5, “trust,” an abstract concept like social capital, is hard to define and measure. The figures used derive from the World Values Survey, or similar national surveys, which ask respondents whether they agree that “most people can be trusted.” Wilson and Pickett present cross-country correlations (and also for U.S. states) showing a negative correlation between levels of trust and the degree of inequality, although with quite wide variation around the line of best fit between these two variables.

See nature European Union, 42, 59, 62, 162–63, 177, 219 Evolution of Cooperation, The (Axelrod), 118–19 “Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, The” (Trivers), 118 externalities, 15, 70, 80, 211, 228–29, 249, 254 Facebook, 289 face-to-face contact, 7, 147, 165–68 fairness: altruism and, 118–22; antiglobalization and, 115; bankers and, 115, 133, 139, 143–44; behavioral econoics and, 116–17, 121; bonuses and, 87–88, 115, 139, 143–44, 193, 221, 223, 277–78, 295; capitalism and, 134, 137, 149; consequences for growth, 135–36; criticism of poor and, 142; democracy and, 141; emotion and, 118–19, 137; game theory and, 116–18, 121–22; government and, 121, 123, 131, 136; gratitude and, 118; growth and, 114–16, 121, 125, 127, 133–37; happiness and, 53; health issues and, 137–43; high salaries and, 130, 143–44, 193, 223, 277–78, 286, 296; inequality and, 115–16, 122–43; innate sense of, 114–19; innovation and, 121, 134; morals and, 116–20, 127, 131, 142, 144, 221; philosophy and, 114–15, 123; politics and, 114–16, 125–31, 135–36, 140–44; productivity and, 131, 135; Putnam on, 140–41; self-interest and, 114–22; social corrosiveness of, 139–44; social justice and, 31, 43, 53, 65, 123, 164, 224, 237, 286; statistics and, 115, 138; superstar effect and, 134; sustainability and, 115; technology and, 116, 131–34, 137; tit-for-tat response and, 118–19; trilemma of, 13–14, 230–36, 275; trust and, 139–44, 150, 157, 162, 172, 175–76; ultimatum game and, 116–17; unequal countries and, 124–30; wage penalties and, 133; well-being and, 137–43; World Values Survey and, 139 Fama, Eugene, 221–22 faxes, 252 Federal Reserve, 145 Ferguson, Niall, 100–101 financial crises: actions by governments and, 104–12; bubbles and, 3 (see also bubbles); capitalism and, 6–9 (see also capitalism); contracts and, 149–50; crashes and, 3, 28, 161, 244, 283; current, 54, 85, 90–91, 145; debt legacy of, 90–92; demographic implosion and, 95–100; goodwill and, 150; government debt and, 100–104; Great Depression and, 3, 28, 35, 61, 82, 150, 208, 281; growth debt and, 85–86; historical perspective on, 3–4; institutional blindness to, 87–88; intangible assets and, 149–50; intrusive regulatory practices and, 244; pension burden of, 92–95; as political crisis, 8–9; statistics of, 145; stimulus packages and, 91, 100–103, 111; structural change and, 25; total cost of current, 90–91; trust and, 88–89 (see also trust); weightless activities and, 150; welfare burden of, 92–95 Financial Times, 257 Fitzgerald, F.

Treasury, 100 utiltarianism, 31–32, 78, 237 U2, 194–98 values, 18; anomie and, 48, 51; balance and, 12–17; bankers and, 211, 213, 217, 223, 226–28, 233; capitalism and, 209–13, 218, 226, 230–32, 235–36; capitalism and, 230–38 (see also capitalism); consumption and, 229, 236; culture and, 230–38; decentralization and, 275; democracy and, 230–38; efficiency and, 210, 215–16, 221–35; face-to-face contact and, 7, 147, 165–68; freedom and, 237–38; globalization and, 210–11, 235; governance and, 211, 217, 238; government and, 14, 210–11, 215–20, 225–26, 229–30, 234; gross domestic product (GDP) and, 212, 218, 232; growth and, 13, 210–13, 222, 231–36; innovation and, 210, 216, 220, 236; institutions and, 240–42, 246–47, 258–60; intangible assets and, 149–52, 157, 161, 199–201; market failure and, 226–30; measurement and, 209, 212–13; merits of markets and, 211–17; morals and, 185, 210, 213, 220–25, 230–33; philosophy and, 237–39; policy recommendations for, 275–84; politics and, 209–13, 217–18, 223–24, 231–34, 237–38; price chasm and, 207–8; productivity and, 212–13, 224; Protestant work ethic and, 13–14, 236; public choice theory and, 220; public deliberation and, 258–60; public service and, 295; rational calculation and, 214–15; reform and, 218, 233, 275–78, 295; revalorization and, 275; role of government and, 14–15; self-interest and, 214, 221; statistics and, 13; stewardship and, 78, 80, 275; technology and, 212–13, 216, 218, 233–34, 237–38; World Values Survey and, 139 Veblen, Thorsten, 22–23 Velvet Revolution, 239 volunteering, 46–49, 205–7, 214, 249, 269, 287 von Bismarck, Otto, 112 voters, 12, 16; declining turnout of, 175; happiness and, 23, 33, 43; increased turnout and, 260, 285; institutions and, 242, 251, 258, 260, 297; Internet and, 260; knowledge levels of, 288; legitimacy and, 297; measurement and, 190, 206; nature and, 57, 61, 68–69, 76; posterity and, 86, 96, 100, 106, 111; technological effects on, 288–89; trust and, 175, 286; values and, 224, 233–34, 258 Waal, Frans de, 119 Wall Street, 147, 221 Wall Street (film), 221 Warwick Commission on International Financial Reform, 164 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 119–20 Weber, Axel, 99 Weber, Max, 236 weightless activities, 150 welfare, 310n25; aging population and, 4, 94–95, 105–6, 109, 112–13, 206, 267, 280, 287, 296; fairness and, 116, 127, 131, 136–37; growth and, 9–12; happiness and, 9–12, 24–26, 29–32, 35–36, 39–42, 50–53; inequality and, 4–5, 11, 17 (see also inequality); institutions and, 239–43, 259; markets and, 211–25; measurement and, 181–86, 193, 207; nature and, 57–58, 61–62, 71–75, 78–84; policy recommendations for, 270–71, 275–77, 286, 290, 296; posterity and, 85, 89–100, 103, 106, 111–12; trust and, 171, 175; values and, 209, 211, 217, 228, 231–38 well-being, 137–43 Western culture, 2, 16, 18, 181–82, 235; aging populations in, 94–95; anomie and, 48, 51; anxiety and, 1, 25, 47–48, 136–38, 149, 174; corrosion of trust in, 150, 156, 171–75, 255–56; downshifting and, 11, 55; Easterlin Paradox and, 39–44; government debt and, 104 (see also government debt); happiness and, 22–23, 26, 40, 48, 50–51; hedonic treadmill and, 40; increased management complexities of, 244; Industrial Revolution and, 27, 149, 290, 297; institutions and, 243–44, 255–58; nature and, 57–66, 76; policy recommendations for, 268–69, 273, 275, 278, 284–85, 287; prosperity and, 86, 94–97, 104–9; Slow Movement and, 27–28, 205; voter turnout and, 175; weightless activities and, 150 Whitehall Studies, 139 Wikipedia, 205, 291 Wilkinson, Richard, 137–40 Willetts, David, 98–99 Williamson, Oliver, 17, 220, 242, 250, 254, 261 Wolf, Naomi, 34 Wolfers, Justin, 41 World Bank, 38, 81, 163–64, 176, 211 WorldCom, 145 World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy, 38 World Trade Organization (WTO), 162–63, 215, 297 World Values Survey, 139 World War II era, 4, 91, 97, 106, 141, 164, 257, 270, 281, 283 zero–sum games, 118 Zimbabwe, 89, 110, 122


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Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

‘The findings presented here are consistent with the interpretation that economic factors have a strong impact on SWB in low-income countries’, write Inglehart and his colleagues (2008: 279), ‘but that, at higher levels of development, evolutionary cultural changes occur in which people place increasing emphasis on self-expression and free choice’. 35 Easterlin’s challenge to Inglehart’s interpretation of the data in the World Values Survey is based on suggesting that the apparent shift in happiness in richer economies over time was an artefact of the way in which the question on happiness changed over successive surveys. The data on life-satisfaction don’t show this change, he claims, because the life-satisfaction question was itself more robust over time. He then goes on to show, using data from the World Values Survey and elsewhere, that for a total of 37 countries (including both developed and developing nations) over periods of between 12 and 34 years, there is ‘no significant relation between the improvement in life-satisfaction and the rate of economic growth’ (Easterlin et al. 2010: 22463). 36 One of the difficulties in comparing the self-report measure against the GDP is that they are simply different kinds of scales.

As Figure 3.2 suggests, we seem to be right back to the idea of diminishing marginal utility.32 Figure 3.2 Subjective wellbeing (SWB) and income per capita Source: Inglehart et al. (2008) (see note 33) To get the measure of subjective wellbeing (SWB) plotted in Figure 3.2, political scientist Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues used two similar measures – one that asked people about their happiness and one that asked them how satisfied they were with their lives – taken from five successive waves of the World Values Survey, between 1981 and 2007.33 By using survey results over such a long period of time, Inglehart and his co-authors were able to retest the Easterlin paradox. Did subjective wellbeing move within individual nations over time or not? Inglehart found that for approximately three-quarters of the nations in the survey it did.

