bread and circuses

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Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich

bread and circuses, effective altruism, end world poverty, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jim Simons, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nick Bostrom, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, supervolcano, time value of money, William MacAskill

Also see Levy’s “From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through: Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation,” in Corporations and American Democracy, ed. Naomi Lamoreaux and William Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Norman I. Silber, A Corporate Form of Freedom: The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001). 4. In this section, I draw on the excellent accounts offered by Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism (London: Penguin, 1992); Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Vincent Gabrielsen, Financing the Athenian Fleet: Public Taxation and Social Relations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Matthew R.

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Reflecting the dual elements of voluntarism and obligations, some scholars describe the trierarchy as a form of public finance and taxation (e.g., Gabrielsen) and others as a mechanism for private provision of public goods (e.g., Kaiser). The more familiar term among classicists is “euergetism,” defined as private liberality for public benefit in Paul Veyne’s classic formulation in Bread and Circuses. 14. Ober, Mass and Elite, 241–242. 15. Gabrielsen, Financing the Athenian Fleet, 220. Also, “The diversion of the naval command into the liturgical orbit placed munificence in this area under the regulatory mechanisms of democratic statutes that generally but unequivocally spelled out the obligation incumbent upon wealthy citizens to serve the state (or the people) with their ‘body and property’” (219). 16.

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Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016. Turgot, Anne-Robert. “Fondation.” In The Turgot Collection, edited by David Gordon, 461–469. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2011. U.S. Congress, Commission on Industrial Relations. “Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony.” 1912. Veyne, Paul. Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. London: Penguin, 1992. Walsh, Frank. “Perilous Philanthropy.” Independent 83 (1915): 262–264. Warren, Mark. Democracy and Association. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Weisbrod, Burton A. “The Pitfalls of Profits.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2004. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_pitfalls_of_profits.

Humble Pie and Cold Turkey: English Expressions and Their Origins by Caroline Taggart

animal electricity, bread and circuses, California gold rush, cuban missile crisis, false flag, invention of the telegraph, low interest rates, the market place

Dating from two thousand years ago, the line from the Christian Lord’s Prayer that asks God to give us this day our daily bread is simply requesting enough to eat; when, a few decades later, the Latin poet Juvenal wrote that the Roman people had grown so self-indulgent that they weren’t interested in their democratic rights but were content with bread and circuses, it went without saying that they’d be happier with some salami and a few olives thrown in. Not to mention something in a flagon to wash it down. To earn your (daily) bread is to work for a living, and has been for several hundred years, while in Australian or New Zealand slang someone wondering about your line of business might ask What do you do for a crust?