INDEX Locators in italic refer to figures absolute decoupling 84–6; historical perspectives 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; mathematical relationship with relative decoupling 96–101, 111 abundance see opulence accounting errors, decoupling 84, 91 acquisition, instinctive 68 see also symbolic role of goods adaptation: diminishing marginal utility 51, 68; environmental 169; evolutionary 226 advertising, power of 140, 203–4 Africa 73, 75–7; life-expectancy 74; philosophy 227; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; growth 99; relative income effect 58, 75; schooling 78 The Age of Turbulence (Greenspan) 35 ageing populations 44, 81 agriculture 12, 148, 152, 220 Aids/HIV 77 algebra of inequality see inequality; mathematical models alienation: future visions 212, 218–19; geographical community 122–3; role of the state 205; selfishness vs. altruism 137; signals sent by society 131 alternatives: economic 101–2, 139–40, 157–8; hedonism 125–6 see also future visions; post-growth macroeconomics; reform altruism 133–8, 196, 207 amenities see public services/amenities Amish community, North America 128 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith) 123, 132 angelised growth see green growth animal welfare 220 anonymity/loneliness see alienation anthropological perspectives, consumption 70, 115 anti-consumerism 131 see also intrinsic values anxiety: fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; novelty 116–17, 124, 211 Argentina 58, 78, 78, 80 Aristotle 48, 61 The Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama) 49 arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 assets, stranded 167–8 see also ownership austerity policies xxxiii–xxxv, 189; and financial crisis 24, 42–3; mathematical models 181 Australia 58, 78, 128, 206 authoritarianism 199 autonomy see freedom/autonomy Ayres, Robert 143 backfire effects 111 balance: private interests/common good 208; tradition/innovation 226 Bank for International Settlements 46 bank runs 157 banking system 29–30, 39, 153–7, 208; bonuses 37–8 see also financial crisis; financial system basic entitlements: enterprise as service 142; income 67, 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; limits to growth 63–4 see also education; food; health Basu, Sanjay 43 Baumol, William 112, 147, 222, 223; cost disease 170, 171, 172, 173 BBC survey, geographical community 122–3 Becker, Ernest 69 Belk, Russ 70, 114 belonging 212, 219 see also alienation; community; intrinsic values Bentham, Jeremy 55 bereavement, material possessions 114, 214–15 Berger, Peter 70, 214 Berry, Wendell 8 Better Growth, Better Climate (New Climate Economy report) 18 big business/corporations 106–7 biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 biological perspectives see evolutionary theory; human nature/psyche biophysical boundaries see limits (ecological) Black Monday 46 The Body Economic (Stuckler and Basu) 43 bond markets 30, 157 bonuses, banking 37–8 Bookchin, Murray 122 boom-and-bust cycles 157, 181 Booth, Douglas 117 borrowing behaviour 34, 118–21, 119 see also credit; debt Boulding, Elise 118 Boulding, Kenneth 1, 5, 7 boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) bounded capabilities for flourishing 61–5 see also limits (flourishing within) Bowen, William 147 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 122 Brazil 58, 88 breakdown of community see alienation; social stability bubbles, economic 29, 33, 36 Buddhist monasteries, Thailand 128 buen vivir concept, Ecuador xxxi, 6 built-in obsolescence 113, 204, 220 Bush, George 121 business-as-usual model 22, 211; carbon dioxide emissions 101; crisis of commitment 195; financial crisis 32–8; growth 79–83, 99; human nature 131, 136–7; need for reform 55, 57, 59, 101–2, 162, 207–8, 227; throwaway society 113; wellbeing 124 see also financial systems Canada 75, 206, 207 capabilities for flourishing 61–5; circular flow of the economy 113; future visions 218, 219; and income 77; progress measures 50–5, 54; role of material abundance 67–72; and prosperity 49; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; role of shame 123–4; role of the state 200 see also limits (flourishing within); wellbeing capital 105, 107–10 see also investment Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty) 33, 176, 177 Capital Institute, USA 155 capitalism 68–9, 80; structures 107–13, 175; types 105–7, 222, 223 car industry, financial crisis 40 carbon dioxide emissions see greenhouse gas emissions caring professions, valuing 130, 147, 207 see also social care Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 213 causal path analysis, subjective wellbeing 59 Central Bank 154 central human capabilities 64 see also capabilities for flourishing The Challenge of Affluence (Offer) 194 change see alternatives; future visions; novelty/innovation; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Chicago school of economics 36, 156 children: advertising to 204; labour 62, 154; mortality 74–5, 75, 206 Chile xxxiii, xxxvii, 58, 74, 74, 75, 76 China: decoupling 88; GDP per capita 75; greenhouse gas emissions 91; growth 99; life expectancy 74; philosophy 7; post-financial crisis 45–6; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; relative income effect 58; resource use 94; savings 27; schooling 76 choice, moving beyond consumerism 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy Christian doctrine see religious perspectives chromium, commodity price 13 Cinderella economy 219–21, 224 circular economy 144, 220 circular flow of the economy 107, 113 see also engine of growth citizen’s income 207 see also universal basic income civil unrest see social stability Clean City Law, São Paulo 204 climate change xxxv, 22, 47; critical boundaries 17–20; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 98; fatalism 186; investment needs 152; role of the state 192, 198, 201–2 see also greenhouse gas emissions Climate Change Act (2008), UK 198 clothing see basic entitlements Club of Rome, Limits to Growth report xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16, Cobb, John 54 collectivism 191 commercial bond markets 30, 157 commitment devices/crisis of 192–5, 197 commodity prices: decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; fluctuation/volatility 14, 21; resource constraints 13–14 common good: future visions 218, 219; vs. freedom and autonomy 193–4; vs. private interests 208; role of the state 209 common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199 see also public services/amenities communism 187, 191 community: future visions of 219–20; geographical 122–3; investment 155–6, 204 see also alienation; intrinsic values comparison, social 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect competition 27, 112; positional 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also struggle for existence complexity, economic systems 14, 32, 108, 153, 203 compulsive shopping 116 see also consumerism Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (CoP21) 19 conflicted state 197, 201, 209 connectedness, global 91, 227 conspicuous consumption 115 see also language of goods consumer goods see language of goods; material goods consumer sovereignty 196, 198 consumerism 4, 21, 22, 103–4, 113–16; capitalism 105–13, 196; choice 196; engine of growth 104, 108, 120, 161; existential fear of death 69, 212–15; financial crisis 24, 28, 39, 103; moving beyond 216–18; novelty and anxiety 116–17; post-growth economy 166–7; role of the state 192–3, 196, 199, 202–5; status 211; tragedy of 140 see also demand; materialism contemplative dimensions, simplicity 127 contraction and convergence model 206–7 coordinated market economies 27, 106 Copenhagen Accord (2009) 19 copper, commodity prices 13 corporations/big business 106–7 corruption 9, 131, 186, 187, 189 The Cost Disease: Why Computers get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t (Baumol) 171, 172 Costa Rica 74, 74, 76 countercyclical spending 181–2, 182, 188 crafts/craft economies 147, 149, 170, 171 creative destruction 104, 112, 113, 116–17 creativity 8, 79; and consumerism 113, 116; future visions 142, 144, 147, 158, 171, 200, 220 see also novelty/innovation credit, private: deflationary forces 44; deregulation 36; financial crisis 26, 27, 27–31, 34, 36, 41; financial system weaknesses 32–3, 37; growth imperative hypothesis 178–80; mortgage loans 28–9; reforms in financial system 157; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–19; and stimulation of growth 36 see also debt (public) credit unions 155–6 crises: of commitment 192–5; financial see financial crisis critical boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi 127 Cuba: child mortality 75; life expectancy 74, 77, 78, 78; response to economic hardship 79–80; revolution 56; schooling 76 Cushman, Philip 116 Dalai Lama 49, 52 Daly, Herman xxxii, 54, 55, 160, 163, 165 Darwin, Charles 132–3 Das Kapital (Marx) 225 Davidson, Richard 49 Davos World Economic Forum 46 Dawkins, Richard 134–5 de Mandeville, Bernard 131–2, 157 death, denial of 69, 104, 115, 212–15 debt, public-sector 81; deflationary forces 44; economic stability 81; financial crisis 24, 26–32, 27, 37, 41, 42, 81; financial systems 28–32, 153–7; money creation 178–9; post-growth economy 178–9, 223 Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (Graeber) 28 decoupling xix, xx, xxxvii, 21, 84–7; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 84, 86, 87, 88, 95, 104; green growth 163, 163–5; historical perspectives 87–96, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95; need for new economic model 101–2; relationship between relative and absolute 96–101 deep emission and resource cuts 99, 102 deficit spending 41, 43 deflationary forces, post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 degrowth movement 161–3, 177 demand 104, 113–16, 166–7; post-financial crisis 44–5; post-growth economy 162, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174–5 dematerialisation 102, 143 democratisation, and wellbeing 59 deposit guarantees 35 deregulation 27, 34, 36, 196 desire, role in consumer behaviour 68, 69, 70, 114 destructive materialism 104, 112, 113, 116–17 Deutsche Bank 41 devaluation of currency 30, 45 Dichter, Ernest 114 digital economy 44, 219–20 dilemma of growth xxxi, 66–7, 104, 210; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; decoupling 85, 87, 164; degrowth movement 160–3; economic stability 79–83, 174–6; material abundance 67–72; moving beyond 165, 166, 183–4; role of the state 198 diminishing marginal utility: alternative hedonism 125, 126; wellbeing 51–2, 57, 60, 73, 75–6, 79 disposable incomes 27, 67, 118 distributed ownership 223 Dittmar, Helga 126 domestic debt see credit dopamine 68 Dordogne, mindfulness community 128 double movement of society 198 Douglas, Mary 70 Douthwaite, Richard 178 downshifting 128 driving analogy, managing change 16–17 durability, consumer goods 113, 204, 220 dynamic systems, managing change 16–17 Eastern Europe 76, 122 Easterlin, Richard 56, 57, 59; paradox 56, 58 eco-villages, Findhorn community 128 ecological investment 101, 166–70, 220 see also investment ecological limits see limits (ecological) ecological (ecosystem) services 152, 169, 223 The Ecology of Money (Douthwaite) 178 economic growth see growth economic models see alternatives; business-as-usual model; financial systems; future visions; mathematical models; post-growth macroeconomics economic output see efficiency; productivity ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ (Keynes) 145 economic stability 22, 154, 157, 161; financial system weaknesses 34, 35, 36, 180; growth 21, 24, 67, 79–83, 174–6, 210; post-growth economy 161–3, 165, 174–6, 208, 219; role of the state 181–3, 195, 198, 199 economic structures: post-growth economy 227; financial system reforms 224; role of the state 205; selfishness 137 see also business-as-usual model; financial systems ecosystem functioning 62–3 see also limits (ecological) ecosystem services 152, 169, 223 Ecuador xxxi, 6 education: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; and income 67, 76, 76; investment in 150–1; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements efficiency measures 84, 86–8, 95, 104, 109–11, 142–3; energy 41, 109–11; growth 111, 211; investment 109, 151; of scale 104 see also labour productivity; relative decoupling Ehrlich, Paul 13, 96 elasticity of substitution, labour and capital 177–8 electricity grid 41, 151, 156 see also energy Elgin, Duane 127 Ellen MacArthur Foundation 144 emissions see greenhouse gas emissions employee ownership 223 employment intensity vs. carbon dioxide emissions 148 see also labour productivity empty self 116, 117 see also consumerism ends above means 159 energy return on investment (EROI) 12, 169 energy services/systems 142: efficiency 41, 109–11; inputs/intensity 87–8, 151; investment 41, 109–10, 151–2; renewable xxxv, 41, 168–9 engine of growth 145; consumerism 104, 108, 161; services 143, 170–4 see also circular flow of the economy enough is enough see limits enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 158 see also novelty/innovation entitlements see basic entitlements entrepreneur as visionary 112 entrepreneurial state 220 Environmental Assessment Agency, Netherlands 62 environmental quality 12 see also pollution environmentalism 9 EROI (energy return on investment) 12, 169 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus) 9–11, 132–3 evolutionary map, human heart 136, 136 evolutionary theory 132–3; common good 193; post-growth economy 226; psychology 133–5; selfishness and altruism 196 exchange values 55, 61 see also gross domestic product existential fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15 exponential expansion 1, 11, 20–1, 210 see also growth external debt 32, 42 extinctions/biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 Eyres, Harry 215 Fable of the Bees (de Mandeville) 131–2 factor inputs 109–10 see also capital; labour; resource use fast food 128 fatalism 186 FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) 92 fear of death, existential 69, 104, 115, 212–15 feedback loops 16–17 financial crisis (2008) 6, 23–5, 32, 77, 103; causes and culpability 25–8; financial system weaknesses 32–7, 108; Keynesianism 37–43, 188; nationalisation of financial sector 188; need for financial reforms 175; role of debt 24, 26–32, 27, 81, 179; role of state 191; slowing of growth 43–7, 45; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–21, 119; types/definitions of capitalism 106; youth unemployment 144–5 financial systems: common pool resources 192; debt-based/role of debt 28–32, 153–7; post-growth economy 179, 208; systemic weaknesses 32–7; and wellbeing 47 see also banking system; business-as-usual model; financial crisis; reform Findhorn community 128 finite limits of planet see limits (ecological) Fisher, Irving 156, 157 fishing rights 22 flourishing see capabilities for flourishing; limits; wellbeing flow states 127 Flynt, Larry 40 food 67 see also basic entitlements Ford, Henry 154 forestry/forests 22, 192 Forrester, Jay 11 fossil fuels 11, 20 see also oil Foucault, Michel 197 fracking 14, 15 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 92 France: GDP per capita 58, 75, 76; inequality 206; life-expectancy 74; mindfulness community 128; working hours 145 free market 106: financial crisis 35, 36, 37, 38, 39; ideological controversy/conflict 186–7, 188 freedom/autonomy: vs. common good 193–4; consumer 22, 68–9; language of goods 212; personal choices for improvement 216–18; wellbeing 49, 59, 62 see also individualism Friedman, Benjamin 176 Friedman, Milton 36, 156, 157 frugality 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 fun (more fun with less stuff) 129, 217 future visions 2, 158, 217–21; community banking 155–6; dilemma of growth 211; enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 147–8, 158; entrepreneur as visionary 112; financial crisis as opportunity 25; and growth 165–6; investment 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208; money as social good 140, 153–7, 158; processes of change 185; role of the state 198, 199, 203; timescales for change 16–17; work as participation 140, 144–9, 148, 158 see also alternatives; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Gandhi, Mahatma 127 GDP see gross domestic product gene, selfish 134–5 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) 54, 54 geographical community 122–3 Germany xxxi; Federal Ministry of Finance 224–5; inequality 206; relative income effect 58; trade balance 31; work as participation 146 Glass Steagal Act 35 Global Commodity Price Index (1992–2015) 13 global corporations 106–7 global economy 98: culture 70; decoupling 86–8, 91, 93–5, 95, 97, 98, 100; exponential expansion 20–1; inequality 4, 5–6; interconnectedness 91, 227; post-financial crisis slowing of growth 45 Global Research report (HSBC) 41 global warming see climate change Godley, Wynne 179 Goldman Sachs 37 good life 3, 6; moral dimension 63, 104; wellbeing 48, 50 goods see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods Gordon, Robert 44 governance 22, 185–6; commons 190–2; crisis of commitment 192–5, 197; economic stability 34, 35; establishing limits 200–8, 206; growth 195–9; ideological controversy/conflict 186–9; moving towards change 197–200, 220–1; post-growth economy 181–3, 182; power of corporations 106; for prosperity 209; signals 130 government as household metaphor 30, 42 governmentality 197, 198 GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 54, 54 Graeber, David 28 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 35 Great Depression 39–40 Greece: austerity xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvii, 43; energy inputs 88; financial crisis 28, 30, 31, 77; life expectancy 74; schooling 76; relative income effect 58; youth unemployment 144 Green Economy initiative 41 green: growth xxxvii, 18, 85, 153, 166, 170; investment 41 Green New Deal, UNEP 40–1, 152, 188 greenhouse gas emissions 18, 85, 86, 91, 92; absolute decoupling 89–92, 90, 92, 98–101, 100; dilemma of growth 210–11; vs. employment intensity 148; future visions 142, 151, 201–2, 220; Kyoto Protocol 18, 90; reduction targets 19–20; relative decoupling 87, 88, 89, 93, 98–101, 100 see also climate change Greenspan, Alan 35 gross domestic product (GDP) per capita 3–5, 15, 54; climate change 18; decoupling 85, 93, 94; financial crisis 27, 28, 32; green growth 163–5; life expectancy 74, 75, 78; as measure of prosperity 3–4, 5, 53–5, 54, 60–1; post-financial crisis 43, 44; post-growth economy 207; schooling 76; wellbeing 55–61, 58 see also income growth xxxvii; capitalism 105; credit 36, 178–80; decoupling 85, 96–101; economic stability 21, 24, 67, 80, 210; financial crisis 37, 38; future visions 209, 223, 224; inequality 177; labour productivity 111; moving beyond 165, 166; novelty 112; ownership 105; post-financial crisis slowing 43–7, 45; prosperity as 3–7, 23, 66; role of the state 195–9; sustainable investment 166–70; wellbeing 59–60; as zero sum game 57 see also dilemma of growth; engine of growth; green growth; limits to growth; post-growth macroeconomy growth imperative hypothesis 37, 174, 175, 177–80, 183 habit formation, acquisition as 68 Hall, Peter 106, 188 Hamilton, William 134 Hansen, James 17 happiness see wellbeing/happiness Happiness (Layard) 55 Hardin, Garrett 190–1 Harvey, David 189, 192 Hayek, Friedrich 187, 189, 191 health: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; inequality 72–3, 205–6, 206; investment 150–1; and material abundance 67, 68; personal choices for improvement 217; response to economic hardship 80; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements Heath, Edward 66, 82 hedonism 120, 137, 196; alternatives 125–6 Hirsch, Fred xxxii–xxxiii historical perspectives: absolute decoupling 86, 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; relative decoupling 86, 87–9, 89 Holdren, John 96 holistic solutions, post-growth economy 175 household finances: house purchases 28–9; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–20, 119 see also credit household metaphor, government as 30, 42 HSBC Global Research report 41 human capabilities see capabilities for flourishing human happiness see wellbeing/happiness human nature/psyche 3, 132–5, 138; acquisition 68; alternative hedonism 125; evolutionary map of human heart 136, 136; intrinsic values 131; meaning/purpose 49–50; novelty/innovation 116; selfishness vs. altruism 133–8; short-termism/living for today 194; spending vs. saving behaviour 34, 118–21, 119; symbolic role of goods 69 see also intrinsic values human rights see basic entitlements humanitarian perspectives: financial crisis 24; growth 79; inequality 5, 52, 53 see also intrinsic values hyperbolic discounting 194 hyperindividualism 226 see also individualism hyper-materialisation 140, 157 I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) 7 Iceland: financial crisis 28; life expectancy 74, 75; relative income effect 56; response to economic hardship 79–80; schooling 76; sovereign money system 157 identity construction 52, 69, 115, 116, 212, 219 IEA (International Energy Agency) 14, 152 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 45, 156–7 immaterial goods 139–40 see also intrinsic values; meaning/purpose immortality, symbolic role of goods 69, 104, 115, 212–14 inclusive growth see inequality; smart growth income 3, 4, 5, 66, 124; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; child mortality 74–5, 75; decoupling 96; economic stability 82; education 76; life expectancy 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; poor nations 67; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; tax revenues 81 see also gross domestic product INDCs (intended nationally determined commitments) 19 India: decoupling 99; growth 99; life expectancy 74, 75; philosophy 127; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; savings 27; schooling 76 indicators of environmental quality 96 see also biodiversity; greenhouse gas emissions; pollution; resource use individualism 136, 226; progressive state 194–7, 199, 200, 203, 207 see also freedom/autonomy industrial development 12 see also technological advances inequality 22, 67; basic entitlements 72; child mortality 75, 75; credible alternatives 219, 224; deflationary forces 44; fatalism 186; financial crisis 24; global 4, 5–6, 99, 100; financial system weaknesses 32–3; post-growth economy 174, 176–8; role of the state 198, 205–7, 206; selfishness vs. altruism 137; symbolic role of goods 71; wellbeing 47, 104 see also poverty infant mortality rates 72, 75 inflation 26, 30, 110, 157, 167 infrastructure, civic 150–1 Inglehart, Ronald 58, 59 innovation see novelty/innovation; technological advances inputs 80–1 see also capital; labour productivity; resource use Inside Job documentary film 26 instant gratification 50, 61 instinctive acquisition 68 Institute for Fiscal Studies 81 Institute for Local Self-Reliance 204 institutional structures 130 see also economic structures; governance intended nationally determined commitments (INDCs) 19 intensity factor, technological 96, 97 see also technological advances intentional communities 127–9 interconnectedness, global 91, 227 interest payments/rates 39, 43, 110; financial crisis 29, 30, 33, 39; post-growth economy 178–80 see also credit; debt Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 18, 19, 201–2 International Energy Agency (IEA) 14, 152 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 45, 156–7 intrinsic values 126–31, 135–6, 212; role of the state 199, 200 see also belonging; community; meaning/purpose; simplicity/frugality investment 107–10, 108; ecological/sustainable 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; and innovation 112; loans 29; future visions 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208, 220; and savings 108; social 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 invisible hand metaphor 132, 133, 187 IPAT equation, relative and absolute decoupling 96 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 18, 19, 201–2 Ireland 28; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75; schooling 76; wellbeing 58 iron cage of consumerism see consumerism iron ore 94 James, Oliver 205 James, William 68 Japan: equality 206; financial crisis 27, 45; life expectancy 74, 76, 79; relative income effect 56, 58; resource use 93; response to economic hardship 79–80 Jefferson, Thomas 185 Jobs, Steve 210 Johnson, Boris 120–1 Kahneman, Daniel 60 Kasser, Tim 126 keeping up with the Joneses 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect Kennedy, Robert 48, 53 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesianism 23, 34, 120, 174, 181–3, 187–8; financial crisis 37–43; financial system reforms 157; part-time working 145; steady state economy 159, 162 King, Alexander 11 Krugman, Paul 39, 85, 86, 102 Kyoto Protocol (1992) 18, 90 labour: child 62, 154; costs 110; division of 158; elasticity of substitution 177, 178; intensity 109, 148, 208; mobility 123; production inputs 80, 109; structures of capitalism 107 labour productivity 80–1, 109–11; Baumol’s cost disease 170–2; and economic growth 111; future visions 220, 224; investment as commitment 150; need for investment 109; post-growth economy 175, 208; services as engine of growth 170; sustainable investment 166, 170; trade off with resource use 110; work-sharing 145, 146, 147, 148, 148, 149 Lahr, Christin 224–5 laissez-faire capitalism 187, 195, 196 see also free market Lakoff, George 30 language of goods 212; material footprint of 139–40; signalling of social status 71; and wellbeing 124 see also consumerism; material goods; symbolic role of goods Layard, Richard 55 leadership, political 199 see also governance Lebow, Victor 120 Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy 23, 25, 26, 118 leisure economy 204 liberal market economies 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6 life expectancy: and income 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; inequality 206; response to economic hardship 80 see also basic entitlements life-satisfaction 73; inequality 205; relative income effect 55–61, 58 see also wellbeing/happiness limits, ecological 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 20–2; climate change 17–20; decoupling 86; financial crisis 23–4; growth 21, 165, 210; post-growth economy 201–2, 226–7; role of the state 198, 200–2, 206–7; and social boundaries 141; wellbeing 62–63, 185 limits, flourishing within 61–5, 185; alternative hedonism 125–6; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 215, 218, 219, 221; paradox of materialism 121–23; prosperity 67–72, 113, 212; role of the state 201–2, 205; selfishness 131–8; shame 123–4; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–21, 119 see also sustainable prosperity limits to growth: confronting 7–8; exceeding 20–2; wellbeing 62–3 Limits to Growth report (Club of Rome) xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16 ‘The Living Standard’ essay (Sen) 50, 123–4 living standards 82 see also prosperity Lloyd, William Forster 190 loans 154; community investment 155–6; financial system weaknesses 34 see also credit; debt London School of Economics 25 loneliness 123, 137 see also alienation long-term: investments 222; social good 219 long-term wellbeing vs. short-term pleasures 194, 197 longevity see life expectancy love 212 see also intrinsic values low-carbon transition 19, 220 LowGrow model for the Canadian economy 175 MacArthur Foundation 144 McCracken, Grant 115 Malthus, Thomas Robert 9–11, 132–3, 190 market economies: coordinated 27, 106; liberal 27, 35–6, 106, 107 market liberalism 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6; wellbeing 47 marketing 140, 203–4 Marmot review, health inequality in the UK 72 Marx, Karl/Marxism 9, 189, 192, 225 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 11, 12, 15 material abundance see opulence material goods 68–9; identity 52; language of 139–40; and wellbeing 47, 48, 49, 51, 65, 126 see also symbolic role of goods material inputs see resource use materialism: and fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; and intrinsic values 127–31; paradox of 121–3; price of 126; and religion 115; values 126, 135–6 see also consumerism mathematical models/simulations 132; austerity policies 181; countercyclical spending 181–2, 182; decoupling 84, 91, 96–101; inequality 176–8; post-growth economy 164; stock-flow consistent 179–80 Mawdsley, Emma 70 Mazzucato, Mariana 193, 220 MDG (Millennium Development Goals) 74–5 Meadows, Dennis and Donella 11, 12, 15, 16 meaning/purpose 2, 8, 22; beyond material goods 212–16; consumerism 69, 203, 215; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 218–20; wellbeing 49, 52, 60, 121–2; work 144, 146 see also intrinsic values means and ends 159 mental health: inequality 206; meaning/purpose 213 metaphors: government as household 30, 42; invisible hand 132, 133, 187 Middle East, energy inputs 88 Miliband, Ed 199 Mill, John Stuart 125, 159, 160, 174 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 74–5 mindfulness 128 Minsky, Hyman 34, 35, 40, 182, 208 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 11, 12, 15 mixed economies 106 mobility of labour, loneliness index 123 Monbiot, George 84, 85, 86, 91 money: creation 154, 157, 178–9; and prosperity 5; as social good 140, 153–7, 158 see also financial systems monopoly power, corporations 106–7 The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman) 82, 176 moral dimensions, good life 63 see also intrinsic values moral hazards, separation of risk from reward 35 ‘more fun with less stuff’ 129, 217 mortality fears 69, 104, 115, 212–15 mortality rates, and income 74, 74–6, 75 mortgage loans 28–9, 35 multinational corporations 106–7 national debt see debt, public-sector nationalisation 191; financial crisis 38, 188 natural selection 132–3 see also struggle for existence nature, rights of 6–7 negative emissions 98–9 negative feedback loops 16–17 Netherlands 58, 62, 206, 207 neuroscientific perspectives: flourishing 68, 69; human behaviour 134 New Climate Economy report Better Growth, Better Climate 18 New Deal, USA 39 New Economics Foundation 175 nickel, commodity prices 13 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) 121 Nordhaus, William 171, 172–3 North America 128, 155 see also Canada; United States Norway: advertising 204; inequality 206; investment as commitment 151–2; life expectancy 74; relative income effect 58; schooling 76 novelty/innovation 104, 108, 113; and anxiety 116–17, 124, 211; crisis of commitment 195; dilemma of growth 211; human psyche 135–6, 136, 137; investment 150, 166, 168; post-growth economy 226; role of the state 196, 197, 199; as service 140, 141–4, 158; symbolic role of goods 114–16, 213 see also technological advances Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler and Sunstein) 194–5 Nussbaum, Martha 64 nutrient loading, critical boundaries 17 nutrition 67 see also basic entitlements obesity 72, 78, 206 obsolescence, built in 113, 204, 220 oceans: acidification 17; common pool resources 192 Offer, Avner 57, 61, 71, 194, 195 oil prices 14, 21; decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; resource constraints 15 oligarchic capitalism 106, 107 opulence 50–1, 52, 67–72 original sin 9, 131 Ostrom, Elinor and Vincent 190, 191 output see efficiency; gross domestic product; productivity ownership: and expansion 105; private vs. public 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; new models 223–4; types/definitions of capitalism 105–7 Oxfam 141 paradoxes: materialism 121–3; thrift 120 Paris Agreement 19, 101, 201 participation in society 61, 114, 122, 129, 137; future visions 200, 205, 218, 219, 225; work as 140–9, 148, 157, 158 see also social inclusion part-time working 145, 146, 149, 175 Peccei, Aurelio 11 Perez, Carlota 112 performing arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 personal choice 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy personal property 189, 191 Pickett, Kate 71, 205–6 Piketty, Thomas 33, 176, 177 planetary boundaries see limits (ecological) planning for change 17 pleasure 60–1 see also wellbeing/happiness Plum Village mindfulness community 128 Polanyi, Karl 198 policy see governance political leadership 199 see also governance Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts 41 pollution 12, 21, 53, 95–6, 143 polycentric governance 191, 192 Poor Laws 10 poor nations see poverty population increase 3, 12, 63, 96, 97, 190; Malthus on 9–11, 132–3 porn industry 40 Portugal 28, 58, 88, 206 positional competition 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison positive feedback loops 16–17 post-growth capitalism 224 post-growth macroeconomics 159–60, 183–4, 221; credit 178–80; degrowth movement 161–3; economic stability 174–6; green growth 163–5; inequality 176–8; role of state 181–3, 182, 200–8, 206; services 170–4; sustainable investment 166–70 see also alternatives; future visions; reform poverty 4, 5–6, 216; basic entitlements 72; flourishing within limits 212; life expectancy 74, 74; need for new economic model 101; symbolic role of goods 70; wellbeing 48, 59–60, 61, 67 see also inequality; relative income effect power politics 200 predator–prey analogy 103–4, 117 private credit see credit private vs. public: common good 208; ownership 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; salaries 130 privatisation 191, 219 product lifetimes, obsolescence 113, 204, 220 production: inputs 80–1; ownership 191, 219, 223 productivity: investment 109, 167, 168, 169; post-growth economy 224; services as engine of growth 171, 172, 173; targets 147; trap 175 see also efficiency measures; labour productivity; resource productivity profits: definitions of capitalism 105; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 87; investment 109; motive 104; post-growth economy 224; and wages 175–8 progress 2, 50–5, 54 see also novelty/innovation; technological advances progressive sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 progressive state 185, 220–2; contested 186–9; countering consumerism 202–5; equality measures 205–7, 206; governance of the commons 190–2; governance as commitment device 192–5; governmentality of growth 195–7; limit-setting 201–2; moving towards 197–200; post-growth macroeconomics 207–8, 224; prosperity 209 prosocial behaviour 198 see also social contract prosperity 1–3, 22, 121; capabilities for flourishing 61–5; and growth 3–7, 23, 66, 80, 160; and income 3–4, 5, 66–7; limits of 67–72, 113, 212; materialistic vision 137; progress measures 50–5, 54; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; social perspectives 2, 22, 48–9; state roles 209 see also capabilities for flourishing; post-growth macroeconomics; sustainable prosperity; wellbeing prudence, financial 120, 195, 221; financial crisis 33, 34, 35 public sector spending: austerity policies 189; countercyclical spending strategy 181–2, 182; welfare economy 169 public services/amenities: common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199; future visions 204, 218–20; investment 155–6, 204; ownership 223 see also private vs. public; service-based economies public transport 41, 129, 193, 217 purpose see meaning/purpose Putnam, Robert 122 psyche, human see human nature/psyche quality, environmental 12 see also pollution quality of life: enterprise as service 142; inequality 206; sustainable 128 quality to throughput ratios 113 quantitative easing 43 Queen Elizabeth II 25, 32, 34, 37 quiet revolution 127–31 Raworth, Kate 141 Reagan, Ronald 8 rebound phenomenon 111 recession 23–4, 28, 81, 161–3 see also financial crisis recreation/leisure industries 143 recycling 129 redistribution of wealth 52 see also inequality reforms 182–3, 222; economic structures 224; and financial crisis 103; financial systems 156–8, 180 see also alternatives; future visions; post-growth economy relative decoupling 84–5, 86; historical perspectives 87–9, 89; relationship with absolute decoupling 96–101, 111 relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison religious perspectives 9–10, 214–15; materialism as alternative to religion 115; original sin 9, 131; wellbeing 48, 49 see also existential fear of death renewable energy xxxv, 41, 168–169 repair/renovation 172, 220 resource constraints 3, 7, 8, 11–15, 47 resource productivity 110, 151, 168, 169, 220 resource use: conflicts 22; credible alternatives 101, 220; decoupling 84–9, 92–5, 94, 95; and economic output 142–4; investment 151, 153, 168, 169; trade off with labour costs 110 retail therapy 115 see also consumerism; shopping revenues, state 222–3 see also taxation revolution 186 see also social stability rights: environment/nature 6–7; human see basic entitlements risk, financial 24, 25, 33, 35 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek) 187 Robinson, Edward 132 Robinson, Joan 159 Rockström, Johan 17, 165 romantic movement 9–10 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 35, 39 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 9, 131 Russia 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 sacred canopy 214, 215 salaries: private vs. public sector 130, 171; and profits 175–8 Sandel, Michael 150, 164, 218 São Paulo, Clean City Law 204 Sardar, Zia 49, 50 Sarkozy, Nicolas xxxi, 53 savage state, romantic movement 9–10 savings 26–7, 28, 107–9, 108; investment 149; ratios 34, 118–20, 119 scale, efficiencies of 104 Scandinavia 27, 122, 204 scarcity, managing change 16–17 Schumpeter, Joseph 112 Schwartz, Shalom 135–6, 136 schooling see education The Science of Desire (Dichter) 114 secular stagnation 43–7, 45, 173 securitisation, mortgage loans 35 security: moving towards 219; and wellbeing 48, 61 self-development 204 self-expression see identity construction self-transcending behaviours see transcendence The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 134–5 selfishness 133–8, 196 Sen, Amartya 50, 52, 61–2, 123–4 service concept/servicization 140–4, 147–8, 148, 158 service-based economies 219; engine of growth 170–4; substitution between labour and capital 178; sustainable investment 169–70 see also public services SFC (stock-flow consistent) economic models 179–80 shame 123–4 shared endeavours, post-growth economy 227 Sheldon, Solomon 214 shelter see basic entitlements shopping 115, 116, 130 see also consumerism short-termism/living for today 194, 197, 200 signals: sent out by society 130, 193, 198, 203, 207; social status 71 see also language of goods Simon, Julian 13 simplicity/simple life 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 simulations see mathematical models/simulations slow: capital 170; movement 128 smart growth 85, 163–5 see also green growth Smith, Adam 51, 106–7, 123, 132, 187 social assets 220 social boundaries (minimum standards) 141 see also basic entitlements social care 150–1 see also caring professions social comparison 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect social contract 194, 198, 199, 200 social inclusion 48, 69–71, 114, 212 see also participation in society social investment 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 social justice 198 see also inequality social logic of consumerism 114–16, 204 social stability 24, 26, 80, 145, 186, 196, 205 see also alienation social status see status social structures 80, 129, 130, 137, 196, 200, 203 social tolerance, and wellbeing 59, 60 social unrest see social stability social wage 40 social welfare: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 socialism 223 Sociobiology (Wilson) 134 soil integrity 220 Solon, quotation 47, 49, 71 Soper, Kate 125–6 Soros, George 36 Soskice, David 106 Soviet Union, former 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 Spain 28, 58, 144, 206 SPEAR organization, responsible investment 155 species loss/extinctions 17, 47, 62, 101 speculation 93, 99, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170; economic stability 180; financial crisis 26, 33, 35; short-term profiteering 150; spending: behaviour of ordinary people 34, 119, 120–1; countercyclical 181–2, 182, 188; economic stability 81; as way out of recession 41, 44, 119, 120–1; and work cycle 125 The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett) 71, 205–6 spiritual perspectives 117, 127, 128, 214 stability see economic stability; social stability stagflation 26 stagnant sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 stagnation: economic stability 81–2; labour productivity 145; post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 see also recession state capitalism, types/definitions of capitalism 106 state revenues, from social investment 222–3 see also taxation state roles see governance status 207, 209, 211; and possessions 69, 71, 114, 115, 117 see also language of goods; symbolic role of goods Steady State Economics (Daly) xxxii steady state economies 82, 159, 160, 174, 180 see also post-growth macroeconomics Stern, Nicholas 17–18 stewardship: role of the state 200; sustainable investment 168 Stiglitz, Joseph 53 stock-flow consistent (SFC) economic models 179–80 Stockholm Resilience Centre 17, 201 stranded assets 167–8 see also ownership structures of capitalism see economic structures struggle for existence 8–11, 125, 132–3 Stuckler, David 43 stuff see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods subjective wellbeing (SWB) 49, 58, 58–9, 71, 122, 129 see also wellbeing/happiness subprime lending 26 substitution, between labour and capital 177–178 suffering, struggle for existence 10 suicide 43, 52, 77 Sukdhev, Pavan 41 sulphur dioxide pollution 95–6 Summers, Larry 36 Sunstein, Cass 194 sustainability xxv–xxvi, 102, 104, 126; financial systems 154–5; innovation 226; investment 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; resource constraints 12; role of the state 198, 203, 207 see also sustainable prosperity Sustainable Development Strategy, UK 198 sustainable growth see green growth sustainable prosperity 210–12; creating credible alternatives 219–21; finding meaning beyond material commodities 212–16; implications for capitalism 222–5; personal choices for improvement 216–18; and utopianism 225–7 see also limits (flourishing within) SWB see subjective wellbeing; wellbeing/happiness Switzerland 11, 46, 157; citizen’s income 207; income relative to wellbeing 58; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75 symbolic role of goods 69, 70–1; existential fear of death 212–16; governance 203; innovation/novelty 114–16; material footprints 139–40; paradox of materialism 121–2 see also language of goods; material goods system dynamics model 11–12, 15 tar sands/oil shales 15 taxation: capital 177; income 81; inequality 206; post-growth economy 222 technological advances 12–13, 15; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 96–8, 100–3, 164–5; dilemma of growth 211; economic stability 80; population increase 10–11; role of state 193, 220 see also novelty/innovation Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 8 terror management, and consumption 69, 104, 115, 212–15 terrorist attacks (9/11) 121 Thailand, Buddhist monasteries 128 Thaler, Richard 194 theatre, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 theology see religious perspectives theory of evolution 132–3 thermodynamics, laws of 112, 164 Thich Nhat Hanh 128 thrift 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 throwaway society 113, 172, 204 timescales for change 16–17 tin, commodity prices 13 Today programme interview xxix, xxviii Totnes, transition movement 128–9 Towards a Green Economy report (UNEP) 152–3 Townsend, Peter 48, 61 trade balance 31 trading standards 204 tradition 135–6, 136, 226 ‘Tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin) 190–1 transcendence 214 see also altruism; meaning/purpose; spiritual perspectives transition movement, Totnes 128–9 Triodos Bank 156, 165 Trumpf (machine-tool makers) Germany 146 trust, loss of see alienation tungsten, commodity prices 13 Turkey 58, 88 Turner, Adair 157 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2015) 19 UBS (Swiss bank) 46 Ubuntu, African philosophy 227 unemployment 77; consumer goods 215; degrowth movement 162; financial crisis 24, 40, 41, 43; Great Depression 39–40; and growth 38; labour productivity 80–1; post-growth economy 174, 175, 183, 208, 219; work as participation 144–6 United Kingdom: Green New Deal group 152; greenhouse gas emissions 92; labour productivity 173; resource inputs 93; Sustainable Development Strategy 198 United Nations: Development Programme 6; Environment Programme 18, 152–3; Green Economy initiative 41 United States: credit unions 155–6; debt 27, 31–32; decoupling 88; greenhouse gas emissions 90–1; subprime lending 26; Works Progress Administration 39 universal basic income 221 see also citizen’s income University of Massachusetts, Political Economy Research Institute 41 utilitarianism/utility, wellbeing 50, 52–3, 55, 60 utopianism 8, 38, 125, 179; post-growth economy 225–7 values, materialistic 126, 135–6 see also intrinsic values Veblen, Thorstein 115 Victor, Peter xxxviii, 146, 175, 177, 180 vision of progress see future visions; post-growth economy volatility, commodity prices 14, 21 wages: and profits 175–8; private vs. public sector 130, 171 walking, personal choices for improvement 217 water use 22 Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (Smith) 123, 132 wealth redistribution 52 see also inequality Weber, Axel 46 welfare policies: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 welfare of livestock 220 wellbeing/happiness 47–50, 53, 121–2, 124; collective 209; consumer goods 4, 21, 22, 126; growth 6, 165, 211; intrinsic values 126, 129; investment 150; novelty/innovation 117; opulence 50–2, 67–72; personal choices for improvement 217; planetary boundaries 141; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; simplicity 129; utilitarianism 50, 52–3, 55, 60 see also capabilities for flourishing western lifestyles 70, 210 White, William 46 Whybrow, Peter 68 Wilhelm, Richard 7 Wilkinson, Richard 71, 205–6 Williams, Tennessee 213 Wilson, Edward 134 wisdom traditions 48, 49, 63, 128, 213–14 work: as participation 140–9, 148, 157, 158; and spend cycle 125; sharing 145, 146, 149, 175 Works Progress Administration, USA 39 World Bank 160 World Values Survey 58 youth unemployment, financial crisis 144–5 zero sum game, growth as 57, 71