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Index A above board ref1 abracadabra ref1 acid test ref1 after your own heart ref1 aftermath ref1–ref2 albatross around your neck, an ref1 all your ducks in a row ref1 amok, to run ref1–ref2 ampere ref1 apple of your eye ref1–ref2 apple-pie order ref1 aristocracy ref1 assassin ref1–ref2 auspices, under the ref1 auspicious ref1 avocado ref1 B babel ref1 back foot, on the ref1 back-handed compliment ref1 backlog ref1–ref2 baker’s dozen ref1–ref2 bandwagon ref1 ball is in your court, the ref1 ball rolling, keep/set the ref1–ref2 banksia ref1 baptism of fire ref1 barbecue ref1 bark up the wrong tree ref1–ref2 bat, off your own ref1 batten down the hatches ref1 battle royal ref1–ref2 beam ends, on your ref1 beat the living daylights ref1 beef ref1 beef something up ref1 benchmark ref1 berserk, to go ref1 between a rock and a hard place ref1 between the devil and the deep blue sea ref1 beyond the veil ref1 big shot ref1 big wig ref1 bikini ref1 birdie ref1–ref2 bistro ref1 bite the dust ref1 blackball ref1 black cap ref1 black comedy ref1 black humour ref1 black magic ref1 black sheep ref1–ref2 blackmail ref1 bleeding heart ref1 blockbuster ref1 blue blood ref1 blue moon, once in a ref1–ref2 board ref1 board, go by the ref1 boot is on the other foot, the ref1 bootleg ref1 bread and circuses ref1–ref2 breed like rabbits ref1 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ref1 bring home the bacon ref1 Bristol fashion ref1–ref2 broad in the beam ref1 bulldozer ref1 burn your bridges/boats ref1 burton, gone for a ref1 burying the hatchet ref1 by and large ref1 by hook or by crook ref1 C calico ref1 call the shots ref1 cards, on the ref1 cash cow ref1 caught red-handed ref1 Celsius ref1 chance your arm ref1 cheesy ref1 chicken ref1–ref2 chicken-hearted ref1 chicken out ref1–ref2 chips are down, the ref1 chips, to cash in your/to have had your ref1 chock-a-block ref1 chopsticks ref1 clean slate ref1 cloak and dagger ref1–ref2 close to the wind ref1 cloud-cuckoo-land ref1–ref2 cloud nine, on ref1–ref2 cockpit ref1–ref2 cold turkey ref1–ref2 colours ref1 cook someone’s goose ref1 copybook ref1 corny ref1 coulomb ref1 cream of the crop ref1–ref2 crème de la crème ref1 cry wolf ref1 cupboard ref1 curium ref1 currying favour ref1 cut both ways ref1 cut of your jib, the ref1 cut the mustard ref1 D damask ref1 Dampiera ref1 dark horse ref1 deadline ref1 death’s door ref1–ref2 denim ref1 devil to pay ref1–ref2 devil’s advocate ref1 dilly-dally ref1 dishevelled ref1 divan ref1 dog in the manger ref1 double-edged sword ref1 dough ref1 Douglas fir ref1–ref2 dove ref1 down to the wire ref1 draconian/draconic ref1 draw a blank ref1 draw in one’s horns ref1 dreadnought ref1 dressed to the nines ref1 drum in/out/up ref1–ref2 duck ref1–ref2 dyed in the wool ref1 E eagle ref1, ref2 earn your (daily) bread ref1 eat humble pie ref1 eavesdrop ref1 F Fahrenheit ref1 fair game ref1–ref2 fall on your sword ref1 Fallopian tube ref1 false colours ref1 far cry ref1 faraday ref1 fast and loose ref1–ref2 fate is sealed ref1–ref2 favour ref1 feet of clay ref1–ref2 flash in the pan ref1 flowing with milk and honey ref1 fly in the ointment ref1 flying colours ref1 forensic ref1 forlorn hope ref1 forsythia ref1 freelance ref1 from pillar to post ref1–ref2 fruits of your labours ref1 full circle ref1 full monty ref1–ref2 G gallows humour ref1 galvanization ref1 galvanize into action ref1–ref2 ghoul ref1 give up the ghost ref1 gobbledygook ref1 good Samaritan ref1–ref2 grapevine, through the ref1 grass roots ref1 graveyard shift ref1 green ref1–ref2 green-eyed ref1–ref2 grist to the mill ref1 ground zero ref1 guillotine ref1 gunwales, packed to the ref1–ref2 H half-cock, go off at ref1 ham ref1–ref2 hamfatter ref1–ref2 ham-fisted/ham-handed ref1 hang fire ref1 hang in the balance ref1 hanky-panky ref1 hardball, to play ref1 hark back ref1 hat trick ref1 haul over the coals ref1 have someone’s guts for garters ref1 have the stomach for ref1 hawk ref1–ref2 head in the clouds, have your ref1 headless chicken ref1 heap coals of fire ref1 heart bleeds/is in your boots/in your mouth ref1 heartstrings ref1 helter-skelter ref1 hertz ref1 hide your light under a