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT putting a severe “strain on modern democracies”: Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch, “Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crisis, 1870–2014,” 35. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT According to the World Values Survey: Brandon Ambrosino, “What the World Values, in One Chart,” Vox, December 29, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7461009/culture-values-world-inglehart-welzel. To view and manipulate the data directly, you can access the World Values Survey here: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT And as Benjamin Friedman, an economist: Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Alfred A.

Looking at twenty different countries over a 140-year period, they found that “political parties on the far right appear to be the biggest political beneficiaries of a financial crash,” putting a severe “strain on modern democracies.” Rapid economic growth, by contrast, is usually associated with a significant liberalization of social attitudes toward all manners of outsiders, including ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. According to the World Values Survey, for example, people in rich countries are much more likely than those in poor ones to say that they would welcome somebody from a salient out-group as their neighbor. And as Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard University, has argued, economic growth “more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy

See elections and electoral politics Vox, 333n243 W wages, 215–16, 260 Wagner, Richard, 189 warlords, 58–59, 304n57 war on terror, 240 Warren, Elizabeth, 41 Washington, George, 136 welfare state, 58, 82, 212, 259–60, 266 Western Europe, 67, 209, 283 Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen), 312n106 Wierzbicka, Anna, 142 Wilson, Woodrow, 10 Włocławek, Poland, 31–32 Wong, Ali, 209 World Values Survey, 258–59 World War I, 31, 35 World War II and civic patriotism, 137 and conflict driven by diversity, 7 and decolonization, 71 and “melting pot” diversity, 154–55 and psychology of group identity, 31–32, 35 and wartime patriotism, 127–28 Y Yale University, 266 Yang, Andrew, 209 Yang, Wesley, 179n, 324–25n206 yellow vest protests, 256–57 youth gangs, 224–25 Yugoslavia, 45 Z Zambia, 43–44, 48, 302n44 Zangwill, Israel, 153–56 Zemmour, Éric, 213 Zimbabwe, 111, 117 Zoroastrians, 36, 308–9n78 Zschocke, Benjamin Jahn, 171–74, 321n171 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ABOUT THE AUTHOR Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Since the rich remain at the top and the poor remain at the bottom whatever the income of society as a whole, average happiness levels do not change. (Imagine, by way of analogy, a queue on an escalator; the woman at the back of the queue remains at the back, even as the queue itself moves forwards.) Chart 7. Happiness According to Income Position in the UK Source: World Values Survey, 2005–8 Psychological experiments appear to confirm that relative, not absolute, income is what matters most to people. When Harvard students were asked to choose between two imaginary worlds—one in which they earned $50,000 a year against an average of $25,000, the other in which they earned $100,000 a year against an average of $200,000—the majority opted for the former.8 This may look like an expression of vanity, and no doubt it is in part, but there are reasons aside from vanity for wanting to be top of the pile.

As we saw in Chapter 1, average incomes in the UK have doubled over the past thirty years, but the median income—that is, the income of the person in the middle of the distribution—has shifted much less. The gains have been predominantly at the very top. Thus even if absolute income does matter for happiness, the statistics may reflect the feelings of the majority whose absolute income has stagnated. Chart 8. Happiness and Income by Country Source: World Values Survey, 2005–9 Chart 8 shows GDP and happiness for a wide variety of countries at various points in the 1990s. As can be seen, the unhappiest countries all have average incomes of less than $15,000 a year, after which point there seems to be little correlation.9 These data suggest a modification of Easterlin’s original thesis.

Then there is the problem of translation. Happiness researchers must assume that the English word “happy” has synonyms or near-synonyms in other languages across the globe; otherwise, comparisons are meaningless. But this is not always the case. Take xingfu, the word used in the Chinese version of the World Values Survey. Xingfu implies a favorable condition of life, with an emphasis on strong family relations. One is not xingfu while playing tennis or eating an orange. And it would be an abuse of terms, not just a psychological error, to call a prostitute or ageing playboy xingfu.* Xingfu, in short, is closer in meaning to the ancient Greek eudaimon than to the modern English “happy.”14 Other languages raise similar difficulties.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

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

Because people want to socialize and trade with those who seem friendly and generous, such norms are encouraged. ‘The more friendly, the more advantageous. Such is the humanity of trade,’ as Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels acknowledged in 1844.30 When we merely express our values in polls, we get a similar result. An analysis of World Values Survey data over many years shows that richer and more economically free countries express less materialism and greed. The researchers believe that one reason is the declining marginal utility of money: ‘the market makes us richer and being richer allows us to focus on alternative, non-material things.’31 In the light of the widespread worry about the decline of trust and solidarity in recent decades, it is also worth looking at changes over time.

Latin American countries are happier than their level of prosperity would predict and former communist countries are unhappier.35 Richer countries are happier36 Ruut Veenhoven sums up the state of research as ‘[t]he more individualized society, the happier its citizens are’ and the research project World Values Survey documents that the most important factors behind increased well-being are ‘global economic growth, widespread democratization, growing tolerance of diversity, and a rising sense of freedom’. After devoting an entire book to talking about a happiness crisis, even the British economist Richard Layard admits that ‘we in the West are probably happier than any previous society’.37 That people claim to be so satisfied with their lives is in itself a surprise to most people.

., 87 Vasa (ship), 195 Veenhoven, Ruut, 279–80, 283–5 Venezuela, 43–5, 47 Verizon, 170 Vietnam, 11 Virgin Galactic, 202 Volcker, Paul, 10 Volkswagen, 153 wages see income Walmart, 147, 178 Walton, Sam, 127 wealth, 119–35, 273 capital income, 130–31 super-rich, 119, 125–35 see also inequality Weber, Max, 22, 273 Weiying Zhang, 213, 227 ‘welfare entrepreneurs’, 197 welfare state, 66, 111–14, 293 Wernberg, Joakim, 176–7 Wilson, Harold, 10 work, 83–118, 288–9 gig economy, 101–3 globalization and, 103–4, 109–10 income/wages, 22, 55, 88–96, 95 job losses, 104–7 job satisfaction, 98–100 labour market insecurity, 101 manufacturing industries, 83–7 safety, 98 stress and, 100 unemployment, 108–15, 109 working hours, 97, 97 World Bank, 17–18, 30–31, 39, 233 ‘World Database of Happiness’, 279 World Health Organization, 237 World Trade Organization (WTO), 2, 4–5, 29, 205, 209, 211 World Values Survey, 278, 283 World Wide Fund for Nature, 238, 249 Xerox, 185 Xi Jinping, 199, 205, 216–17, 222, 227–9 Xinjiang, China, 204–5 Yahoo!, 169–70, 174 Yale University, 248 Yemen, 251 YouTube, 177 Zeng Qinghon, 215–16 Zimbabwe, 42–3 Zinn, Howard, 43 zombie companies, 144–5, 149 Zoom, 178 Zuckerberg, Mark, 170, 174–5 Zuma, Jacob, 45–6 About the Author Johan Norberg is a historian, lecturer and commentator.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But this does not seem to be the case. National identity remains alive and well, even in some surprising corners of the world. And this was true even before the global financial crisis and the populist backlash that has unfolded since. To observe the continued vitality of national identification, let us turn to the World Values Survey, which covers more than eighty thousand individuals in fifty-seven countries (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/). The respondents to the survey were asked a range of questions about the strength of their local, national, and global attachments. I measured the strength of national attachments by computing the percentages of respondents who “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement “I see myself as a citizen of [country, nation].”

While global action remained stalled on capping emissions, environmental groups and concerned citizens successfully pushed for the plan over the opposition of business groups, and the state’s Republican governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed it into law in 2006. If it proves a success and remains popular, it could become a model for the entire country. Global polls such as the World Values Survey indicate that there is still a lot of ground that needs to be covered: self-expressed global citizenship tends to run 15–20 percentage points behind national citizenship. But the gap is smaller for young people, the better educated, and the professional classes. Those who consider themselves to be at the top of the class structure are significantly more globally minded than those who consider themselves to be from the lower classes.

See VERs voters, 170–171; rule of law and, 264 Wall Street, 175, 256 Walton, Michael, 173 Walzer, Michael, 192 Warren, Elizabeth (Senator), 212 Washington Consensus, 53, 94, 268; policies, 142 wealth: as a class of its own, 176–179; prosperity and, 223–224; rule of the rich, 169–172 Weibull, Jörgen, 288n20 welfare economics, 32–33 welfare state, 204, 263; to innovation state, 260–263 Wolfers, Justin, 139 Women: female workers, 86–87 work: future paths of, 91–93; history of, 83–86; labor in developing countries, 86–88; policy makers and, 92; skilled versus unskilled workers, 85; sweatshops, 87 World Bank: Ease of Doing Business rankings, 54; reforms for developing countries, 52–53 World Resources Institute, 237 World Trade Organization (WTO), 219, 226, 249; agreements, 129; conditions of membership in, 135; food regulation agreement, 34; hyperglobalization and, 28; rules, x; trade agreements, x World Values Survey, 20–22, 237 WTO. See World Trade Organization Xi Jinping, 191 Yew, Lee Kuan, 104 Zakaria, Fareed, 95 Zenawi, Meles (Prime Minister of Ethiopia), 191–192 Zingales, Luigi, 146


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The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

He thought everything was great.63 Finally, the most mature form of empathic response is the ability to experience an entire group of people or even other species as if their distress were one’s own.64 Often this happens when one empathizes with an individual’s plight and that plight is indicative of what his or her whole group experiences; for example, abused women or certain religious minorities or gay men, who all suffer at the hands of the dominant culture. The universalizing of empathy to include whole groups and categories of beings approaches the notion of a universal consciousness. The World Values Survey, which will be discussed in Chapter 11, shows a clear trend toward the universalizing of empathy among the younger generations, at least in the more developed nations of the world. Fundamental changes in parenting and attachment behavior, longer periods of adolescence, more exposure to diverse peoples, communities, and cultures, greater global connectivity, increasing economic interdependence, and more cosmopolitan lifestyles have all contributed to the universalization of empathic consciousness.

For panentheism, God is “right here,” even as God is also more than “right here.”38 Yet the central narratives of the world’s great religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism—remain, for the most part, disembodied and extraworldly, cutting off empathic extension and the search for connectivity and God’s immanence. In the Age of Empathy, spirituality invariably replaces religiosity. Spirituality is a deeply personal journey of discovery in which embodied experience—as a general rule—becomes the guide to making connections, and empathy becomes the means to foster transcendence. The World Values Survey and countless other polls show a generational shift in attitudes toward the divine, with the younger generation in the industrialized nations increasingly turning away from institutionalized religiosity and toward personal spiritual quests that are embodied in nature and empathic in expression.

The empathy question in the presidential polling is reflective of a sea change in human values that has taken place over the course of the past fifty years around the world. Much of that change has been chronicled and recorded in global public opinion surveys. Among the most detailed of the studies is the World Values Survey, conducted by Ronald Inglehart et al. at the University of Michigan. The researchers began tracking opinion shifts in eighty countries representing 85 percent of the world’s population in 1981. The most recent survey was conducted in 2005. Over the course of nearly a quarter-century of surveying, Inglehart and his colleagues have seen a transformation take place in human consciousness unlike at any other time in human history.


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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

But first a brief overview about what we know about value changes in developed societies. The Decline (but Survival) of Traditional Values Most academic work on the evolution of values over time sees the onward march of Anywhere liberalism, at least in Europe and North America. The most detailed research by the World Values Survey, which has published data in six ‘waves’ since the early 1980s, continues to confirm the trend.11 It is not yet clear whether the Trump victory and Brexit are signs of a slow-down or even reversal of that long liberalising trend. Ronald Inglehart, who has pioneered work on value change, argues that when countries industrialise the traditional values of religion and deference to authority tend to give way to more secular and rational priorities, initially among the educated.

Indeed, the people who hold these views are, in the formulation of a group of American cultural psychologists, WEIRD—they are from a sub-culture that is Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. They tend towards moral universalism and are suspicious of strong national loyalties. As the World Values Survey stresses, they also tend to prioritise autonomy and self-realisation. They are usually strongly concerned with social justice and unfairness, and also suspicious of appeals to religion, tradition or human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment—differences between men and women, for example, are regarded as almost entirely cultural rather than biological.

.: product lines of, 86 Appiah, Kwame Anthony: 117 assortative mating: 188 Aston University: 164 austerity: 98, 200 Australia: 4, 160 Austria: 56, 69–70 authoritarianism: 8, 12, 30, 33, 44, 57; concept of, 57; hard, 45 Baggini, Julian: observations of British class system, 59 Bangladesh: 130 Bank of England: personnel of, 86 Bartels, Larry: Democracy for Realists, 61 Bartlett, Jamie: Radicals, 64 Basel Accords: 85 BASF: 176 Bayer: 176 Belgium: 73, 75, 101; Brussels, 53, 89, 93, 95, 98 Berlusconi, Silvio: 65 birther movement: 68 Bischof, Bob: head of German-British Forum, 174 Blair, Tony: 10, 76, 159, 189; administration of, 218; foreign policy of, 96; speeches of, 3, 7, 49; support for Bulgarian and Romanian EU accession, 26; unravelling of legacy, 221 Bloomsbury Group: 34 Bogdanor, Vernon: concept of ‘exam-passing classes’, 3 Boyle, Danny: Summer Olympics opening ceremony (2012), 111, 222 Branson, Richard: 11 Brexit (EU Referendum)(2016): 1–2, 19, 27, 81, 89, 93, 99–100, 125, 233; negotiations, 103; polling prior to voting, 30, 64; Remainers, 2, 19–20, 52–3, 132; sociological implications of, 4–7, 13, 53–4, 118, 126, 167–8, 225; Stronger In campaign, 61; Vote Leave campaign, 42, 53, 72, 91, 132; voting pattern in, 7–9, 19–20, 23, 26, 36, 52, 55–6, 60, 71, 74, 215, 218 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): 112, 145; Newsnight, 60; personnel of, 15; Radio 4, 31, 227; Today, 60 British Empire: 107 British National Party: European election performance of (2009), 119; supporters of, 38 British Future: 19 British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association: personnel of, 135 British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys: 153; authoritarian-libertarian scale, 44–5; findings of, 38–9, 44, 106–7, 120, 202, 206–7, 218; immigration survey (2013), 44; personnel of, 218–19 British Values Survey: establishment of (1973), 43; groups in, 43 Brooks, Greg: Sheffield report, 155 Brown, Belinda: 205, 207–8 Brown, Gordon: 106; abolition of Married Couples Allowance, 204; budget of (2006), 147–8; political rhetoric of, 16–17 Brummer, Alex: Britain for Sale, 173 Bulgaria: 26; accession to EU, 225 (2007); migrants from, 126; population levels of, 102 Burgess, Simon: 131 Burggraf, Shirley: Feminine Economy and Economic Man, The, 194 Cahn, Andrew: 98 Callaghan, Jim: Ruskin College speech (1976), 154 Callan, Eamonn: 191 Callan, Samantha: 202, 212 Cambridge University: 35, 179, 186; faculty of, 37; students of, 158–9 Cameron, David: 71, 103, 179, 183, 189; administration of, 226; cabinet of, 187 Canada: 160; mass immigration in, 119 capital: 9, 100; cultural, 190; human, 34; liberalisation of controls, 97; social, 110 capitalism: 7, 11; organised, 159 Care (Christian Action Research & Education): 203 Carswell, Douglas: 13 Case, Anne: 67 Casey, Louise: review of opportunity and integration, 129 Catholicism: 15, 213; original sin, 57 Cautres, Bruno: 72 Center for Humans and Nature: 30 Centre for Social Justice: 206; personnel of, 202 chauvinism: 33; decline in prevalence of, 39; violent, 106 China, People’s Republic of: 10, 95, 104, 160; accession to WTO (2001), 88; manufacturing sector of, 86; steel industry of, 87 Chirac, Jacques: electoral victory of (2002), 49 Christianity: 33, 69, 83, 156 citizenship: 68, 121–2; democratic, 7; global, 114; legislation, 103; national, 5; relationship with migration, 126; shared, 113; temporary, 126 Clarke, Charles: British Home Secretary, 84 Clarke, Ken: education reforms of, 158–9 Clegg, Nick: 11, 13, 189 Cliffe, Jeremy: 10–11; ‘Britain’s Cosmopolitan Future’ 216; observations of social conservatism, 217 Clinton, Bill: 29, 76; administration of, 218 Clinton, Hillary: electoral defeat of (2016), 67–8 Coalition Government (UK) (2010–16): 13, 54, 226; cabinet members of, 16; immigration policies of, 124–5 Cold War: end of, 83, 92, 95, 98 Collier, Paul: 110; view of potential reform of UNHCR, 84 colonialism: 87; European, 105 communism: 58 Communist Party of France: 72 Confederation of British Industry (CBI): 164 confirmation bias: concept of, 30 Conservative Party (Tories)(UK): 19, 207; dismantling of apprenticeship system by, 157; ideology of, 76, 196; members of, 31, 164, 187; Party Conference (2016), 226; Red Toryism, 63; supporters of, 24, 35, 77, 143, 216–17 conservatism: 4, 9; cultural, 58; social, 217; Somewhere, 7–8; working-class, 8 Corbyn, Jeremy: elected as leader of Labour Party, 20, 53, 59, 75, 78 Cowley, Philip: 35 Crosland, Tony: Secretary of Education, 36; two-tier higher education system proposed by, 158 Crossrail 2: 228; spending on, 143 Czech Republic: 69, 73 D66: supporters of, 76 Dade, Pat: 43–4, 219; role in establishment of British Values Survey, 43, 218–19 Daily Mail: 227; reader base of, 4 Danish Peoples’ Party: 55, 69–70, 73; ideology of, 73 Darwin, Charles: 28 death penalty: 44; support for, 39, 216–17 Deaton, Angus: 67 deference, end of: 63 Delors, Jacques: 96, 103–4; President of European Commission, 94 Democratic Party: ideology of, 62, 65; shortcomings of engagement strategies of, 66–7 Demos: 137 Dench, Geoff: 207; concept of ‘quality with pluralism’, 214; Transforming Men, 209 Denmark: 69, 71, 99; education levels in, 156 Diana, Princess of Wales: death of (1997), 107 double liberalism: 1, 11, 63 Duffy, Gillian: 124 Dyson: 173; Dyson effect, 173 Economist: 10, 210, 216 Eden, Anthony: administration of, 187 Eichengreen, Barry: 91 Elias, Norbert: 119 Employer Skills Survey: 163 Engineering Employers Federation: 166 Englishness: 111 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip: 218 Essex Man/Woman: 186 Estonia: population levels of, 102 Eton College: 179, 187 Euro (currency): 100–1; accession of countries to, 98–9 European Commission: 26, 97 European Convention on Human Rights: 83–4 European Court of Justice (ECJ): 103 European Economic Community (EEC): 92; British accession to (1973), 93; Treaty of Rome (1957), 101 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): 97–8 European Parliament: elections (2009), 71–2; elections (2014), 72 European Union (EU): 10, 25, 53, 76, 89, 92–4, 99–100, 120, 124, 160, 215, 221–2, 229, 233; Amsterdam Treaty (1997), 94; Common Agricultural Policy, 92, 96; establishment of (1957), 91–2; freedom of movement principles, 100–1, 163–4; Humanitarian Protection Directive (2004), 83; integration, 50, 98–9, 173; Lisbon Treaty (2009), 94; Maastricht Treaty (1992), 94, 96, 103; members states of, 16, 31, 55, 71, 216; personnel of, 128; Schengen Agreement (1985), 94–5, 99, 117; Single European Act (1986), 94; Treaty of Nice (2000), 94 Euroscepticism: 69 Eurozone Crisis (2008–): 92, 99 Evening Standard: 143–5 Facebook: 86 family culture: 196–7; childcare, 202–3; cohabitation, 196, 211; divorce figures, 196–7; gender roles, 206–13; legislation impacting, 195–6; lone parents, 196; married couples tax allowance, 225; relationship with state intrusion, 200–2; tax burdens, 203–4; tax credit systems, 202, 204–5, 225 Farage, Nigel: 11; leader of UKIP, 72; political rhetoric of, 20 Fawcett Society: surveys conducted by, 195–6 federalism: 69 feminism: 185, 199, 205; gender pay gap, 198–9; orthodox, 194 Fidesz: 69, 71, 73 Fillon, François: 73 Financial Times: 91, 108, 115, 138, 145, 147 Finkelstein, Daniel: 34 Five Star Movement: 53, 55, 64, 70, 73 Florida, Richard: concept of ‘Creative Class’, 136 Foges, Clare: 183 food sector: 17, 102, 125, 126 Ford, Robert: 35, 150 foreign ownership: 172–74, 230 Fortuyn, Pim: assassination of (2002), 50, 69 France: 69, 75, 94–6, 101, 173; agricultural sector of, 96; compulsory insurance system of, 222; Paris, 104, 143; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; Revolution (1789–99), 106 Frank, Thomas: concept of ‘liberalism of the rich’, 62 Franzen, Jonathan: 110 free trade agreements: opposition to, 62 Freedom Party: 69; electoral defeat of (2016), 70; ideology of, 73; supporters of, 70 French Colonial Empire (1534–1980): 107 Friedman, Sam: ‘Introducing the Class Ceiling: Social Mobility and Britain’s Elite Occupations’, 187 Friedman, Thomas: World is Flat, The, 85 Front National (FN): 53, 69, 72–3; European electoral performance of (2014), 72; founding of (1973), 72; supporters of, 72 Gallup: polls conducted by, 65 Ganesh, Janan: 115, 145 gay marriage: 5, 76; opposition to, 46–7; support for, 26, 220 General Electric Company (GEC) plc: 172, 175 German-British Forum: members of, 174 Germany: 70, 73, 86, 94, 96, 100–1, 173–4, 209; automobile industry of, 96; chemical industry of, 176; compulsory insurance system of, 222; education sector of, 166; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; labour market of, 147; Leipzig, 58; Ludwigshafen, 176; Reunification (1990), 96, 147, 176; Ruhr, 176–7 Ghemawat, Prof Pankaj: 85–6 Gilens, Martin: study of American public policy and public preferences, 61–2 Glasman, Maurice: 227 Global Financial Crisis (2007–9): 56, 169–70, 177; Credit Crunch (2007–8), 98, 177 Global Villagers: 31–2, 44–5, 160, 226; characteristics of, 46; political representation of, 75; political views of, 109, 112 globalisation: 9–10, 50–2, 81–2, 85, 87–8, 90–1, 105–6, 148; economic, 9; global trade development, 86–7; growth of, 85–6; hyperglobalisation, 88–9; relationship with nation states, 85–6; sane, 90 Golden Dawn: 74; growth of, 105 Goldman Sachs: personnel of, 31 Goldthorpe, John: 184–5, 189–90 Goodhart, David: 12 Goodwin, Fred: 168 Goodwin, Matthew: 150 Gordon, Ian: 137–8, 140 Gould, Philip: 220 Gove, Michael: 64, 91 great liberalisation: 39–40, 47; effect of, 40 Greater London Authority (GLA): 143 Greece: 53, 56, 69, 74, 99, 105; Athens, 143; government of, 98 Green, Francis: 163 Green Party (UK): supporters of, 38 Group of Twenty (G20): 89 Guardian: 14, 210 Habsburg Empire (Austro-Hungarian Empire): collapse of (1918), 107 Haidt, Jonathan: 11, 30, 33, 133; Righteous Mind, The, 28–9 Hakim, Catharine: 205 Hall, Stuart: 14–15 Hames, Tim: 135–6 Hampstead/Hartlepool alliance: 75 Hanson Trust: subsidiaries of, 175 Hard Authoritarian: 43–7, 51, 119, 220; characteristics of, 24–5; political views of, 109 Harris, Gareth: 137; ‘Changing Places’, 137 Harvard University: faculty of, 57 Heath, Edward: foreign policy of, 96 Higgins, Les: role in establishment of British Values Survey, 43 High Speed 2 (HS2): 228 High Speed 3 (HS3): aims of, 151, 228 Hitler, Adolf: 94 Hoescht: 176 Hofstadter, Richard: ‘Everyone is Talking About Populism, But No One Can Define It’ (1967), 54 Holmes, Chris: 151 homophobia: observations in BSA surveys, 39; societal views of, 39–40, 216 Honig, Bonnie: concept of ‘objects of public love’, 111 Huguenots: 121 Huhne, Chris: 16, 32 human rights: 5, 10, 55, 113; courts, 113; legislation, 5, 83–4, 109, 112; rhetoric, 112–13 Hungary: 53, 64, 69, 71, 73–4, 99, 218; Budapest, 218 Ignatieff, Michael: leader of Liberal Party (Canada), 13 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI): 172, 174–5; personnel of, 169; subsidiaries of, 175 Inbetweeners: 4, 25, 46, 109; political views of, 109 India: 104 Inglehart, Ronald: theories of value change, 27 Insider Nation: concept of, 61, 64; evidence of, 61–2 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS): 201; findings of, 211–12 International Monetary Fund (IMF): 86–7, 102 interracial marriage: societal views of, 40 India: 10, 160 Ipsos MORI: polls conducted by, 42, 122 Iraq: 84; Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11), 82 Islam: 50; Ahmadiyya, 84; conservative, 131; Halal, 68; hostility to, 73; Qur’an, 50 Islamism: 130 Islamophobia: 130 Italy: 55, 64, 69–70, 73, 96; migrants from, 125 Jamaica: 14 Japan: 86; request for League of Nations racial equality protocol (1919), 109 Jews/Judaism: 121, 259; orthodox, 131; persecution of, 17 jingoism: 8 Jobbik: 53, 64, 74 Johnson, Boris: 145 Jones, Sir John Harvey: death of (2008), 169 Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of: government of, 84 Jospin, Lionel: defeat in final round of French presidential elections (2002), 49 Judah, Ben: This is London: Life and Death in the World City, 145 Kaufmann, Eric: 8–9, 131, 219, 227; ‘Changing Places’, 137 Kellner, Peter: 78 King, Mervyn: Governor of Bank of England, 86 Kinnock, Neil: 98 knowledge economy: 147, 149, 154, 166, 221 Kohl, Helmut: 94 Kotleba: 74 Krastev, Ivan: 55, 65, 82–3 labour: 9, 89–90, 149; eastern European, 125–6; gender division of, 197; hourglass labour market, 150, 191; living wage, 26, 152; market, 95, 101–2, 124, 140, 147–8, 150–2, 156–7, 181, 225 Labour Party (Denmark): 77 Labour Party (Netherlands): 50; supporters of, 76 Labour Party (UK): 2, 23, 53, 57, 72, 123, 157, 159, 207; Blue Labour, 63; electoral performance of (2015), 75; European election performance (2014), 72; expansion of welfare state under, 199–200; members of, 14, 20, 36, 59, 61, 77–8, 84; Momentum, 53; New Labour, 33, 75, 107, 123, 155, 159, 167, 196, 207, 220, 226, 232; Party Conference (2005), 7; social media presence of, 79; supporters of, 17, 35, 75, 77, 143, 221; voting patterns in Brexit vote, 19 Lakner, Christoph: concept of elephant curve, 87 Lamy, Pascal: 97 Latvia: adoption of Euro, 98–9; migrants from, 25–6 Laurison, Daniel: ‘Introducing the Class Ceiling: Social Mobility and Britain’s Elite Occupations’, 187 Law and Justice Party: 69, 71, 73 Lawson, Nigel: 205 Le Pen, Jean-Marie: victory in final round of French presidential elections (2002), 49, 69 Le Pen, Marine: 53; electoral strategies of, 73 Leadbeater, Charles: 53 League of Nations: protocols of, 109 left-behinders: 20 Lega Nord: 69 Levin, Yuval: Fractured Republic, The, 232 liberal democracy: 2, 31, 55 Liberal Democrats: 23, 53–4; members of, 16; supporters of, 38, 78 Liberal Party (Canada): members of, 13 liberalism: 4–5, 12–13, 29–31, 55, 76, 119, 127–8, 199, 233; Anywhere, 27–8; baby boomer, 6; double, 1, 63; economic, 11; graduate, 216–17; meritocratic, 34; metropolitan, 216; orthodox, 13–14; Pioneer, 44; social, 4, 11 libertarianism: 8, 11, 22, 39, 44 Libya: 84; Civil War (2011), 225 Lilla, Mark: 35 Lind, Michael: 105, 135 Livingstone, Ken: 136 Lloyd, John: 56 London School of Economics (LSE): 54, 137–8, 140, 183 Low Pay Commission: findings of, 170 Lucas Industries plc: 172 male breadwinner: 149, 194, 195, 198, 206, 207 Manchester University: faculty of, 131 Mandelson, Peter: British Home Secretary, 61; family of, 61 Mandler, Peter: 135 Marr, Andrew: 53, 181 Marshall Plan (1948): 92 mass immigration: 14, 55, 104–5, 118–19, 121–4, 126–7, 140, 228–9; accompanied infrastructure development, 137–9; brain-drain issue, 102; debate of issue, 81–2; freedom of movement debates, 100–3; housing levels issue, 138–9; impact on wages, 152; integration, 129–32, 140–2; non-EU, 124–5; opposition to, 16–17, 120, 220 May, Theresa: 63, 179, 183, 198–9; administration of, 173, 176, 187, 191, 230; British Home Secretary, 124–5; ‘Citizens of Nowhere’ speech (2016), 31; political rhetoric of, 15, 31, 226 McCain, John: electoral defeat of (2008), 68 meritocracy: 152, 179–80, 190; critiques of, 180–1; perceptions of, 182–3 Merkel, Angela: reaction to refugee crisis (2015), 71 Mexico: borders of, 21 migration flows: global rates, 82, 87; non-refugee, 82 Milanovic, Branko: 126; concept of elephant curve, 87 Miliband, Ed: 78, 189 Mill, John Stuart: ‘harm principle’ of, 11–12 Millennium Cohort Study: 159 Miller, David: concept of ‘weak cosmopolitanism’, 109 Mills, Colin: 185 Mitterand, François: 94, 97 mobility: 8, 11, 20, 23, 36, 37, 38, 153, 167, 219; capital: 86, 88; geographical, 4, 6; social, 6, 33, 58, 152, 168, 179, 180, 182, 183–191, 213, 215, 220, 226, 231 Moderate Party: members of, 70 Monnet, Jean: 94–5, 97, 103–4 Morgan Stanley: 171 Mudde, Cas: observations of populism, 57 multiculturalism: 14, 50, 141–2; conceptualisation of, 106; laissez-faire, 132 narodniki: 54 national identity: 14, 38, 41, 111–12; conceptualisations of, 45; indifference to, 41, 46, 106, 114; polling on, 41 nationalism: 38, 46–7, 105; chauvinistic, 107, 120; civic, 23, 53; extreme, 104; moderate, 228; modern, 112; post-, 8, 105–6, 112; Scottish, 221 nativism: 57 Neave, Guy: 36 net migration: 126; White British, 136 Netherlands: 13–14, 50, 69, 73, 75, 99–100; Amsterdam, 49, 51; immigrant/minority population of, 50–1; Moroccan population of, 50–1 Netmums: surveys conducted by, 205–6 New Culture Forum: members of, 144 New Jerusalem: 105 New Society/Opinion Research Centre: polling conducted by, 33 New Zealand: 160 Nextdoor: 114 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): 21; refugee, 82 Norris, Pippa: 57 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): 91; opposition to, 62 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): 85, 92; personnel of, 84 Norway: 69 Nuttall, Paul: leader of UKIP, 72; Obama, Barack: 67; approval ratings of, 60; electoral victory of (2012), 68; healthcare policies of, 22–3; target of birther movement, 68 O’Donnell, Gus: background of, 15–16; British Cabinet Secretary, 15 O’Leary, Duncan: 232 Open University: Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), 172–3 Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11): political impact of, 56 Orbán, Victor: 69, 218 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): 201, 204; report on education levels (2016), 155–6; start-ups ranking, 173 Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 108–9 Osborne, George: 189; economic policies of, 4, 226 Oswald, Andrew: 171 Ottoman Empire: collapse of (1923), 107 outsider nation: concept of, 61, 64 Owen, David: 99 Oxford University: 15, 35, 179, 186; Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance, 151; faculty of, 31, 151; Nuffield College, 32 Pakistan: persecution of Ahmadiyya Muslims in, 84 Parris, Matthew: 115 Parsons, Talcott: concept of ‘achieved’ identities, 115 Party of Freedom (PVV): 69; ideology of, 73; supporters of, 50, 76 Paxman, Jeremy: 42 Pearson: ownership of Higher National Certificates (HNCs)/Higher National Diplomas (HNDs), 157 Pegida: ideology of, 73 Pessoa, Joao Paulo: 88 Phalange: 74 Phillips, Trevor: 133 Pioneers: characteristics of, 43–4 Plaid Cymru: supporters of, 38 Podemos: 53, 64 Poland: 56, 69, 73; migrants from, 25–6, 121 Policy Exchange: ‘Bittersweet Success’, 188 political elites: media representation of, 63–4 populism: 1, 5, 13–14, 49–52, 55–6, 60, 64, 67, 69–74, 81; American, 54, 65; British, 63; decent, 6, 55, 71, 73, 219–20, 222, 227, 233; definitions of, 54; European, 49, 53, 65, 68–9, 74; left-wing, 54, 56; opposition to, 74; right-wing, 33, 51, 54 Populists: 54 Portillo, Michael: 31 Portugal: migrants from, 121, 125 post-industrialism: 6 post-nationalism: 105 poverty: 83, 168; child, 183–4, 200, 204; extreme, 87; reduction of, 78, 200; wages, 231 Powell, Enoch: ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (1968), 127 Professionalisation of politics: 59 Progress Party: 69 progressive individualism: 5 Progressive Party: founding of (1912), 54 proportional representation: support for, 228 Prospect: 14, 91, 136 Prospectors: characteristics of, 43 Protestantism: 8, 213 Putin, Vladimir: 218 Putnam, Robert: 22; theory of social capital, 110 racism: 32, 73–4, 134; observations in BSA surveys, 39; societal views of, 39; violent, 127 Rashid, Sammy: Sheffield report, 155 Reagan, Ronald: 58, 63; approval ratings of, 60 Recchi, Ettore: 104 Refugee Crisis (2015–): 83–4; charitable efforts targeting, 21–2; government funds provided to aid, 83; political reactions to, 71 Relationships Foundation: 202 Republic of Ireland: 99; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 151; property bubble in, 98 Republican Party: ideology of, 62, 65; members of, 68 Resolution Foundation: 87–8; concept of ‘squeezed middle’, 168–9; reports of, 171 Ricardo, David: trade theory of, 101 Robinson, Eric: 36 Rodrik, Dani: 82, 89; concept of ‘hyperglobalisation’, 88; theory of ‘sane globalisation’, 90 Romania: 26; accession to EU, 225 (2007); migrants from, 102, 126 Romney, Mitt: electoral defeat of (2012), 68 Roosevelt, Theodore: leader of Progressive Party, 54 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 156 Rowthorn, Bob: 149 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS): personnel of, 168 Royal College of Nursing: 140 Rudd, Amber: foreign worker list conflict (2016), 17 Ruhs, Martin: 126 Russell Group: 55; culture of, 37; student demographics of, 130–1, 191 Russian Federation: 2, 92; Moscow, 218; St Petersburg, 218 Rwanda: Genocide (1994), 82 Saffy factor: concept of, 199, 221–2 Scheffer, Paul: 85; ‘Multicultural Tragedy, The’ (2000), 49–50 Schumann, Robert: 94 Sciences Po: personnel of, 104 Scottish National Party (SNP): 1, 23, 54, 112; electoral performance of (2015), 75; ideology of, 53 Second World War (1939–45): 105, 194; Holocaust, 109 Security and identity issues: 41, 78, 81 Settlers: characteristics of, 43 Sikhism: 131 Singapore: 101, 128; education levels in, 156 Slovakia: 69, 73–4 Slovenia: adoption of Euro, 98–9 Smer: 69, 73 Smith, Zadie: 141–2 Social Democratic Party: supporters of, 75–6 social mobility: 6, 33, 58, 179–80, 183, 187, 189–91, 220; absolute mobility, 184, 188; relative mobility, 184; slow, 168; upward, 152 Social Mobility Commission: 161, 179–80 socialism: 49, 72, 183, 190 Somewheres: 3–5, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 41–3, 45, 115, 177, 180, 191, 214, 223, 228; characteristics of, 5–6, 2, 32; conflict with Anywheres, 23, 79, 81, 193, 215; conservatism, 7–8; employment of, 11; European, 103; immigration of, 106; moral institutions, 223–4; political representation/voting patterns of, 13–14, 24–6, 36, 53–5, 77–9, 124, 227; political views of, 71, 76, 109, 112, 119, 199, 218, 224–6, 232; potential coalition with Anywheres, 220, 222, 225–6, 233; view of migrant integration, 134 Sorrell, Martin: 31 Soskice, David: 159 South Korea: 86 Soviet Union (USSR): 92, 188; collapse of (1991), 82, 107 Sowell, Thomas: 30; A Conflict of Visions, 29 Spain: 53, 56, 64, 74; government of, 98; migrants from, 125; property bubble in, 98 Steinem, Gloria: 198 Stenner, Karen: 30, 44, 122, 133, 227; Authoritarian Dynamic, The, 30–1 Stephens, Philip: 108 Sun, The: 227 Sutherland, Peter: 31–2 Sutton Trust: end of mobility thesis, 183–5 Swaziland: 135 Sweden: 56, 70, 100; general elections (2014), 70; Stockholm, 143; taxation system of, 222 Sweden Democrats: 70; electoral performance of (2014), 70; ideology of, 73 Switzerland: 37 Syria: Civil War (2009–), 82, 84 Syriza: 53, 69 Taiwan: 86 Teeside University: 164 terrorism: jihadi, 71, 74, 129 Thatcher, Margaret: 58, 63, 95, 189, 205; administration of, 169; economic policies of, 176 Third Reich (1933–45): 104; persecution of Jews in, 17 Times Education Supplement: 37 Timmermans, Frans: EU Commissioner, 128 Thompson, Mark: Director-General of BBC, 15 trade theory: principles of, 101 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP): 89; support for, 225 Trump, Donald: 50, 62, 74, 85; electoral victory of (2016), 1–3, 5–7, 13, 27, 30, 64–8, 81, 232; political rhetoric of, 14, 22–3, 51, 54, 66–7; supporters of, 56, 67 Tube Investments (TI): 172 Turkey: 218 Twitter: use for political activism, 79 Uber: 140 UK Independence Party (UKIP): 53, 55, 63–4, 69, 71–3, 228; electoral performance of (2015), 75; European election performance (2009), 71–2; members of, 13; origins of, 72; supporters of, 24, 35, 38, 72, 75, 143, 168, 216, 222 ultimatum game: 52 Understanding Society: surveys conducted by, 37–8, 202 unemployment: 101–2; gender divide of, 208–9; not in employment, education or training (Neets), 151–2, 190; youth, 139, 151–2, 166 Unilever: 175 United Kingdom (UK): 1–3, 8, 11–12, 21, 27–8, 31, 33, 41, 44, 59–60, 69, 73, 75, 81, 83, 91, 111–12, 147, 165, 173, 180, 193–5, 199, 204, 217, 227; Aberdeen, 136; accession to EEC (1973), 93; Adult Skills budget of, 161, 225; apprenticeship system of, 154, 157, 162–3, 166; Birmingham, 7, 123, 166; Boston, 121; Bradford, 133, 136; Bristol, 136; British Indian population of, 77; Burnley, 151; Cambridge, 136; City of London, 95, 106, 174; class system in, 58–9, 75, 123, 135–6, 149–52, 172, 182–3, 186, 195; Dagenham, 136; Department for Education, 206; Department for International Development (DfID), 224; Divorce Law Reform Act (1969), 196; economy of, 152, 170; Edinburgh, 54, 136; education sector of, 35, 147, 154–8; ethnic Chinese population of, 77; EU citizens in, 101; Finance Act (2014), 211; Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 224; Glasgow, 136; high-skill/low-skill job disappearance in, 150–1; higher education sector of, 35–7, 47, 159–62, 164–7, 179, 208, 230–1; Home Office, 17; House of Commons, 162; general election in (2015), 60; House of Lords, 31; Human Rights Act, 123, 225; income inequality levels in, 169–70, 172, 177, 184–5; labour market of, 16, 26, 124, 140–1, 148, 150–1, 152, 225; Leicester, 133; Leeds, 161; London, 3–4, 7, 10–11, 18–19, 24, 26, 34, 37, 59, 79, 101, 114–15, 119, 123, 131, 133–45, 151, 168, 216, 218, 226, 228, 232–3; Manchester, 123, 136, 151, 161, 228; manufacturing sector of, 17, 88; mass immigration in, 122–4, 126–7, 228–9; Muslim immigration in, 41–2, 44; Muslim population of, 127, 130; National Health Service (NHS), 72, 91, 111, 120, 140, 144, 200–1, 229; National Insurance system of, 204; Newcastle, 131, 136, 161; Northern Ireland, 38; Office for Fair Access, 180; Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), 155; Office of National Statistics (ONS), 138, 144–5; Oldham, 133; Olympic Games (2012), 111, 143, 222; Oxford, 136; Parliamentary expenses scandal (2009), 56, 168; Plymouth, 131; public sector employment in, 171, 208–9, 229–30; regional identities in, 3–4, 186; Rochdale, 124; Scotland, 110, 138; Scottish independence referendum (2014), 53, 110; self-employment levels in, 171; Sheffield, 161; Slough, 131, 133; social mobility rate in, 58, 184–5, 187; start-ups in, 173–4; Stoke, 121; Sunderland, 52, 172; Supreme Court, 66; taxation system of, 222; Treasury, 16; UK Border Agency, 108; vocational education in, 163; voting patterns for Brexit vote, 7–9, 19–20, 23, 26, 36, 52; wage levels in, 168; Wales, 138; welfare state in, 199–203, 223–4, 231–2; Westminster, 54, 58, 60; youth unemployment in, 151–2 United Nations (UN): 102, 198; Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 10; Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 109; Geneva Convention (1951), 82–4; High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 82, 84; Security Council, 99 United States of America (USA): 1–2, 6–7, 22–3, 36–7, 51, 57, 60, 74, 86, 89, 94, 128, 168, 193, 208, 227; 9/11 Attacks, 130; Agency for International Development (USAID), 224; Asian population of, 68; borders of, 21; Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 54; class identity in, 65–6; Congress, 67; Constitution of, 57; education system of, 166; higher education sector of, 167; Hispanic population of, 67–8, 85; House of Representatives, 67; immigration debate in, 67–8; Ivy League, 36, 61; New York, 135; political divisions in, 65; Senate, 67 University College London (UCL): Imagining the Future City: London 2061, 137, 139 University of California: 165 University of Kent: 36 University of Sussex: 36 University of Warwick: 36; faculty of, 171 Vietnam War (1955–75): 29 Visegrad Group: 69, 73, 99 Vlaams Belang: ideology of, 73 wages for housework: 194 Walzer, Michael: 117–18 War on Drugs: 62 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic): 27 Welzel, Christian: Freedom Rising, 27 Westminster University: 165 white flight: 129, 134, 136 white identity politics: 9, 67 white supremacy: 8, 68, 73–4 Whittle, Peter: 144 Wilders, Geert: 50, 76 Willetts, David: 164, 185 Wilson, Harold: electoral victory of (1964), 150 Wolf, Prof Alison: 162, 164–5; XX Factor, The, 189, 198 working class: 2–4, 6, 51–2, 59, 61, 65; conservatism, 8 political representation/views of, 8, 52, 58, 63, 70, 72; progressives, 78–9; voting patterns of, 15, 52, 75–6; white, 19, 68 World Bank: 84 World Trade Organisation (WTO): 10, 85, 89–90, 97; accession of China to (2001), 88 World Values Survey: 27 xenophobia: 2, 14, 50–1, 57, 71, 119, 121, 141, 144, 225 York, Peter: 138 York University: 36 YouGov: personnel of, 78; polls conducted by, 16–17, 42, 66, 79, 114, 132, 141 Young, Hugo: 93 Young, Michael: 119, 190; Rise of the Meritocracy, The, 180–1 Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001): 97 Yugoslavia: 97 Zeman, Milos: President of Czech Republic, 73