bushel ref1 higgledy-piggledy ref1 high horse ref1 hit below the belt ref1 hit for six ref1–ref2 hobby-horse ref1–ref2 hocus pocus ref1 hoist by your own petard ref1 hold the fort ref1–ref2 holy of holies ref1 I ironclad ref1 J Jack ref1 jeans ref1 jerry-built ref1 jetty ref1 K keen as mustard, as ref1 keep mum ref1 keep someone posted ref1 kelvin ref1 kiss of death ref1 know/learn by heart ref1 L lamb to the slaughter ref1–ref2 lambert ref1 lame duck ref1 Land of Nod ref1 last ditch ref1 leotard ref1 left field ref1 let the cat out of the bag ref1–ref2 let your hair down ref1 lily-livered ref1 limelight ref1 long chalk ref1–ref2 look to your laurels ref1 loop, in the ref1 love ref1 lurch, in the ref1 M macadamization ref1 magnolia ref1 mahonia ref1 main chance, to have an eye for ref1 man of my kidney ref1 manure ref1–ref2 marching orders ref1 maverick ref1 mayhem ref1 meander ref1–ref2 millstone around your neck ref1 milk of human kindness ref1 moonshine ref1 moot point ref1 mortician ref1 mumbo-jumbo ref1–ref2 mummery/mumchance ref1 museum ref1 N nail your colours to the mast ref1 neck and neck ref1–ref2 nest egg ref1 new-fangled ref1 no holds barred ref1–ref2 no room to swing a cat ref1 O ohm ref1 olive branch ref1 onions, to know your ref1–ref2 ostracize ref1 ottoman ref1 P pan out ref1–ref2 par for the course ref1 Parthian shot/parting shot ref1–ref2 pass the buck ref1–ref2 pay through the nose ref1 perfect storm ref1–ref2 perfume ref1 pick up the gauntlet ref1 pig in a poke ref1 piggyback ref1 pink, in the ref1 pipe dream ref1 piping hot ref1 plain as a pikestaff ref1–ref2 plums in your mouth ref1 plum job ref1 polonium ref1 pot, go to ref1 pot luck ref1 pour your heart out ref1 powwow ref1 pull the wool over someone’s eyes ref1 pull your punches ref1 punch above your weight ref1 push the boat out ref1–ref2 R rabbit in the headlights ref1 rabbit on ref1–ref2 rain check ref1 raise Cain ref1 rank and file ref1 read the riot act ref1 realtor ref1 red cent ref1–ref2 red herring ref1 red-letter day ref1 rest on your laurels ref1–ref2 restaurant ref1 ring the changes ref1 ropes, against the ref1 ropes, to know/to show someone ref1 round-robin ref1–ref2 rub salt in the wound ref1 Rubicon, to cross the ref1 run-of-the-mill ref1–ref2 run someone to earth ref1 run the gauntlet ref1 S salad days ref1 salt of the earth ref1–ref2 salt something away ref1–ref2 sardonic ref1 save your bacon ref1–ref2 saving grace ref1 say boo to a goose ref1 scapegoat ref1 scatter to the four winds ref1–ref2 schmaltzy ref1 scot-free ref1 sea change ref1–ref2 seal of approval ref1 separate the sheep from the goats ref1–ref2 seventh heaven, in ref1 shambles ref1 shilly-shally ref1–ref2 shipshape ref1 shoot fish in a barrel ref1 shoot your bolt ref1 short shrift ref1 shrapnel ref1 siemens ref1 silhouette ref1 sitting duck ref1 slogan ref1 soap box ref1 soap opera ref1 sofa ref1 sour grapes ref1 squirrel away ref1 speakeasy ref1 speed, up to ref1–ref2 steal a march ref1 steal someone’s thunder ref1 steeplechase ref1 stoic/stoical ref1 string to your bow, to have more than one ref1 stump, on the ref1 stumped, to be ref1 suede ref1 sweepstake ref1 T take candy from a baby ref1 take something to your heart ref1 taken aback ref1–ref2 talk turkey ref1 tantalize/tantalus ref1 tarmac ref1 tarred with the same brush ref1 tawdry ref1–ref2 teetotal ref1–ref2 three sheets to the wind ref1 through the mill ref1 throw in at the deep end ref1 throw in the towel ref1–ref2 throw your hat into the ring ref1–ref2 thug ref1 thumbs down/thumbs up ref1–ref2 Tom ref1 tomfoolery ref1 true blue ref1 true colours ref1–ref2 tulip ref1 turncoat ref1 tyrant ref1 U undertaker ref1 upper crust ref1 upper hand, to have the ref1 V vandalize ref1 vent your spleen ref1–ref2 volt ref1 vulcanization ref1–ref2 W wear your heart on your sleeve ref1 wellington ref1 whip hand, to have the ref1 whistle-stop tour ref1–ref2 white elephant ref1–ref2 white feather ref1 white-livered ref1 wild-goose chase ref1 willy-nilly ref1 win hands down ref1 wipe the slate clean ref1 with a grain/pinch of salt ref1 within cry/within cooee ref1 worth your salt ref1 wring someone’s withers ref1 writing on the wall ref1 Y yellow belly ref1 Z zero hour ref1

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

In other countries, he would have been labeled as a "terrorist" and tortured for years. Abuse of children is a terrible thing. Branding teenagers who send nude pictures of themselves as sex offenders, with life-long consequences, does not protect anyone. We are often so afraid of losing our bread and circuses and so quick to fear and hate others that we're ready to give up our neighbors without a struggle. We often clap as authorities drag away the wretched lawbreakers. And the labeling continues: "extremist," "communist," "liberal," "union organizer," "intellectual," "atheist" -- and the midnight knock on the door is for our parents, brothers, children, ourselves.

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Bad things tend to happen elsewhere, to other people. Who may or may not deserve it. We're enormously complacent, if not smug, and anyone who seriously claims the state is working hard to reduce our freedoms tends to be seen as paranoid. However, while wealth and freedom correlate, full fridges and streaming TV shows do not equal freedom. Bread and circuses is a classic way to appease the people without giving them real freedom. We are so good at self-deceit, rationalization, and maintaining the sense of normalcy no matter how bizarre things get. "So far so good!" and "stop complaining!" fight for first place as the prime motto of the human race.

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It matters because people are only as stupid as their environments. That average person is the descendant of an infinite line of survivors, each meaner and more determined than their peers. Inside every calm, ordinary person sits a little implacable demon, able to come to life, grow and take charge if the situation demands it. Bread and circuses. The criminals inside the ring, fighting the wild animals, and the spectators outside, passively watching. That was the way the establishment hoped the Internet would develop. Except that the crowd jumped the barriers and joined the fracas in the ring. In 2008, the Church of Scientology tried to use copyright law to censor the video interview of a prominent Scientologist, Tom Cruise.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Price controls and quotas and extortion fees became increasingly burdensome and trade began to collapse, causing desperate food shortages. Diversion: The last days of the Roman empire were marked by its moral decline, but in reality, it was the “bread-and-circuses” used by corrupt governments to placate a population that brought about the fall of the empire. “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.” – Juvenal, a poet in Ancient Rome. People became, and were encouraged to become, more interested in “being happy” than in education and training or being confronted with inconvenient truths that would force them out of their comfort coma.

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In the end, those that review how it all ended will feel the same way, have the same lack of empathy, and wonder the same things: how did they not see it coming, the signs were everywhere – starting with the flashing neon red arrows pointing out rogue governments all over the world. They do not care if the people become aware of their criminality, and they do not worry about prosecution because they know that they control the halls of (in)justice. They take the “bread and circuses” approach towards dealing with the general public since they do not respect them, and they treat the people as if they work for them, not the other way around. They conduct scientific experiments on the population without their consent and run human trafficking, organ harvesting, and weapons distribution operations.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

You would pay almost no income tax, save that your corporations pay to the extent they are not leveraged and hedged. Even that can be attenuated through the use of offshore havens.Then you would loudly sing support for the common man by calling upon government to raise the individual income tax, and you would magnanimously call for more bread and circuses for the masses. Another key part of the PR campaign would be to project a philanthropic image through several high-profile donations. In this way you would replicate the behavior of the senatorial class in ancient Rome, which also paid no taxes but was expected to contribute to the public good by building the occasional wall or aqueduct, which would be sure to impress the citizenry and prove one’s worth in the patronage system.

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The estates of Rome’s middle classes were eroded by governmental action, mostly the suppression of consumer price inflation through food price controls and repression of wages through competition for labor by slavery. The emergence of populist politicians such as the Gracchus brothers in the first century bc introduced land reform and welfare, and the Roman populace shifted to embrace a socialist framework of rewarding idleness with bread and circuses. The role of money in credit crises is carefully examined. The recurrence of credit panics on the surface seems incongruent with the discipline of hard money developed in the Republic. But as a reserve, silver expanded geometrically, acting as a rudimentary version of today’s fiat backing, and its production was under complete government control in state-owned mines.

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Instead it was a protracted slide that lasted hundreds of years. Rome’s entrepreneurial middle class would prosper at the apex of imperial prosperity, but its success would prove to be overly alluring to Rome’s rulers. Thinking 256 ENDLESS MONEY they were immune from political upheaval if a broad underclass could be pleased by bread and circuses, they crafted fiscal and monetary policies in such a way that they would plunder the most dynamic element within their society and cause a nearly modern civilization to regress for a millennia. Chapter 13 Other Perspectives his chapter is a potpourri of noneconomic explanations used to explain the decline of Rome.Variety abounds: Decadence is a popular attribution, but it offers little substance.