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

A 1993 Gallup International “Health of the Planet Survey” covering twenty-four nations found a substantial concern for the environment among people of both industrial and developing nations, with majorities agreeing that protecting the environment is more important than economic growth.7 The World Values Survey, which gathered longitudinal data from forty-three countries from 1970 to 1994, found that residents of countries that achieve significant economic security show a strong inclination to challenge traditional sources of authority, including government, science, and organized religion, in favor of greater freedom of selfexpression and personally examined values. The World Values Survey data reveal a growing acceptance of equal rights for women, a greater interest in the quality of life relative to pursuit of material gain, and an increasing sense of the importance of family life to individual and community well-being.

Treasury Department, 136–137, 239 value of money, 139 values alignment with authentic, 84 Christian, 339 of Earth Community, 55, 319–320 family, 221–222, 329, 337 Institute for American Values, 282 liberal and conservative, 31, 298, 328, 340 moral, 225, 324, 329 progressive, 339 surveys of U.S., 79–80 World Values Survey, 80 VA (Veterans Administration), 64 van Gelder, Sarah, 14, 357 Vazquez, Tabare, 356 Veterans Administration (VA), 64 violence, 37, 65, 66, 265, 285, 297, 307 Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion, 168–169 vocations, 297 voting/voters integrity of voting machines, 348 numbers of women voting, 323 right to vote, 348 voter base, 221–223 voting rights, 187, 215 wage increases, 213 wages, inadequate, 226 Walker, David, 202 walking away from the king, 174–178, 356 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 65–66 Wallis, Jim, 261 War of 1812, 190–191 wars.

See also gender perspectives in ancient Athens, 146 Daughters of Liberty, 176 equality for, 202, 203–204 in his-story, 106–107 historical roles of, 94 job and family issues, 226 leadership by, 323–324 partnership relations, 37 rejection of social roles definitions, 323 rights of citizenship, 187 runaway wives, 168 spiritual identity of, 104–105 subjugation of, historic, 112 subordination of, by men, 105–106 When God Was a Woman (Stone), 98 women-led societies, 99, 323 workers, isolation from rulers of, 57–58 working class, 206–212 399 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 204 World Bank, 136–137, 194, 195, 227, 239 World Health Organization (WHO), 64 World Social Forum, 87 World Trade Organization (WTO), 12, 87, 136, 195, 228, 239 World Values Survey, 80 worldview(s) creation of, 76 inclusive, 47 Integral World view, 47 mature, 52 of modern culture, 256 Western religious, 254 World War II, 134–135, 194–196, 200, 217 World Wide Web, development of, 82 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 59 WTO (World Trade Organization), 12, 87, 136, 195, 228, 239 WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 59 YES!


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

He advised a new ‘responsible nationalism’, which would ‘begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good’.76 The global elites, in other words, need to catch up with how most people view the world – not the other way round. I believe what Summers is saying now is closer to the truth. According to the World Values Survey, people identify far more strongly with their nation than with a global identity. The two exceptions were Colombia, which has been racked by a brutal civil war for more than a generation, and Andorra, which has fewer than eighty thousand people. The more we cede power to global bodies, the more virulent the backlash against globalisation.

Davos is no fan club for more democracy. Having hived off many areas that were once under democratic control (such as monetary policy and trade and investment), post-2016 Western elites now fear they have not gone far enough. But elite disenchantment with democracy has been rising for many years. According to the World Values Survey, which offers the most detailed take on the state of global public opinion, support for democracy has plummeted across the Western world since the fall of the Berlin Wall.52 This is particularly true of the younger generations. For a long time, academics assumed that rising signs of disaffection with democracy were simply a reflection of dislike of the government of the moment.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

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

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

TOWARD AN INCLUSIVE CIVIC NATIONALISM One of the reasons populist nationalism appears to be spreading today is because alternative sources of social solidarity, such as the neighborhood or community, seem to be tenuous, especially for those with lower incomes and sliding status. For example, the World Values Survey indicates that in the United States, only 57 percent of low-income respondents trusted people from their neighborhood, while 85 percent of upper-middle-class respondents did so.6 Similarly, when asked whether they saw themselves as part of the community, there was a thirteen-percentage-point lower response for low-income respondents than for those who saw themselves as upper-middle-class.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist papers (1788), available at https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers, especially Federalist 10, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” 6. Evidence available from the author based on analysis of World Value Surveys. 7. David Brooks, “Bobos in Paradise,” in The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender, ed. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007). 8. Mitchell Petersen and Raghuram Rajan, “Does Distance Still Matter? The Information Revolution in Small Business Lending,” Journal of Finance 57, no. 6 (December 2002): 2533–70. 9.

“Japan’s Foreign Minister Says Country to Open to Foreigners,” The New York Times, September 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/09/13/world/asia/ap-as-vietnam-japan-migration.html [inactive]. 5. “Physicians (per 1,000 People),” World Bank (website), accessed August 7, 2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS. 6. Dani Rodrik offers a related set of calculations from the World Value Survey in his book Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 7. Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007), 139. 8. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). 9.


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

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

And there is a reason for this: the more educated you are, the more likely you are to question rigid hierarchy, be tolerant of cultural differences, and reject traditional values. These correlations aren’t found only in the United States; they are also evident globally, as the political scientist Ronald Inglehart has shown through the World Values Survey. Although education can obviously open one’s mind to new ideas and experiences, Inglehart suggests a deeper underlying dynamic, which is that the educated are more likely to have been raised in economically secure families. As Inglehart tells the story, people who grow up feeling secure tend to focus more on self-expression and worry less about maintaining order.

“Postmodern values give priority to environmental protection and cultural issues,” Inglehart wrote, “even when these goals conflict with maximizing economic growth.”11 Affluent people also have more time and energy to sink into endeavors that aren’t simply about making ends meet. Inglehart bases this conclusion on forty years of research through the World Values Survey, which has tracked changing values in more than eighty-one countries. His findings have consistently shown that rising incomes and more wealth lead ineluctably to an embrace of environmentalism. Richer countries have stronger environmental movements than poorer ones do, and the modern environmental movement in both the United States and Europe was born during an era of mass affluence in the 1960s.

., 19, 170, 236 and self-interest, 53, 143–144 social context in the future, 283–289 as threat to representative democracy, 9, 100, 196, 206, 209, 277–279, 289 as threat to social justice, 266–267 westward shift, 170–171 See also wealth creation wealth creation, 6–7, 22–30, 36, 81, 106, 109, 134, 144, 151 William Flora Hewlett Foundation, 193–194 Wilson, Robert W. 77–78 Wolf, Robert, 42 women’s issues, 27, 93, 172–173, 254, 260, 277 WorldCom, 44, 159, 232 World Economic Forum, 60, 115–116, 163 World Values Survey, 27, 65 Yahoo!, 88, 182, 188 Zuckerberg, Mark, 60, 193, 269–270 5/11/10 6:28:41 AM — co n t i n u e d fro m fro n t f l ap — of Change “Reading Fortunes of Change is like finding the missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Sweeping economic changes are profoundly reshaping our politics—and not in ways we usually think.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

Despite all the warnings of racism on the rise, every serious survey of attitudes to race and ethnicity in British society tells the same story of growing tolerance today. One article published in October 2016 summarised various findings: only one in ten Brits now ‘endorse nakedly racist views’; the proportion of the English public ‘most hostile to immigration’ for racist reasons has shrunk from 13 per cent to 7 per cent; while the World Values Survey now ‘rates Britain as one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world’. None of which prevented the Remainer newspaper in question publishing the article under a headline which declared, contrary to all its own evidence, that post-referendum ‘Britain is becoming mean and small-minded’.47 The political and media panic about an alleged wave of ‘hate crimes’ after the referendum appeared equally dubious.

2 Oh, I don’t know – how about ‘the democratic majority’? Nevertheless, the way that everybody wants a piece of the D-word demonstrates that even autocrats feel it necessary to dress up as democrats these days. Little wonder, given that most people on the planet will say they want to live under a democratic system. When the World Values Survey questioned 73,000 people in 57 countries which account for 85 per cent of the world’s population, almost 92 per cent endorsed democracy as a good way to govern.3 And yet despite all of that apparent support, something is shifting beneath the surface of society that puts living democracy to question – not just in unstable developing states, but in its Western heartlands.


pages: 211 words: 69,380

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

classic study, Day of the Dead, experimental subject, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Kibera, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, security theater, selection bias, Steve Jobs, summit fever, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, traveling salesman, World Values Survey

And we cringe, surely rightly, when we hear well-heeled celebrities speak in rapt tones about the simple joys of having nothing – as when, for example, Coleen Rooney, television presenter and footballer’s wife, told an interviewer: ‘I find it so inspiring when you see people from poorer countries on TV: they just seem so happy with their lives, despite their lack of material things … in the future, I plan to visit somewhere like Africa.’ The problem with merely dismissing this entire outlook as wrong or misguided, though, is that it appears to be at least partly true. International surveys of happiness – including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey – have consistently found some of the world’s poorest countries to be among the happiest. (Nigeria, where 92 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, has come in first place.) Survey data from the Afrobarometer research project, which monitors more than a dozen African countries, including Kenya, has indicated ‘unusual levels of optimism among the poorest and most insecure respondents’ in those places.

‘It’s clear that poverty has crippled Kibera’: From Jean-Pierre Larroque, ‘Of Crime and Camels’, blog post at mediaforsocialchange.org/blog/of-crime-and-camels 22 July 2001 ‘I find it so inspiring when you see people’: See ‘Colleen “Inspired” by Poor People’, unbylined article at www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/22368-coleen-inspired-by-poor-people International surveys of happiness: All World Values Survey data is accessible at www.worldvaluessurvey.org. Also see, for example, ‘Nigeria Tops Happiness Survey’, unbylined BBC News article, 2 October 2003, at news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3157570.stm Survey data from the Afrobarometer project: A good overview of this research is Carol Graham and Matthew Hoover, ‘Poverty and Optimism in Africa: Adaptation or Survival?’


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

“Individual attitudes and attributes are considered more important than family background, race, gender or the economy as reasons people get ahead,” the study concluded. Indeed, Americans see individuals as responsible for their own economic fortunes in a way that most people around the world do not. According to the World Values Survey, a significant majority of Americans believe the poor could become rich if they tried hard enough, whereas a significant proportion of Europeans disagree. In a 2014 Pew survey, a majority of Americans disagreed that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control,” whereas a majority of Europeans concurred.

$10 billion fortune: Ana Swanson, “The Myth and Reality of Donald Trump’s Business Empire,” Washington Post, Feb. 29, 2016. “hard work” and “ambition” as the two most important factors: “Economic Mobility and the American Dream: Where Do We Stand in the Wake of the Great Recession?” (Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, Pew Charitable Trusts, May 2011). World Values Survey: Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution: US vs. Europe,” American Economic Review 95 (Sept. 2005): 913–35. “success in life is pretty much determined”: George Gao, “How Do Americans Stand Out from the Rest of the World?,” FactTank (blog), Pew Research Center, Mar. 12, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/​fact-tank/​2015/​03/​12/​how-do-americans-stand-out-from-the-rest-of-the-world/.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

They are asked to imagine a ladder and to place their life satisfaction on the appropriate rung, with the best possible life for them being 10 and the worst 0. Another question, in the European Social Survey, asks, “Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?” with answers ranked from 0 to 10. Yet another—the World Values Survey—poses a similar question but orders answers on a scale of 0 to 3. “Taking all things together, would you say you are: Very happy, Quite happy, Not very happy, or Not at all happy?” These types of questions are the ones that Layard says produce the most useful results. The good news for happiness economics is that the results of different surveys tend to match.

These are income (GDP per capita), healthy years of life expectancy, having people to turn to, trust in others (roughly equated to lack of corruption), perceived freedom to make life decisions (what is sometimes called agency), and generosity (the propensity to donate to charity). * * * — Layard’s work focuses less on cross-country comparisons and more on what dictates levels of happiness within countries. Using data from the World Values Survey, which has been carried out since 1981, he singles out seven main determinants of happiness.13 These are: family relationships, financial situation, work, friends, health, personal freedom, and personal values. He lists these in a table, showing the negative impact of various events on total happiness as measured on a scale of 10 to 100, with 100 being perfect happiness:14 Figure 5 The table highlights a number of patterns.


pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Government Printing Office: Washington, 1980. Work in America. A report of a special task force to the Secretary of HEW (Health Education and Welfare). Boston: MIT Press, 1975. World Investment Report. Transnational Corporations and Integrated International Production. New York: United Nations, 1993. World Values Survey. Data from the World Values Survey. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. The Worst: A Compilation Zine on Grief and Loss 1 (2008). http://www.theworstcompzine.blogspot.com Zajicek, Edward K., Toni Calasanti, Cristie Ginther, and Julie Summers. “Intersectionality and Age Relations: Unpaid Care Work and Chicanas.”


pages: 503 words: 131,064

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

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

Lord Kelvin said Silvanus Phillips Thompson (2011), The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, Cambridge University Press. Chapter 17 leap of faith Søren Kierkegaard (1844), The Concept of Anxiety. Alistair Hannay and Gordon Marino, eds. (1997), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press. World Values Survey Jaime Diez Medrano (2011), “Interpersonal Trust,” World Values Survey Archive and ASEP/JDS. results differ widely Magali Rheault (5 Oct 2007), “Many World Citizens Trust Neighbors More Than Police: Trust in Neighbors and Police About Equal in 21 Countries,” Gallup. tried something similar Reader's Digest (Jul 2007), “The Reader's Digest Global Phone Test.”

(6) This is a simplification of something Lord Kelvin said: I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be. (7) Or, as Lord Acton said over 100 years ago: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Chapter 17 (1) In some ways, this is similar to Kierkegaard's leap of faith, the non-logical acceptance of belief required for most religions. (2) The World Values Survey measures impersonal trust in about 70 different countries by asking the question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” The Scandinavian countries reported the highest level of trust (60% in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark believe most people can be trusted), while countries like Peru, Turkey, Rwanda, and Trinidad and Tobago reported the lowest.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

For all those people except individuals in the top quintile of income, greater inequality is correlated with a reduction in protest participation, and that result holds across a data set of twenty-five different European democracies. Political interest, the frequency of political discussion, and participation in elections also all tend to be lower in situations with higher income inequality. Similarly, a global study based on the World Values Survey found that support for democracy was relatively low when inequality was high; thus, engagement also might be low under those conditions.8 I’ve heard many a question about when the next revolutionary Thermidor is coming to the United States, but the data suggest a different story. Since 1970, American survey respondents show no greater preference for government redistribution.

For those pie charts, see Roeder, Eisen, and Bowling (2015, p. 6). On the parallel with Canada, see Latzer (2016, p. 247).   5. “Beyond Distrust” (2015).   6. On declining trust across the two parties, see, for instance, Haidt and Hetherington (2012).   7. See, for instance, Purtill (2016) and Silver (2016).   8. See Solt (2008, 2015). On the World Values Survey, see Krieckhaus, Son, Bellinger, and Wells (2014).   9. See Ashok, Kuziemko, and Washington (2015). In general these trends are robust long-run trends and they do not require the particular start date of 1970. 10. On female education and the number of children, see Hazan and Zoabi (2015). 11.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

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

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

There is yet further evidence that wealthier, more business-oriented nations are more likely to induce higher levels of trust. Two economists, Paul J. Zak and Stephen Knack, set out to study this connection. They began by measuring which nations’ citizens demonstrate the most trust, using questionnaire answers from the World Values Survey. For instance, one question asks respondents to check one of two statements: either “most people can be trusted” or “you can’t be too careful dealing with people.” There is a remarkable variance in the answers, with Peru getting the lowest score at a 5.5 percent positive response and Norway getting the highest score at a 61.2 percent positive response.

Treasury See also T-bills venture capital American innovation and Verizon Vietnam War voice recording Volkswagen wages Walgreens Walmart Warren, Elizabeth Waze wealth management Wells Fargo WhatsApp whistleblowers Wi-Fi-enabled technology WikiLeaks Williamson, Oliver Wilson, David work altruism and economic oppression exploitation flow and human relationships and non-pay-related benefits potential burden of satisfaction of sexual harassment and stress and studies “work as a safe haven” effect work hours workplace freedom WolframAlpha World Bank World Trade Organization World Values Survey World War I World War II X-rays Yahoo YouTube Zak, Paul J. Zawadzki, Matthew J. Zingales, Luigi zombie banks Zuckerberg, Mark See also Facebook ALSO BY TYLER COWEN The Complacent Class Average Is Over The Great Stagnation An Economist Gets Lunch The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist ABOUT THE AUTHOR TYLER COWEN, Ph.D., holds the Holbert L.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

“Four out of five were materialistic in 1970” Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies”, American Political Science Review Vol. 65, No. 4, December 1971. For updates since then, see Ronald Inglehart, “Changing Values among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006”, West European Politics Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2, January–March 2008; also, the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). Many make sense of the shift to less materialistic values by referring to Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review Vol. 50, No. 4, 1943. Also, read about a generational shift to post-materialism in David Brooks, “The Experience Economy”, New York Times, 14 February 2011.

Is Experientialism the Answer to Stuffocation? Ron Inglehart Again, Ron Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies”, American Political Science Review Vol. 65, No. 4, December 1971. To see the shift away from materialistic values, see the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). The changing make-up of our economy Compare the type of items in Simon Kuznets, National Income, 1929-32 (Cambridge, MA: NBER, June 1934) with those in today’s economies. Consider also, Francisco J Buera and Joseph P Kaboski. “The Rise of the Service Economy”, American Economic Review Vol. 102, No. 6, 2012.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Since 1980, for example, both use of the death penalty and the prosecution of homosexuality have rapidly decreased in countries around the world. These steps probably wouldn’t be surprising to the political scientist Christian Welzel, who has documented a steady rise in what he calls “emancipative values” such as gender equality, personal choice, freedom of speech, and political voice. Drawing on the World Values Survey, which since the early 1980s has asked questions of as many as 150,000 people in ninety-five countries that together contain 90 percent of the planet’s population, Welzel documents a startling trend: all regions of the world, without exception, are embracing more and more of these values. The cumulative changes are huge.

Seebohm, 24 Royal Crown Cola, 101 Russia, 185 Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), 66 Salemi, Jason, 216 Salesforce, 256–57 Samasource, 255–56 sanitation, 22–23, 194 Saudi Arabia, 104 Save the Elephants, 154 Schmidt, Christian, 148 Schnakenberg, Keith, 175 Schumpeter, Joseph, 122 Scientific American, 59–60 Scotland, 38 Scramble for Africa, 39 sea otters, 43, 96, 152 Second Enlightenment, 123, 141, 238–39, 265 Second Machine Age, 112–13, 114–15, 122–23, 141, 162, 168, 177, 200, 206, 213, 231 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson), 112 self-employment, 138–39 self-healing cities, 21–23 self-interest, 127 Sen, Amartya, 68–69, 94 service industry, 88, 200–201 Shapiro, David, 190 Shell Oil, 103, 104–05 Shellenberger, Michael, 251 Sherman, Brad, 107 Sheskin, Mark, 210 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (las Casas), 39–40 Sidgwick, Henry, 142n silver, 120 Simon, Julian, 69–70, 71–72, 75, 151, 179, 244–45 Singapore, 148 Singh, Manmohan, 171–72 Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 179, 181 slash-and-burn agriculture, 148 slavery, 35, 36, 37–38, 181 Sloman, Steven, 226 smartphones, 102, 111, 113, 168–69, 205, 235, 236 Smil, Vaclav, 31, 101 Smith, Adam, 125–39, 128–29 Smith, Noah, 191 smog, 42, 55, 186 Snow, John, 22–23 social capital, 212–13, 216–17, 228–29, 247, 254, 255, 270 social democracy, 133–34 social development, 24–25, 26 social development index, 60n social safety nets, 131–32 socialism, 132–38, 192 sodium nitrate, 17 solar power, 111, 240, 250, 269 Song, Jian, 93 Sørlle, Petter, 47 Soros, George, 132 South Korea, 117–18, 174 Soviet Union, 133, 163–64, 170–71 “Spaceship Earth”, 64–65 Staggers Act (1980), 109 Starmans, Christina, 210 steam engine, 16, 17, 27, 30, 36, 44, 48–49, 205, 206, 237 steamships, 17–18, 26 steel, 80 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 273 Steller’s sea cow, 273 Stenner, Karen, 217 Sterba, Jim, 43–44 Stigler, George, 126 Strangers in Their Own Land (Hochschild), 221 Suicide (Durkheim), 215–16, 219 sulfur dioxide, 54–55, 95, 186, 249 Sullivan, Andrew, 219 Summers, Larry, 254 sustainability, 64 taxation, 5, 130, 250 tech progress, 2–3, 4, 36, 67, 99–123, 113, 141, 151, 158–59, 167–68, 169–70 defining of, 114–15 Tesla, Nikola, 27 Texas, Hill Country of, 29, 205 Thatcher, Margaret, 132, 138 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 129 Thomas, Chris, 182–83 3-D printing, 239 tin, 72 tin cans, 101 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 89–90, 212–13 Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), 66 tragedy of the commons, 183 transportation, 241–42 Trump, Donald, 158, 201 trust, 212, 213, 217 Truth About Soviet Whaling, The (Berzin), 164 Ulam, Stanislaw, 19n Ultimate Resource, The (Simon), 69, 179 unfairness, 210, 220–24 Union Oil, 54 United Airlines, 257 United Kingdom, 76, 85 United Nations, 40, 58, 199 United States, 117–18 agriculture in, 81–82, 100 coal consumption in, 102–03 cropland acreage in, 201–02 dematerialization in, 76–85 industrial production in, 88–89 mortality rates in, 213–14 slavery in, 37–38 suicide rate in, 214–16 water pollution in, 189–90 urbanization, 91–92, 199–200 Utopia or Oblivion (Fuller), 70 vaccination, 227 Van Reenen, John, 203, 204, 207 Varian, Hal, 236 Veblen goods, 152–53 Veblen, Thorstein, 152 Venezuela, 118, 134–38, 172 voluntary exchange, 117 wages, 20–21 Waggoner, Paul, 76 Wagner, Stephan, 148 Wald, George, 61 water, drinking, 194 water pollution, 189–90 Watt, James, 15–16, 20, 121, 206, 237 Watt, Kenneth, 58 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 127, 131 Weeks-McLean Law Act (1913), 96 Welzel, Christian, 176, 177 Wernick, Iddo, 76 whales, 44, 46–47, 163–65 wheat, 31–32 Wheelwright, William, 17–18 Whole Earth Catalog, 68 Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson), 159 Wilson, James, 19n wind power, 111, 240, 250 Winship, Scott, 215 Wolff, Edward, 206 Woodbury, N.J., 65 wooly mammoth, 180 World Bank, 118, 168, 169, 192 World Values Survey, 176 Yao Ming, 154, 161 Yellowstone National Park, 46, 153 YouTube, 236 Zoorob, Michael, 216 First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2019 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd, 2019 A CBS COMPANY Copyright © 2019 by Andrew McAfee The right of Andrew McAfee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.


EcoVillage at Ithaca Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (2005) by Liz Walker

car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, intentional community, microcredit, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, systems thinking, the built environment, transit-oriented development, World Values Survey

Rather than pull apart in destructive conflict, the human community could choose to pull together in cooperation and work collaboratively to create a sustainable future. I am heartened by research that indicates public attitudes and behaviors seem to be shifting in favor of more sustainable ways of living. A “World Values Survey” was conducted at the turn of the 21st century, which represented a majority of the world’s population and covered the full range of economic and political variation. Strikingly, this survey revealed that, over the several decades prior to the turn of the century, a major shift in values has been occurring in a cluster of a dozen or so nations, including the United States, Canada, Northern Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Department of Agriculture (USDA), 129 Utne Reader, 22, 205 V Vanek, Frances, 176 Via Campesina movement, 191 Village Association, 175 forming of, 150 Village Habitat, 216 village life, allure of, 200–202 village life, traditional, 3, 181, 185, 190–191, 192–196, 195, 199–200, xiv Village Wisdom, Future Cities, 198, 199–200 vision, future, 159–160 Vizard, Mary, 205 W wages, 210 Walker, Dan, 92, 93–95, 101–102 Walker, Liz (author) childhood, 45, 83 Katz, Jon, relationship with, 10, 14 leadership, 13, 89–90, 119–120, 153–154, 156–157, 212 moving to EVI, 14 neighbor conflict, 84–87 parenting/work balance, 57–58 personal conflict, 84–87 sabbatical, 157–158 Shapiro, Elan, working with, 168–174 walking iris story, 53–54 wastewater treatment, 217 water conservation, 130–131 irrigation system, 47 supply, 93 use planning, 26–27 water tank conflict, 92–102 water tank construction, 98 Webber, Mary and Bill, 30–31, 218–219 Weisburd, Jerry and Claudia, 92–93, 138, 198 West Haven Farm, 39–51, 48, 215. see also farming West Haven Road, 36, 37 West Hill site, 15–17, 129 “wheel,” ecovillage living, 185–186 Whitham, Scott, 26 wildlife, 130, 163–164, 164 Willett, Pamela, 117 Williams, Pam, 29 Williams, Peggy, 180 wind power, 216–217 The Winter Spiral, 67–68 Wold, Sandy, 70 Wolfson, Elissa and Steve, 72–73, 202–203 Women Goin’ Swimmin’, 70 working shares, 45, 50 work teams, 165–166 “World Values Survey,” xii Y Yoff, Senegal, 192–200 Yoff, sister village Winter 1996 visit, 196–197 The Yoff Delegation, 193 yurts, 56 Z Zanes, Anne, 36 Zeitlin, Marian, 198 Zen Buddist head shaving tradition, 109–110, 111 ABOUT THE AUTHOR As the co-founder and executive director of EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) since 1991, Liz Walker has dedicated her full-time work to bring this internationally acclaimed project from vision to reality.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Dept. of Health and Human Services 1979–2020 1,436,802 Monitoring the Future 8th and 10th graders (ages 13–16) University of Michigan; funded by National Institutes of Health 1991–2021 936,118 Monitoring the Future 12th graders (ages 17–18) University of Michigan; funded by National Institutes of Health 1976–2021 692,817 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and Adolescent Behavior and Experiences Survey 9th–12th graders (ages 14–18) CDC 1991–2021 224,283 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (international) 13- to 15-year-olds World Health Organization 2002–2018 650,504 Millennium Cohort Study (UK) 14-year-olds University College, London 2000–2015 10,904 Programme for International Student Assessment (international) 15- and 16-year-olds Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2000–2018 1,049,784 World Values Survey (international) Ages 15 and up World Values Survey Association 1981–2020 28,809 American Time Use Survey Ages 15 and up Bureau of Labor Statistics 2003–2021 219,673 Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement Ages 15 and up U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1947–2021 ~7,000,000 American National Election Studies Adults 18+ Stanford University and University of Michigan 1948–2020 69,498 American Freshman Survey Incoming college students (most ages 18–19) UCLA 1966–2019 10,551,020 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Adults 18+ University of Michigan 1968–2019 90,264 General Social Survey Adults 18+ NORC, University of Chicago 1972–2021 68,846 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System Adults 18+ CDC 1993–2021 9,550,207 National Health Interview Survey Adults 18+ CDC 1997–2021 1,835,337 Gallup poll Adults 18+ Gallup, Inc. 2001–2022 22,842 Cooperative Election Study Adults 18+ Harvard and YouGov 2006–2021 531,755 Pew Research Center polls Adults 18+ Pew Charitable Trusts 2010–2018 17,021 CIVIQs poll Adults 18+ CIVIQs polling company 2017–2022 345,605 Nationscape Adults 18+ Democracy Fund 2019–2021 413,790 Voter Survey Adults 18+ Democracy Fund 2020 4,943 Household Pulse Survey Adults 18+ U.S.

Figure 6.40: Rates of depression among U.K. teens, by gender and age group, 2003–2018 Source: Cybulski et al. (2021) Notes: Incidence rates are estimated from a figure in Cybulski et al. (2021) and are not exact. The incidence rate is the annual rate per 10,000 person years at risk. Figure 6.41: Percent of 15- to 25-year-olds who say they are unhappy, by country, 1994–2020 Source: World Values Survey Notes: The question: “Taking all things together, would you say you are: Very happy, rather happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?” Figure shows the number who responded “not very happy” or “not at all happy.” Question not asked in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the recent waves. What about other countries?


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

J Soc Issues 57:389–412. Estes R. 2014. The Gnu’s World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ethridge R, C Hudson, eds. 2008. The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. European Values Study Group and World Values Survey Association 2005. European and world values surveys integrated data file, 1999–2002, Release I. 2nd ICPSR version. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Evans R. 2007. A History of Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Everett DL, et al. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language.

Dunbar presented the human ability to categorize society members by their social roles as a solution to this question, but knowing what people do doesn’t explain the memberships of societies and the distinct boundaries between them. 13 Turnbull (1972). Some doubt his interpretations (e.g., Knight 1994). 14 At least as of the date of the following study: European Values Study Group and World Values Survey Association (2005). 15 Simmel (1950). 16 A chimpanzee will sometimes be generous to an individual that’s likely to return the favor in other ways (Silk et al. 2013). 17 Jaeggi et al. (2010). Tomasello (2011; see also 2014) finds hunter-gatherers to be more cooperative than apes in every domain: “Cooperation is simply a defining feature of human societies in a way that it is not for the societies of other great apes” (p 36). 18 Ratnieks & Wenseleers (2005). 19 e.g., Bekoff & Pierce (2009); de Waal (2006). 20 Social life can offer benefits for one group over another even when the individuals in it don’t profit directly and aren’t related (this is group selection) or when there are advantages for individual and group both (multilevel selection) (e.g., Gintis 2000; Nowak 2006; Wilson & Wilson 2008; Wilson 2012).


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Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

As such, the preponderance of questions about physical symptoms in the early questionnaires, such as about having trouble sleeping, and physical aches and pains – gradually gave way to much more direct questions about how people felt. By the seventies and early eighties, a number of cross-national surveys emerged that asked questions about respondents’ happiness and life satisfaction, such the Eurobarometer and the World Values Survey (WVS). The data showed marked and stable differences between countries. But as this data came through, new methodological questions were raised. One question was whether linguistic and cultural differences led respondents to interpret happiness differently. The easy conclusion was that national differences were measurement error, rather than anything deeper.

(page numbers in italics refer to illustrations) advertising: and alcohol 100–1 and humour 100 and shock 98–100, 100 and smoking 99, 100 airport expansion 98 alcohol 100–1, 127 and calories 100 and pregnancy 126–7 Alexander, Danny 281 anaesthetics 17 ‘animal spirits’ 207, 210, 211 Aos, Steve 282 Ariely, Dan 96–7, 134, 325 Aristotle 221, 240 Armstrong, Hilary 34 Asch, Solomon 26 ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) 189 Ashford, Maren 57, 83 attentional spotlight 83–4 Ayres, Ian 142 Bazerman, Max 134, 325 Beales, Greg 36 Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) (see also nudging): arguments lost by 212–14 becomes social-purpose company 350 beginnings of x–xi, 50–8, 56, 58, 341 current numbers employed by xiii, 341 current trials by 341 expansion of xiii governments follow 11 initial appointments to 56–7, 56 initial scepticism towards 9 most frequent early criticisms of 333 naming of x–xi, 52–3 objectives of 54–5 and transparency, efficacy and accountability, see under nudging and webpage design 275–9, 276 World Bank’s request to 125 year of scepticism experienced by 274 behavioural predators 312–13 Benartzi, Shlomo 64 benefits, see welfare benefits Bentham, Jeremy 221–2 BIG lottery 283 ‘Big Society’ 43, 50, 142, 250 BIT, see Behavioural Insights Team Blair, Tony 151, 225 and behavioural approaches in government 302 Brown takes over from 36, 260–1 review into tenure of 34 Strategy Unit of 31 Tories’ admiration of 50 Bogotá 135, 146 Bohnet, Iris 123 Britton, John 188 Brown, Gordon 34 becomes PM 36, 260–1 Byrne, Liam 47 Cameron, David 151 BIT set up by 8 and Coalition Agreement 38 and data transparency 159 Hilton appointed by 43 and randomised controlled trials 274 and response to notes 186 and smoking 194 and well-being 225–8, 227, 250 car tax 3, 91, 92, 275–8 carrier bags 23 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Chand, Raj 146 charities 116–20, 142–4, 144 and reciprocity 116 Chetty, Raj 64 childbirth, see pregnancy and childbirth Cialdini, Robert 34–6, 47, 107–8, 109, 113, 121–2, 308, 312 Clegg, Nick, and Coalition Agreement 38 Cochrane, Dr Archie 269–71, 295, 297 Cochrane Collaboration 271 cocktail-party effect 86 cognitive dissonance 21 cognitive psychology 27–9, 28 Colbourne, Tim 215 College of Policing 282, 289 Collins, Kevan 283, 285 Community First 254–5 commuting 219–20, 263–4 conflict and war 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 cooling-off periods 77 Council Tax 95 crime prevention (see also theft): ‘scared straight’ approach to 266–8, 267 and ‘What Works’ institutes 289 Darley, J. 27, 110 data transparency 153–84 and better nudges 179–80 and consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 and food labelling 172, 178 and machine-readable code 154, 157, 159 and RACAP 157 in restaurants 178 and understandable information 176–9 on cancer 178–9 on car safety 177–8 on financial products 177 and utility suppliers 154–60, 155 Davey, Ed 157 Deaton, Angus 243 decision fatigue 141 Deep Blue 7 Diener, Ed 231 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) 272 discontinuity design 161–2 doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 Dolan, Paul 47–8, 220 Down, Nick 113 drivers’ behaviour 18, 18 Duckworth, Angela 247 Dunn, Elizabeth 220, 237, 250, 256 Durand, Martine 243 Dweck, Carol 343 e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282 EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) framework 10, 60, 149, 349 Attractive 80–105, 81, 85, 94 Easy 62–79, 68, 72, 73 and jobcentres 200 Social 106–25, 115, 118, 120, 122 (see also social influence) Timely 126–49, 129 Easterlin, Richard 238 eating habits 139, 171, 307 (see also obesity/weight issues) and choice 306–7 and food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 and food tax 301–2 and healthy/unhealthy food 41, 82, 101–2, 216, 302 ‘mindless’ 171 Economic and Social Research Council 283 economy, UK 205–12 econs 6–7, 178, 223 education 137, 282 financial 64 further 146–7 and timely intervention 146–7 and ‘What Works’ institutes 283–7, 284, 286 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 Effectiveness and Efficiency (Cochrane) 295 endowment effect 140 Energy Performance Certificate 179 energy ratings 135 energy and utility suppliers, see utility suppliers Enterprise Bill 159 Epley, Nick 260–1 established behaviour, see habits ethnicity, and recruitment 137–9, 344 experimental government 266–98, 270, 272, 276 and crime prevention 266–8, 267 ethics of 325–8 (see also nudging: and accountability) and growth vouchers 279–80 and organ donation 275–9, 276 and overseas health-aid programmes 273 and radical incrementalism 291 and ‘What Works’ institutes 281–90, 292–4 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 experimental psychology 24–6 farmers 145 ‘fat tax’ 301–2 (see also eating habits) fertiliser 145 Feynman, Richard 296, 297 financial crisis 45, 46, 206, 336 (see also UK economy) financial products 177, 206 fines, collecting 3–4, 52, 89, 90–1 Fischhoff, Baruch ix Fisher, Ronald 291 Fiske, Susan 84, 86, 325, 345 food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 forms, prefilling 73–4 fossils 35 Frederick the Great 15, 16 Freud, Lord 279 Gallagher, Rory 55, 88–9, 158, 197–8, 204, 343, 349 gender equality, and company boards 123 Genovese, Kitty 109–10 Gigerenzer, Gerd 178 Gilbert, Danny 139, 220 Gino, Francesca 347 giving 116–20, 142–4, 144, 250 God Complex 269 Gove, Michael 287 Grant, Adam 347 Green Book 46, 228, 258, 259 Grice, Joe 233 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 222–4, 255 (see also UK economy) Grove, Rohan 211 growth vouchers 279–80 Gyani, Alex 197–8, 203, 204, 343, 349 habits: and early intervention 128–32 key moments to prompt or reshape 132–9 and tax payments 131 Hallsworth, Michael 48, 113 Hancock, Matthew 279 hand washing 99, 140 happy-slave problem 231 Haynes, Laura 56–7 hearing 25 Heider, Fritz 345 Helliwell, John 226–7, 232 Henry VIII 17 herd instinct 161 Heywood, Sir Jeremy 2, 215, 217, 281 The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Halpern) 44 Highway Code 20 Hillman, Nick 165 Hilton, Steve x, 43–4, 51, 53–4, 159, 190, 214, 215, 225–6, 247, 250 and randomised controlled trials 274 hindsight bias ix HMRC 2–3, 8, 87–8, 89, 113, 115, 118, 120, 181–2 (see also tax payments) BIT member’s secondment to 113 non-tax-related business communications sent via 210–11 and online tax forms 74 and randomised controlled trials 274 Homer, Lin 210 honesty 133–4 honours 98 horses’ behaviour 18–19, 19 hospitals: and doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 and patient charts 72–3, 73 Hume, David 221 Hunt, Stefan 209 Hurd, Nick 250 Hutcheson, Francis 221 hyperbolic discounting 139 imprinting 128–9, 129 infant development 128–30 (see also pregnancy and childbirth) and early mother–child ‘meshing’ 129 (see also imprinting) in geese 128–9, 129 and mother’s depression 129 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini) 34–5, 312 Inglehart, Ronald F. 229 Inland Revenue, see HMRC Institute for Government 40, 46–50 J-PAL 294 jobcentres 120–1, 197–205, 200, 201, 343, 349 (see also unemployment) John, Peter 96 The Joyless Economy (Scitovsky) 223 judges 140 Kahneman, Daniel 27, 29–30, 32, 48, 220, 226, 230 BIT’s work commended by 11 Kasparov, Garry 7 Kennedy, Robert F. 218, 222 Kettle, Stuart 125 Keynes, John Maynard 210, 211–12 King, Dom 48, 72 Kirkman, Elspeth 121, 146 knife crime 122 Kuznets, Simon 222 Laibson, David 64–5, 245, 307 Latene, B. 27, 110 Layard, Richard 225, 242, 248 Lazy Town 82 Legatum Institute 242–3 letters/messages, simplifying 71–3 and handwriting 72 in hospitals 72–3, 73 and prefilled forms 73–5 Letwin, Oliver 213, 217, 281, 295 Life satisfaction (discussion paper) 225 (see also well-being) Linos, Elizabeth 137, 344 List, John 286 litter 23, 35, 94, 107–8, 114 Loewenstein, George 307, 324, 345 loft/wall insulation 3, 75–6 Lorenz, Konrad 128–9, 129 lotteries, as incentive 94–6 Luca, Michael 161–2, 166, 177 Lyard, Richard 238 Lyons, Michael 250 MacFadden, Pat 34 Mackenzie, Polly 51, 215 Major, John 46 Manzi, James 295–6 Marcel, Anthony 136 Martin, Steve 113 Matheson, Jill 227 Mayhew, Pat 66 Mazar, Nina 347 Meacher, Michael 224 mental health 246–9 Merkel, Angela 243 midata, see data transparency Milgram, Stanley 26, 327 Miliband, Ed 34 military recruitment advertising 87 Milkman, Katherine 323 Mill, John Stuart 221 MINDSPACE framework 49–50, 50, 60, 72 motorcycle helmets 66–7 Mulgan, Geoff 225, 301–2 Mullainathan, Sendhil 343 National Citizenship Service (NCS) 251–2, 251 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 195, 271, 281, 290 Nesta 350 Nguyen, Sam 55, 197–8, 343 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 240 nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193, 193 (see also smoking) 9/11 28 Norton, Mike 256, 347 Nudge (Thaler, Sunstein) ix–x, 6–7, 39, 157, 234 Nudge Unit, see Behavioural Insights Team nudging (see also Behavioural Insights Team; EAST framework): and accountability 324–5 and experimentation, ethics of 325–8 and the public voice 328–32, 329 defined and discussed 22–4 and efficacy 304, 315–24 and familiarity with approach 319–24 relative 318–19 improving, with better data 179–80 rediscovery of 13 and subconscious priming 136 and transparency 304–15 and behavioural predators 312–13 and choice 306, 314–15 and effective communication vs propaganda 307–11, 311 Nurse Family Partnership 129 Obama, Barack 39–40, 254 acceptance speech of 38 Obama, Michelle 101 obesity/weight issues 101, 170–3, 307 (see also eating habits) in children, levelling of 173 and food labelling 172 and ‘mindless’ eating 171 O’Donnell, Sir Gus (later Lord) 45–6, 47, 57, 225, 227, 227, 242, 258 OECD 293, 340 Office of War Information (US) 21 Olds, David 130 online shopping 109 Ord, Toby 273 organ donation 9, 37, 52, 275–9 Orwell, George 309, 311 Osborne, George 45 and data transparency 159 O’Shaughnessy, James 247 Overman, Henry 288 Paley, William 221 paternalism x, 33, 51, 316 Pelenur, Marcos 135 pensions xii, 9, 62–5, 331 and choice 307 PMSU’s paper on 33 people’s parliaments 332 perception 24–5, 25 Personality responsibility and behaviour change (discussion paper) 301–2 police, ethnic recruits into 137–9, 344 potato consumption 15–16 pregnancy and childbirth 126–7 (see also infant development) Prescott, John 302 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) 31–3, 47, 53, 225, 337 and Personality responsibility and behaviour change paper 301–2 psychological operations (PsyOps) 30, 308–9, 333 Putnam, Robert 253 radical incrementalism 291 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) 8, 113, 132, 182, 252, 270, 274–5, 283, 297–8, 339 and HMRC 274 Raseman, Sophie 157 RECAP 157 recycling 35 Red Tape Challenge 57 Reeves, Richard 51 Revenue and Customs, see HMRC road fuel 23 road traffic, see vehicles Roberto, Christine 101, 178 Rogers, Todd 146, 321 Rolls-Royce 208 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 21 Ruda, Simon 125, 137, 214, 344 Sainsbury, Lord (David) 46–7 Sanders, Michael 57, 116, 119, 142–3, 146 Scheving, Magnús 81, 82–3 Scitovsky, Tibor 223 Scott, Stephen 247 Seligman, Marty 232, 247 Sen, Amartya 231 Service, Owain 2, 56, 69 Sesame Street 101 Shadbolt, Sir Nigel 158 Shafir, Eldar 343, 345 sight 24–5, 25 Silva, Rohan x–xi, 43–5, 51, 53–4, 159 Singer, Tania 345 small businesses 205–9 passim (see also UK economy) smart disclosure 157 smoke detectors 99 smoking 9, 23, 99, 100, 138 and e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193 and pregnancy 126–7 prevalence of 189 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 SNAP framework 48 social influence 26–7, 106–25 and bystander intervention 110 dark side of 109–10 and litter 107–8, 114 norms of: descriptive vs injunctive 108 picking apart 107–11 in policy 111–15 and online shopping 109 and personal touch 119–21 and reciprocity 115–17 social psychology 107 Soman, Dilip 337 Southern Cross station staircase 85 speed bumps 76–7 Sportacus 81–3, 81 Stanford Prison 26–7 Steinberg, Tom 254 stickk.com 142 subconscious priming 136 suicide 67–9, 68, 77 Sunstein, Cass ix–x, 6–7, 22, 39–42, 44, 57, 73, 305, 307, 314 and RACAP 157 supermarkets 80–1, 84, 86, 171–2 and food labelling 173, 178 Sutherland, Rory 187–8 tailored defaults. 307 tax payments 3, 8, 23, 52, 87–8, 88, 89, 112–14, 118, 120, 131, 181–2 in Central America 125 Council Tax 95 and habits 131 and lottery incentive 96–7 and online tax forms 74–5 and randomised controlled trials 274 road duty 3, 91, 92, 275–8 social-norm-based approach to 113, 115 Tetlock, Philip 192 Thaler, Richard 6–7, 22, 39, 44, 50, 51, 53, 57, 305 and BIT’s name 53 and RACAP 157 theft (see also crime prevention): mobile phones 173–6, 174, 175 and target-hardening 78, 214 vehicles: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 time, perception of 128 time-inconsistent preferences 128, 139–45 Times 301–2 tobacco, see smoking Turner Lord (Adair) xii, 33, 331 Tversky, Amos 27, 29, 230 UK economy 205–12, 215, 216 (see also financial crisis; Gross Domestic Product) unemployment 120–1, 122, 197–205, 200, 201, 216, 343, 349 (see also jobcentres) and well-being 255–6 utilitarianism 221–2 utility suppliers: and data transparency 154–60 switching among 153–4, 155–6, 155, 160, 213 vehicles 18–20 safety of 177–8 and speeding 76–7, 92–5, 100 varied penalties for 147 thefts of: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 Victoria, Queen 17 visas 132 Vlaev, Ivo 48 Volpe, Kevin 320 voter registration 95–6 Walsh, Emily 123 Wansink, Brian 171, 306 war 20–1 war and conflict 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 weight, see obesity/weight issues welfare benefits 8 and conditional cash transfers 135, 145 and timing of payments 135 well-being 218–65 and community 249–55, 251 and commuting 219–20, 263–4 by country 229, 238, 243 drivers of 235–41 material factors 237–9 social factors 239–41 (see also well-being: and community) sunny disposition 235–7 early concepts of 220–2 and GDP 222–4, 255 and governance and service design 258–62 and happy-slave problem 231 and income, work and markets 255–7 and Life satisfaction paper 225 measuring 222–4 big questions concerning 231–3 subjective 228–31 and mental health 246–9 and National Citizenship Service programme 251–2, 251 by occupation 244 and policy 242–3, 258 subjective 224, 228–31 and giving 250 (see also giving) by occupation 244–5 and prostitutes 231–2 UK government’s programme on 226–8, 233–5, 234, 240 unemployment’s effects on 255–6 and utilitarianism 221–2 What Works institutes 281–90, 292–4, 340 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 When Harry Met Sally 160–1 ‘wicked problems’ 170 Willetts, David 165 World Bank 125, 293, 309, 340 World Values Survey (WVS) 229 yelp.com 161–2 Young, Lord 279 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THERE ARE MANY people who deserve thanks and credit for the work and results of the Behavioural Insights Team that this book describes, and a rather shorter list for the writing and editing of the book itself. There are a number of people who deserve explicit credit for the creation and early support of the team, many of whom I hope I remembered to mention in section 1.


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Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

For example, when asked what qualities should be encouraged in children, authoritarians tend to prioritize obedience, good manners, and being well behaved over things like independence, curiosity, and thinking for oneself. Pitting this “bare bones” measure of authoritarianism against any variety of “conservatism,” and the whole roster of socio-demographic variables—including education, income, gender, class, and religiosity—Stenner (2005: 133; 2009a: 152) has shown via the World Values Survey that authoritarianism is the principal determinant of general intolerance of difference around the globe. What Authoritarianism Does1 Authoritarianism inclines one toward attitudes and behaviors variously concerned with structuring society and social interactions in ways that enhance sameness and minimize diversity of people, beliefs, and behaviors.

., during some particularly fractious week in US history, as determined by the actual variance in survey responses to the General Social Survey 1972–2000; see Stenner 2005: 314) are living in a place (e.g., some nation of the world) marked by high variance in public opinion (see Stenner 2005: 314, from the World Values Survey 1990–1995). FIGURE 1. Effects of authoritarianism on general intolerance of difference given experimental manipulation of threat. Reprinted from Stenner (2005). In every case, normative threat dramatically increased the influence of authoritarianism on general intolerance of difference: racial, political, and moral.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But for those seeking to acquire, wield, or retain power in the United States and Europe, an understanding of the mindsets and expectations of these new constituencies will be essential. A number of global public opinion surveys are providing a clearer picture of the extent and velocity of these attitudinal changes. Since 1990, the World Values Survey (WVS) has been tracking changes in people’s attitudes in over eighty countries containing 85 percent of the world’s population. In particular, Ronald Inglehart, the director of the WVS, and several of his co-authors, notably Pippa Norris and Christian Welzel, have documented profound changes in attitudes concerning gender differences, religion, government, and globalization.

(Domhoff), 48 Wikileaks, 13, 100, 101, 130 Wilson, Scott, 119 Winfrey, Oprah, 8 Wohlforth, William, 136 Wolfe, Alan, 38 Women, 25, 33, 65, 66, 69, 70, 198 Wood, David, 214 Wood Ion, Heather, 211 Wooldridge, Adrian, 37 Woolworths, 169 Woods, Tiger, 7, 28, 207–208 World Bank, 8, 55, 56, 144, 180, 184, 206, 227, 244 World Chess Federation, 2 World Health Organization, 13, 145 World 3.0 (Ghemawat), 166 World Trade Organization, 156 World Values Survey (WVS), 67 Worldview, 65 World War I, 42, 114, 116 World War II, 45, 46, 83, 108, 114, 116–117, 136, 138, 158 postwar years, 253, 254 Yadlin, Amos (General), 121, 125 Yahoo, 212, 213 Yale, 139, 193 Yéle Haiti, 210 Yemen, 80, 110, 149 Young people, 14, 51, 57, 66–67, 69–70, 204 YouTube, 28, 79, 134, 179 Yugoslavia, 81, 157 Zakaria, Fareed, 140 Zambia, 187 Zambrano, Lorenzo, 175 Zara retailer, 44, 159, 176–177 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 127 Zeitung Online, 215 Zimbabwe, 57, 150 Zoellick, Robert, 55 Zunz, Oliver, 43


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The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

It does not seem, however, that socioeconomic inequality explains religious extremism in the Muslim world, where radicals are, on average, wealthier and more educated than moderates (Atran, 2003; Esposito, 2008). 9. http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258. 10. http://pewforum.org/surveys/campaign08/. 11. Pyysiäinen & Hauser, 2010. 12. Zuckerman, 2008. 13. Paul, 2009. 14. Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010. 15. Decades of cross-cultural research on “subjective well-being” (SWB) by the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org) indicate that religion may make an important contribution to human happiness and life satisfaction at low levels of societal development, security, and freedom. The happiest and most secure societies, however, tend to be the most secular. The greatest predictors of a society’s mean SWB are social tolerance (of homosexuals, gender equality, other religions, etc.) and personal freedom (Inglehart, Foa, Peterson, & Welzel, 2008).

., 48 witchcraft, 129–30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131 women: antisocial behavior and, 215n89 bride burning, 42 burqas for and veiling of, 27, 42, 42–45, 65, 74, 196n9, 207n17 forced marriage of, 42, 43 genital mutilation of females, 27, 42, 46 health issues of, 47 as priests, 34–35 as property of men, 50, 207n17 Taliban’s goals regarding, 37 See also rape World Values Survey, 231–32n15 worst possible misery for everyone, 38–42, 204n22 Wright, N. T., 166 Zaidel, E., 216n104 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Debt and Lifestyle Servitude keeps people bound to work and unbound to relationships. A 2003 World Value Survey (worldvaluessurvey.com) found that the happiest people in the world have a tight sense of community and strong family bonds. After basic needs are met (security, shelter, health, food), our happiness quotient is most significantly impacted by the quality of our relationships with our partners, our family, our friends, our spirituality, and ourselves. If we are too busy chasing the next greatest gadget to strike down the competitive opulence of the Joneses, we finance our misery. The World Value Survey concluded that “consumerism” is the leading obstacle to happiness.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Beyond the Hedonic City Our rejection of the experience machine carries us back to the deeper notion of happiness for which the Greeks argued. So does the evidence from the emerging field of happiness economics, where Kahneman’s peers have tried to understand what influences the happiness of entire societies, drawing on data produced by census reports and polls such as the massive World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll. These surveys don’t simply measure affect, or people’s relative cheeriness in the moment. They ask how people feel about their entire life.* The hope is to distill eudaimonia down to a number that can be compared with just about any variable, from income to unemployment to the length of our commutes and the number of friends we have, and then to understand all the ingredients that combine to create life satisfaction.† These surveys are fueling a revolution in economics, partly because they contest the power of massive advances in spending power to make societies happier.

But since his late-career conversion to happiness economics, Helliwell prefers to introduce himself as Aristotle’s research assistant, and he tends to begin his lectures with a sing-along version of the children’s song “The More We Get Together, the Happier We’ll Be.” He has evidence to back that song up; and cities, countries, and the United Nations are listening. Helliwell and his team have run several iterations of the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll through their statistical grinders and have found that when it comes to life satisfaction, relationships with other people beat income, hands down. For example, these polls asked people if they had a friend or relative to count on when needed. Just going from being friendless to having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

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

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

"We are witnessing a downward trend in trust in government and confidence in leaders across most industrial societies."17 Inglehart then tested his theory. Beginning in 1970, he conducted surveys around the globe, looking for signs of a culture shift. His first poll studied a half-dozen countries. Now his World Values Survey includes eighty societies that encompass more than 75 percent of the world's population. Inglehart has found that not all cultures change as fast or as much as others. The Nordic cultures are the most "post-materialist," while Americans are stubbornly traditional. (Here Inglehart diverges somewhat from Maslow, who proposed that his hierarchy of needs would operate cross-culturally.

Evans, [>] Wohlgemuth, Arlene, [>]–[>], [>] n Women, in Congress, [>] n, and gender gap, [>], [>] n, [>], and marriage gap, [>] n, [>]–[>], and presidential election (2004), [>] Women's rights, [>], [>], [>]. See also Abortion Woodfill, Jared, [>] Wooldridge, Adrian, [>], [>] n Woolston, Thomas, [>] Working class. See Class; Employment, Labor unions and strikes World Council of Churches, [>], [>], [>] World Values Survey, [>]–[>] Wuthnow, Robert, [>] Xerox, [>] n Yablonski, Jock, [>] n Yankelovich, Daniel, [>] Yankelovich Partners, [>], [>] n, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Yarmuth, John, [>]–[>] Yoga, [>] Young, H. Edwin, [>], [>] Young, James Sterling, [>]–[>] Zuniga, Markos Moulitsas, [>], [>] Footnotes * Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, working in the 1940s, saw the same kind of policy-free connection between parties and people.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

Where I come from we trusted each other, helped each other and left our doors unlocked. And you’re right, from up close, it’s easy to assume people are decent. People like our families and friends, our neighbours and our co-workers. But when we zoom out to the rest of humanity, suspicion quickly takes over. Take the World Values Survey, a huge poll conducted since the 1980s by a network of social scientists in almost a hundred countries. One standard question is: ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?’ The results are pretty disheartening.

., here Smith, Adam, here, here Smith, Carlyle, here snipers, here, here social learning, here social psychology, rise of, here socialisation, here sociopathy, here, here, here, here Sodom and Gomorrah, here Sokoloff, Jose Miguel, here, here Solnit, Rebecca, here Sørensen, Carl Theodor, here South Africa, here, here, here Spanish Civil War, here, here Speer, Albert, here Spencer, Herbert, here Spinoza, Baruch, here Stalin, Josef, here, here, here, here, here, here Stanford Prison Experiment, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stangneth, Bettina, here Starr, Belle, here states, origins of, here STDs, here Stein, Gertrude, here Sudbury Valley School, here Summerhill School, here Sungir grave, here Sutton-Smith, Brian, here Syrian refugees, here Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, here Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, King of Tonga, here, here, here Taylor, Frederick, here, here Temple of Apollo (Delphi), here Terre’Blanche, Eugène, here terrorists, here, here, here, here Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, here Thucydides, here Tigris–Euphrates floodplain, here Tilley, Oswald, here Titanic, sinking of, here Tomasello, Michael, here Torres, here, here Totau, Mano, here, here, here, here, here, here Tower of Babel, here Travolta, John, here Treaty of Versailles, here Trilling, Lionel, here Trojan War, here, here Trump, Donald, here, here, here Trut, Lyudmila, here, here, here, here, here tulip mania, here Turchin, Peter, here Twain, Mark, here Twitter, here, here, here Uber, here Uhila, Taniela, here, here unemployment benefits, here University of Delaware, Disaster Research Center, here Uruk, here US Congress, here US Constitution, here, here vaccines, here van der Graaff, Laurens, here Van Reybrouck, David, here Vedda people, here veneer theory, here, here Verdun, Battle of, here, here Vietnam War, here, here, here Viljoen, Abraham, here, here, here, here Viljoen, Constand, here, here, here, here violent deaths, decline in, here Virgin Mary, here virtue labelling, here Voltaire, here Walkington, Leslie, here war crimes, and propaganda, here warfare causes of death, here, here commanders, here and conditioning, here, here and friendship, here, here origins of, here, here, here Ward, Colin, here Warneken, Felix, here, here Warner, Arthur, here Warner, Peter, here, here, here water resources, here Waterloo, Battle of, here, here Wesley, John, here Wichmann, Fabian, here Wigram, Lieutenant Colonel Lionel, here Wikipedia, here Williams, Graham, here Williams, John, here, here Wilson, James Q., here, here, here Wolfowitz, Paul, here World Values Survey, here Wrangham, Richard, here, here xenophobia, here, here, here, here, here Yahil, Leni, here Yanomami people, here, here Ypres, Battles of, here Zehmisch, Lieutenant Kurt, here Zimbardo, Philip, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Zobrist, Jean-François, here, here A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR Rutger Bregman is one of Europe’s most prominent young historians.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

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

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

1 “Many of the so-called comforts of life”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), p. 15. 2 “The people of this country need”: John S. Ellsworth, Jr., “The Depression Generation,” The North American Review 234 (October 1932). 3 University of Michigan researcher Ronald Inglehart: See Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel, and Roberto Foa, World Values Survey: Happiness Trends in 24 Countries, 1946–2006, January 2008. 4 In 1943, behavioral scientist Abraham Maslow: The original article appeared in Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–96. See also Janet Simons, Donald Irwin, and Beverly Drinnien, Psychology: The Search for Understanding (New York: West Publishing Company, 1987). 5 Before the Great Recession: See press release: Annals of Internal Medicine, University of Chicago Medical School Press, December 6, 2004. 6 In 2007, Americans spent a whopping $23.9 billion: J.


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Advertise at moments of reflection Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, psychologists from New York University and UCLA respectively, have identified a surprising moment when people are more likely to reappraise their lives – when their age ends in nine. They term this group: “nine-enders”. The psychologists analysed data from the 42,063 respondents to the World Values survey and found nine-enders were more likely to question the meaningfulness of their lives. This moment of greater reflection occurs because we don’t think of time progressing in an even manner. Certain landmarks, such as approaching a new decade, assume disproportionate importance. Jenny Riddell and I wanted to see if the findings held in the UK.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

As another scholar wrote about modern China: “you trust your family absolutely, your friends and acquaintances to the degree that mutual dependence has been established. With everybody else you make no assumptions about their good will.”34 We have some data on cultural values today from the World Values Survey.35 We can see the insider/outsider distinction on trust, using China and Great Britain from the 2005 Survey for comparison (Figure 6.1). If behaving amorally outside the family is acceptable, as in China, the expectation is that everyone will act accordingly, and anyone outside the family is then not to be trusted, not even “somewhat.”

For the rest of the world, it is difficult to boil down individualistic values to a single survey question that will translate across cultures. It is so difficult that most global surveys do not even try. We are stuck with some very indirect measures of individualism. FIGURE 6.1Percent saying they trust different groups “completely” (black) or “somewhat” (gray) in China and Great Britain. (Prepared using 2005 data from World Values Survey.)36 * * * Berkeley researchers Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland have used a survey measure of individualist values that a Dutch researcher named Geert Hofstede originally applied to IBM employees around the world and that has since been validated in broader samples. As they describe it: the individualism score measures that individuals are supposed to take care of themselves as opposed to being strongly integrated and loyal to a cohesive group.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

In my scenario the real threat is that large numbers of people conclude that democratic values and institutions no longer solve social problems, reduce crime or create jobs. So what might people turn to instead? It’s easy to imagine a growing taste for a more ‘system one’ demagogue who promises to restore order, control and stability – even at the cost of undermining democratic institutions and norms.* We should be very worried, for example, that the World Values Survey has found increasing support for authoritarian leaders over the past 20 years across many democratic nations.1 I doubt however that millions of people will suddenly rush en masse to vote for a fascist or a neo-Leninist. As David Runciman argues in his forthcoming book, How Democracy Ends, we should not keep looking back to the 1930s for clues.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In order to apply that approach to my study of national crises, we would need operationalized measures of the outcomes and of the postulated factors that I discussed, including “acknowledgment,” “acceptance of responsibility,” “national identity,” “freedom from constraints,” “patience at dealing with failure,” “flexibility,” “honest self-appraisal,” “change or lack of change,” and “success or failure at resolving a national crisis.” Possible starting points for developing such operationalized measures include the data in social science databases, such as the World Values Survey led by Ronald Inglehart, the Economic Values Survey, the European Social Survey, the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific, and books by Geert Hofstede, Michael Minkov, and others. I put effort into trying to use these data sources to devise operationalized measures for some of my variables, before reluctantly concluding that that would require a large project beyond the scope of this book’s narrative survey, which already took me six years even without devising operationalized measures.

Quarterly Journal of Economics 120, no. 3: 835–864 (2005). Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken. Hit or miss? The effect of assassinations on institutions and war. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1/2: 55–87 (2009). Michael Minkov. What Makes Us Different and Similar: A New Interpretation of the World Values Survey and Other Cross-Cultural Data. (Klasika I Stil, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2007). Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Steven Lattimore, translator. (Hackett, Indianapolis, IN, 1988). Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Ann Dunnigan, translator. (New American Library, New York, 1968). ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jared Diamond’s interests in history and geography stem from being born in 1937 and thus growing up during World War Two, with daily changing maps pinned up by his father on his bedroom wall depicting the shifting battle lines in the European and Pacific war theaters.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Even if all the workers were constantly well pleased with their condition, the outcome might still be deeply morally objectionable on other grounds—though which other grounds is a matter of dispute between rival moral theories. But any plausible assessment would consider subjective well-being to be one important factor. See also Bostrom and Yudkowsky (forthcoming). 23. World Values Survey (2008). 24. Helliwell and Sachs (2012). 25. Cf. Bostrom (2004). See also Chislenko (1996) and Moravec (1988). 26. It is hard to say whether the information-processing structures that would emerge in this kind of scenario would be conscious (in the sense of having qualia, phenomenal experience).

Global Economic Prospects: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World 42097. Washington, DC. World Robotics. 2011. Executive Summary of 1. World Robotics 2011 Industrial Robots; 2. World Robotics 2011 Service Robots. Retrieved June 30, 2012. Available at http://www.bara.org.uk/pdf/2012/world-robotics/Executive_Summary_WR_2012.pdf. World Values Survey. 2008. WVS 2005-2008. Retrieved 29 October, 2013. Available at http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalizeStudy.jsp. Wright, Robert. 2001. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Vintage. Yaeger, Larry. 1994. “Computational Genetics, Physiology, Metabolism, Neural Systems, Learning, Vision, and Behavior or PolyWorld: Life in a New Context.”


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Correlations between crime and social participation are less clear cut; poverty has a higher adverse effect across the board than inequality. 21. Ironically, people in countries where equality is high, like Germany and Norway, are the least likely to take personal credit for success. In the U.S., by contrast, people are less likely (as the World Values Survey shows) to consider their successes a product of luck or circumstance. 22. Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, “Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth,” IMF (April 2014). http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf 23. Wilkinson and Pickett’s findings caused quite a stir, but since the publication of The Spirit Level there have been dozens more studies confirming their thesis.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

Defined as the degree to which we believe the people around us can be trusted, it influences attitudes and behavior at all levels of society, where low measures of social trust mean a lack of confidence in our fellow neighbors, business colleagues, and public institutions. These values can influence national economic growth just as powerfully as financial and physical capital, and are associated with many other noneconomic outcomes, including quality of life and mental health. The World Values Survey, which has tracked the degrees of social trust since the early 1980s, has shown the rates in America and Great Britain declining steadily, now at 35 and 30 percent, respectively. The Netherlands, meanwhile, has been trending in the opposite direction and is second only to Norway, with a level of 70 percent.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Among the theoretical works by economists on the origins of culture are the pathbreaking papers by Bisin and Verdier (1998, 2011), which for the first time brought to economics the important work on cultural evolution done by scholars of cultural anthropology and population dynamics. The empirical work on the economics of culture depends heavily on data from the World Values Survey, Gallup World Poll, and similar data (Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales, 2006; Tabellini, 2008, 2010; Deaton, 2011). This work has successfully addressed a whole set of issues of supreme importance to economists such as household behavior and female labor force participation, corruption, and migration (Fernández, 2011).

., 51 water power, 143 Watson, Foster, 137 Watt, James, 109, 125, 277, 268, 274 weak ties, 191, 296 Weber, Max, 230, 231, 234 Weberian values, and economic growth, 122 Webster, Charles, 86, 87, 94, 159, 194, 229, 235, 238 Webster, John, 235 Wedgwood, Josiah, 66, 84, 185, 277, 283 Weismann, August, 44 Weismann barrier, 25 Wesson, Robert, 164 Western Christianity, 170 Western knowledge, Chinese attitudes toward, 312 Westfall, Richard, 106, 109, 115, 203, 206, 232 Westman, Robert, 158 Westminster Abbey, Newton’s epitaph in, 111 Whigs, 229 Whiston, William, 100, 110 White, Andrew Dickson, 133, 150 White, Lynn, 119, 135, 136, 142, 143 on economic growth, 17 White, Michael, 100 Wieland, Christoph Wieland, 243 Wilkins, John, 87, 93, 94, 153, 155, 229, 238, 255 Williams, David, 68 Williams, George, 30 Willis, Thomas, 91 Willughby, Francis, 94, 229 Wilson, Andrew, 143 Winter, Sidney, 22 Wiseman, Richard, 91 witchcraft, 220 Withers, Charles, 265 Wittenberg, University of, 173, 174 Woeßmann, Ludger, 127 Wolff, Christian, 245 women, and the Republic of Letters, 199 Wong, Bin, 287, 289 Woodside, Alexander, 292, 304, 305, 307, 322 Woodward, Hezekiah, 235 Wootton, David, 55, 160, 201, 213, 216, 218, 248, 270, 272, 318 World Values Survey, 13 Worm, Ole, 158, 240 Wotton, William, 95, 198, 253 Wren, Christopher, 87 Wright, Thomas, 222 wunderkammern, 153 Wuthnow, Robert, 174, 180, 276 Xu Guangqi, 326, 328, 333 Xue, Melanie Meng, 294, 327 Xunzi, 298, 319, 330 xylography, 293 Yan Roju, 328 Yan Yuan, 303 Yang Guangxian, 312 Yates, Frances, 73, 210 Yongle Dadian, 332 Yongle emperor, 300, 332 Yongzheng emperor, 313, 334 Young, Arthur, 276, 328 Yuan dynasty, 299-301, 308, 314 Yuchtman, Noam, 127 Zaccaria, Francesco Antonio, 131 Zagorin, Perez, 76, 78, 79, 132, 233 Zak, Paul J., 13 Zamenhof, Lazar, 257 Zelin, Madeleine, 291 Zheng He, 309 Zhou dynasty, 136 Zhu Shunshui, 311 Zhu Xi, 300, 302, 303, 308, 324, 330 as a cultural entrepreneur, 336 neo-Confucian orthodoxy, 309, 323 triumph of ideas, 308 Zilibotti, Fabrizio, 7, 236 Zilsel, Edgar, 136, 138 Ziman, John, 22, 31, 62 Zingales, Luigi, 13, 14 Zittel, Claus, 78 zoology, 91 Zuñiga, Diego de, 212 zunshi, concept of, 295 Zurich, 171, 204 Zurndorfer, Harriet, 326


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Todd Johnson, editor of the World Religion Database published by Brill, explains that “the world is less religious today than in 1900, but more religious since 1970 because of a resurgence of religion in post-communist countries and eastern Europe” (see Figure 7.1).15 This complements research conducted by Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris and University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who directs the World Values Survey. They write, “The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before—and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population.”16 If such data weren’t surprising enough, some scholars have shown that belief in an afterlife has increased in the United States, a wealthy and developed nation that has always been highly religious.17 Research published by the University of Chicago’s Andrew M.


pages: 334 words: 82,041

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Falling Apart 1Natalie Gil, 20 July 2014, ‘Loneliness: A Silent Plague That Is Hurting Young People Most’, theguardian.com. 2International Longevity Centre and Independent Age, 2013, Isolation: A Growing Issue Among Older Men, independentage.org. 3Ibid; Gil, ‘Loneliness’. 4Ian Sample, 16 February 2014, ‘Loneliness Twice as Unhealthy as Obesity for Older People, Study Finds’, theguardian.com; Gill, ‘Loneliness’. 5Keith Perry, 5 August 2014, ‘One in Five Children Just Want to Be Rich When They Grow Up’, telegraph.co.uk. 6John Bingham, 18 June 2014, ‘Britain the Loneliness Capital of Europe’, telegraph.co.uk. 7The Campaign to End Loneliness, ‘A Million Lonely Older People Spell Public Health Disaster’, campaigntoendloneliness.org. 8The Campaign to End Loneliness, ‘Loneliness Research’, campaigntoendloneliness.org. 9Luca Stanca and Luigino Bruni, June 2005, ‘Income Aspirations, Television and Happiness: Evidence from the World Values Surveys’, boa.unimib.it. 10Kathryn Hopkins, 13 October 2014, ‘FTSE Bosses Earn 120 Times More Than Average Worker’, thetimes.co.uk. 11Jill Treanor, 14 October 2014, ‘Richest 1% of People Own Nearly Half of Global Wealth, Says Report’, theguardian.com. 12Graeme Wood, April 2011, ‘Secret Fears of the Super-Rich’, theatlantic.com. 13International Longevity Centre, Isolation. 2.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

You can already travel from Belgium to the Netherlands, France, Germany and Luxembourg without a passport and without changing currency. But the truth is that, when it comes to identity, the global and the parochial have a symbiotic relationship. The smaller the world seems and the less control we have over it, the more likely we are to retreat into the local spheres where we might have influence. Analysis of the World Values Survey by Professor Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School reveals that, notwithstanding the explosion in both global trade and communication, the primary territorial identity that most people choose is local or regional, as opposed to national, continental or cosmopolitan. Only 2 percent identified as cosmopolitan, meaning an exclusively continental or world identity; 15 percent identified primarily with their continent; 38 percent with their nation state; while 47 percent chose their region or local area.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

There is indeed a virtuous circle between the technologies of freedom and the struggle to free the minds from the frames of domination. These findings are in cognitive coherence with a 2010 study in Britain, conducted by sociologist Michael Willmott on the basis of the global data obtained from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan. He analyzed 35,000 individual answers between 2005 and 2007. The study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence: all feelings that have a positive effect on personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and less qualifications, for people in the developing world, and for women.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

But when we talk of reproductive labor under capitalism, we’re referring to a very specific set of arrangements, ones that were rearranged through world-ecology and persist today.22 Under these arrangements, some humans were confined to new political, social, and ecological units—households—the better to engage in care work in capitalism’s ecology. Call this the Great Domestication. Consider what appear to be entirely independent sets of observations. Between 2010–2014, the Vienna-based World Values Survey received a range of responses to the statement “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.” In Iceland, 3.6 percent of people agreed, but in Egypt 99.6 percent did.23 Why the difference? The easy explanations are culture, religion, tradition, income level. Yet a study in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics points the finger at none of these things.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

A number of cross-national studies have shown that middle-class people have different political values from the poor: they value democracy more, want more individual freedom, are more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, etc. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class status produce what he calls “post-material” values in which democracy, equality, and identity issues become much more prominent than older issues of economic distribution. William Easterly has linked what he labels a “middle class consensus” to higher economic growth, education, health, stability, and other positive outcomes.

Illinois Waisman, Carlos Waldersee, Alfred von Wales Wallis, John Wang Qishan wantok Ward, Artemus War of the Pacific War of the Triple Alliance wars; in Europe; Japan and; in Latin America Washington, George Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Weber, Eugen Weber, Max Weberian states Weingast, Barry welfare states Wells, H. G. West Papua Wilberforce, William William of Orange Wilson, James S. Wilson, Woodrow “winner-take-all” society Wolfenson, James Woolcock, Michael workers working class; conversion into middle class; voting by World Bank; Worldwide Governance Indicators World Bank Institute World Values Survey World War I World War II; Japan’s defeat in Wrong, Michela Wu Zhao Xi Jinping Yamagata Aritomo Yang, Dali Yang, Hongxing Yanukovich, Viktor Yar’Adua, Umaru Musa Yemen Yrigoyen, Hipólito Yugoslavia Zaire Zakaria, Fareed Zambia Zanzibar Zenawi, Meles Zhao, Dingxin Zhou Enlai Zhu Yuangzhang Zimbabwe ALSO BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity The End of History and the Last Man About the Author Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

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

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

Huntington (eds.) (2000), Culture Matters – How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Books, New York); the articles in the ‘Symposium on “Cultural Economics”’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006, vol. 20, no. 2. 21 Landes (1998), p. 516. 22 M. Morishima (1982), Why Has Japan Succeeded? – Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). This argument has been popularized by Fukuyama (1995). 23 Based on their analysis of the World Value Survey data, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro argue that Muslims (together with ‘other Christians’, that is, Christians that do not belong to the Catholic, the Orthodox or the mainstream Protestant churches) have exceptionally strong beliefs in hell and after life. See their article, ‘Religion and Economy’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006, vol. 20, no. 2. 24 It is said that, of the nine names of Allah, two mean the ‘just one’.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

If workers are not mobile, firms with regional labor market power can take advantage of their immobility and push down their wages. Thus, the authors argue, individuals with strong family ties should prefer regulated labor markets to avoid the need to move and to limit the market power of firms. Answers from the “World Values Survey” indeed show that countries with strong family ties implement more stringent labor market regulations. They also show that, within countries, individuals with strong family ties are more likely to believe that job security is a critical feature of a job and would like government regulation to ensure it (Alesina et al. 2010).


pages: 347 words: 99,317

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

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

Huntington (eds.) (2000), Culture Matters – How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Books, New York); the articles in the ‘Symposium on “Cultural Economics”’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006, vol. 20, no. 2. 21 Landes (1998), p. 516. 22 M. Morishima (1982), Why Has Japan Succeeded? – Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). This argument has been popularized by Fukuyama (1995). 23 Based on their analysis of the World Value Survey data, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro argue that Muslims (together with ‘other Christians’, that is, Christians that do not belong to the Catholic, the Orthodox or the mainstream Protestant churches) have exceptionally strong beliefs in hell and after life. See their article, ‘Religion and Economy’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006, vol. 20, no. 2. 24 It is said that, of the nine names of Allah, two mean the ‘just one’.


pages: 352 words: 107,280

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

Back in the 1980s a little over 30 per cent of people in Britain agreed with the strong statement that, ‘most people on the dole are fiddling in one way or another’. By the late 1990s this had reached nearly 40 per cent, and in 2014 it was still 35 per cent, compared to only 31 per cent who disagreed.11 This kind of belief is also much stronger in Britain than in most other comparable countries. In the World Values Survey across OECD countries between 2000 and 2004, 61 per cent of respondents in Great Britain agreed that either ‘almost all’ or ‘many’ people were claiming state benefits to which they ‘are not entitled’. This put Britain behind only Turkey, Italy, Greece and Poland in the extent to which we believed our compatriots were on the fiddle.12 Myths have consequences Misconceptions about the welfare state and the way it is abused are not just a matter of harmless misunderstanding.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

For good overviews of public opinion on key values issues, see "Issues in the 2000 Election: Values," The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/ Harvard University, September 2000; "Pew Values Update: American Social Beliefs 1997–1987," The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 20 April 1998; and "American Values: 1998 National Survey of Americans on Values," Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard Survey Project. See also the General Social Survey and the World Values Survey. In addition, see The Post-Modernity Project, The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture (Ivy, Va.: In Medias Res Foundation, University of Virginia, 1996); Daniel Yankelovich, "How Changes in the Economy Are Reshaping American Values," in Henry J. Aaron, Thomas E. Mann, and Timothy Taylor, eds., Values and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994);and Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

“Soak the rich” policies have seldom been popular among the less well-off in America, not necessarily because they have great sympathy for the rich but perhaps because the poor see themselves eventually becoming rich: Horatio Alger’s stories of ordinary people attaining great success in the land of limitless opportunity had broad appeal.18 Although such optimism may always have been unrealistic, the gulf between the possible and the practical might have been small enough in the past that Americans could continue dreaming. According to the World Values Survey, 71 percent of Americans believe the poor have a good chance of escaping poverty, while only 40 percent of Europeans share this belief.19 These differences are particularly surprising because cross-country studies suggest that people in the United States are not much more mobile across income classes than in European countries, and indeed the bottom 20 percent of earners may be unusually immobile in the United States.20 Nevertheless, the idea of income mobility was deeply ingrained in the past.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

Cultural Heritage: A Classification of Countries by Denomination Countries P % C % PC % O % M % OM % S % T % CL Anglo-American Countries USA Australia New Zealand 36 48 60 25 26 14 61 74 74 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 2 0 18 3 4 80 79 78 P P P Western European Countries Norway Sweden Finland West Germany Spain 82 81 80 39 1 1 5 3 33 82 83 86 83 72 83 1 1 2 0 0 1 4 0 1 0 2 5 2 1 0 4 1 1 1 1 89 92 86 74 84 P P P C T Central European Countries East Germany Czech Republic Slovakia Hungary Slovenia Croatia 18 2 10 17 2 0 5 39 73 55 69 82 23 40 83 72 71 82 0 0 0 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 2 3 1 1 3 3 1 1 1 24 43 86 75 75 85 T C C C C C Baltic Countries Estonia Latvia Lithuania 10 19 2 0 18 77 10 37 79 16 18 4 0 0 0 16 18 4 2 5 2 28 60 85 T P C South-Eastern European Countries (Mainly Orthodox) Yugoslavia 1 6 7 64 Romania 2 5 6 87 Bulgaria 1 1 2 53 8 0 12 72 87 64 2 3 1 81 96 67 O O O South-Eastern European Countries (Mixed-Muslim) Macedonia 0 1 1 45 Bosnia-Herzegovina 2 14 16 26 Albania 0 6 6 20 24 27 67 69 53 87 0 1 0 70 70 93 O M M 5 0 0 0 53 56 54 83 1 1 0 1 54 63 62 84 O O O O Eastern European Countries Russia Ukraine Belarus Moldova 0 0 0 0 0 6 8 0 0 6 8 0 48 56 54 83 P = Protestant; C = Catholic; PC = sum of Protestant + Catholic; O = Orthodox; M = Muslim; OM = sum of Orthodox + Muslim; S = Sects; T = proportion of respondents mentioning a denominational affiliation; CL = generalized denominational classification. Cell entries are data generated by the World Values Survey 1995–1999. Source: Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Eastward Enlargement of the European Union and the Identity of Europe” (Berlin: Veröffentlichungsreihe der Abteilung Institutionen und sozialer Wandel des Forschungsschwerpunkts Sozialer Wandel, Institutionen und Vermittlungsprozesse des Wissenschaftszentrums Berlin für Sozialforschung, September 2000), 13. 68 Chapter 3 The debate within Germany on the role of Europe after World War II may have given Thatcher—and Ridley—grounds for Germanophobia.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

These ‘happiness’ studies allow us to get around a lot of problems involved in measuring living standards: what needs to be included in the measurement; how we assign values to difficult-to-measure elements that affect our living standards (even though this has not stopped people from coming up with things like ‘political freedom index’); and what weight to give to each element. The best-known of this type of study are the Gallup Happiness Survey and the World Values Survey. Many people question whether happiness can be, and indeed should be, measured at all. The fact that happiness may be conceptually a better measure than income does not mean that we should try to measure it. Richard Layard, the British economist who is a leading scholar trying to measure happiness, defends such attempts by saying, ‘If you think something matters you should try to measure it [italics added].’3 But other people disagree – including Albert Einstein, who once famously said, ‘Not everything that counts can be measured.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

For an excellent discussion of material versus postmaterial values, see Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues have been conducting social-values research in eighty-one societies since 1981 as part of the University of Michigan’s World Values Survey. The data represent 85 percent of the world’s population. Inglehart finds that social values and economic development progress hand in hand in predictable ways. He rejects the notion that either economic development or social values drive modernization and argues that the two are inextricably linked.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Brooks is right that Americans, in general, are more generous than Europeans. Even in a ranking produced by the British Charities Aid Foundation that arguably understates American generosity, the U.S. still comes out on top (see table). It is also true that Americans are more religious than their peers across the Atlantic: in the 2000 World Values Survey, only 16 percent of Americans said they would “never” or “practically never” attend church, compared with 60 percent of the French and 55 percent of Britons. But even if giving is correlated with faith across the population as a whole, does that hold true for superwealthy philanthrocapitalists?


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

13 While no one claims that any one person’s happiness can be directly compared with any other person’s, the average differences across the groups are meaningful and reflect real differences in well-being. Average happiness across countries: What happens if we compare average happi­ ness levels across countries with different levels of average income? ­Figure 4.4 shows data on responses to a question about happiness from seventy countries in the 1999­–2004 World Values Survey.14 For each country, we show the average level of happiness (converted to a ten-point scale) and the best measure available of its real output per person.15 Remarkable are the very poor countries (such as Tanzania and Nigeria), whose happiness scores here are even higher than those in the happiest of the wealthy countries.16 Easterlin observes that such results ‘are a testimony to the adaptability of mankind.


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

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

The phrase is that of Lipset, American Exceptionalism; see also Minxin Pei, "The Paradoxes of American Nationalism," Foreign Policy (May-June 2003). 3. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 100-102, 140-161, 215216, etc. 4. Figures for 1999 from World Values Survey, quoted in Pei, "The Paradoxes of American Nationalism." For the 1985 figures, see Richard Rose, "National Pride in Cross-cultural Perspective," International Social Science Journal 37, no. 1 (1985). For the 2003 figures, see Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Views of a Changing World 2003, Washington, DC.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

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

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

Tahir Andrabi and Jishnu Das, “In Aid We Trust: Hearts and Minds and the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005,” Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 3 (2017): 371–86. 20. These numbers paint a grim picture of trust among Pakistani citizens, but they are consistent with trust levels in developing countries as measured by the World Values Survey, which has been applied in one hundred countries in six waves since 1981. 21. Andrabi and Das, “In Aid We Trust,” 379. 22. Ibid., 382. 23. Ibid., 385. 24. Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov, “Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan” (MIT Political Science Department Research Paper No. 2011–14, 2012). 25.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

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

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

By the same token, to pretend that no impulse for popular sovereignty was part of the uprising in the first place is simply untrue. The demand for recognition was there; it has just not been met. Quite remarkably, given their manifold advantage over other forms of government, the established democracies are losing confidence in their own goodness. Astonishingly, the 2011 World Values Survey found that 34 per cent of Americans approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’. They might have been more careful what they wished for. A third of voters are at least prepared to say they would like to drop the inconvenient panoply of democracy.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The observations of participants contribute to that narrative, and the meaning of these observations is derived from the context in which they are made. 13 Evolution gave us a capacity to reason which, as a 2017 book by two French researchers in cognitive science, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, explains, ‘is not geared to solitary use’. 14 Evolution has produced the collective intelligence and social norms and institutions which are ‘the secret of our success’; these social capabilities provide the reason that humans dominate the planet. 15 Multiple levels of evolutionary selection If social groups developed the division of labour and the mutualisation of risk-sharing, and subsequent millennia took these socio-economic innovations to unsurpassed levels, the outcome was equally unsurpassed levels of prosperity. And the emergence of broadly defined kinship groups had many other economic and social advantages. Much of modern life would be difficult without a degree of trust, and economic life would be almost impossible. The World Values Survey shows a strong positive correlation across countries between per capita income and answers to the question ‘Do you think that most people can be trusted?’ 16 Recognition of the importance of social and cultural evolution long precedes Darwin; it certainly can be found in the work of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

In particular, the “collectivist” cultures of East Asia may have contributed to more deference to authority—and thus higher degrees of compliance with public health mandates—than was the case in the more “individualistic” Western countries.81 But this broad generalization proves not as informative as two other factors. The first is the level of trust in government. Using measures from the World Values Survey, one analysis found that countries with low levels of trust suffered the most COVID-19 deaths during the first wave, controlling for other variables such as population age structure and the size and timing of the pandemic. Another study, using international survey data from twenty-three countries, concluded that those nations with higher levels of trust in government had higher rates of compliance with public health measures including frequent handwashing, avoiding large gatherings, and quarantine requirements.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The brain we have is two million years old. It hasn’t evolved that much. So aggression and war will always be a big challenge. But with less scarcity, perhaps there’s less of a trigger to spark violence. There’s statistical evidence to show that more access to technology can make people happier. The World Values Survey has shown that from 1981 to 2007, happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries studied. And what was going on during those years? That’s right. The digital revolution. The technology wave was spreading across the globe—or what the report calls “the transition from industrial to knowledge societies.”


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In 2005 Televangelist John Hagee and others saw Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment on New Orleans for tolerating such ‘abominations’ as Gay Pride parades and clinics that offer abortions. For earlier ‘peccatogenic’ explanations, see ch. 1 above. 21. Bankoff, Cultures, 3; Kvaløy, ‘The publics' concern’, based on data collected from the 2005–9 ‘World Values Survey’, quotations from pp. 11, 13–14, and 18. The authors asked respondents how serious they considered not only global warming but also ‘loss of plant or animal species or biodiversity’ and ‘pollution of rivers, lakes and oceans’. Almost everywhere, concern for the last category came top, with global warming either second or last (p. 17).