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The new creators of culture were not the people, but rather industrialists; the people’s role was dumbed down into being passive purchasers of commodities. Much like Marx’s view of religion as the opiate of the masses, Horkheimer and Adorno worried that this new trend was shifting people’s attention away from their economic exploitation. Culture was becoming the equivalent of the Ancient Romans’ panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”), entertainment to appease the masses.139 Traditional creativity, produced by individuals, was increasingly being left to state-subsidized programs and could therefore hardly be said to be an industry. 122 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT Eventually, budgets for state programs were cut back. Rather than declare they were no longer interested in furthering culture—an option not open to countries with ministries of culture—governments simply declared that the marketplace was already supplying people’s cultural needs: The marketplace magically became the creative industries.

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See Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (2007, MIT Press). 138. “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” final chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” A 2002 edition with a new translation by Edmund Jephcott and published by Stanford University Press is the best English language version. 139. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses. 140. “The Impact of Culture on Creativity” (June 2009), available at: http://www.keanet.eu/en/impactcreativityculture.html. 141. Report at 37. 142. Report at 51. 143. See Susan Galloway and Stewart Dunlop, A Critique of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Public Policy, 13 International Journal of Cultural Policy 17 (2007). 144.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

bread and circuses, Cepheid variable, Charles Lindbergh, double helix, gravity well, index card, indoor plumbing, job automation, phenotype, union organizing

Finally, the Sleepless, nearly all of whom were invisible in Sanctuary anyway, were disregarded by Livers, if not by donkeys. All of it, the entire trefoil organization—id, ego, and superego, some wit had labeled it sardonically—was underwritten by cheap, ubiquitous Y-energy, powering automated factories making possible a lavish Dole that traded bread and circuses for votes. The whole thing, Leisha thought, was peculiarly American, managing to combine democracy with materialism, mediocrity with enthusiasm, power with the illusion of control from below. “Tell me, Mr. Cavanaugh, what do you and your friends do with all your free time?” “Do?” He seemed startled.

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“My Daddy was a little boy then. The Dole didn’t hardly provide nothin’ then.” “I remember,” Leisha said wryly; what the Dole had provided, courtesy of basic cheap Y-energy and social conscience, was nothing compared to what donkeys and government now provided, courtesy of the need for votes. Bread and circuses, saved from Roman barbarism only by that same cheap affluence. Comfortable and courted, Livers lacked the pent-up rage for the arena. She had expected Drew to pass over her reference to remembering his father’s era; most children regarded the past as irrelevant. But he surprised her. “You remember, you?

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Menzler, address to the Institute of Public Administration, Lord Ashfield and the public corporation, 1951. 4 Ibid. 5 Barker and Robbins, p. 285. 6 Lord Ashfield, ‘London’s Traffic Problem Reconsidered’, The 19th Century and After Review, August 1924, p. 4. 7 John Glover, London’s Underground, Ian Allan, 1999, p. 39. 8 Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, The Making of Modern London, 1914–1939, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. 9 It was originally published in the Daily Herald and is quoted in Bernard Donoghue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison, Portrait of a Politician, Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 116. 10 Donoghue and Jones, p. 121. 11 Ibid., p. 145. 12 House of Commons, 31 March 1931. 13 Financial News, 14 March 1931. 14 Donoghue and Jones, p. 145. 15 Jonathan Glancey, London bread and circuses, Verso, 2001, p. 38. 16 Indeed, this lack of integration still causes problems today. When Transport for London introduced the Oyster card in 2004, it could not be used on much of the suburban rail network for individual journeys and it took until 2009 before it could be generally used for all rail trips in London. 17 Menzler. 18 This was the first Lord Hailsham, the father of the one who was Lord Chancellor in the 1970s and 1980s. 19 House of Lords, 30 March 1933. 20 Donoghue and Jones, p. 114. 21 Barman, p. 155. 22 Ibid., p. 160. 23 Ibid., p. 155. 24 Glancey, p. 35.

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Dennis Edwards and Ron Pigram, The Romance of Metroland, Baton Transport, 1986. Andrew Emmerson, The Underground Pioneers, Capital Transport, 2000. Desmond Fennell, Investigation into the King’s Cross Fire, HMSO 1988, Cm 499. Clive Foxell, The story of the Met and GC joint line, self-published, 2001. Jonathan Glancey, London, Bread and Circuses, Verso, 2001. John Glover, London’s Underground, the world’s premier underground system, Ian Allan, 1999 (ninth edition). John Glover, Principles of London Underground Operations, Ian Allan, 2000. John Gregg, The Shelter of the Tubes, Capital Transport, 2001. Stephen Halliday, Making the Metropolis, creators of Victoria’s London, Breedon Books, 2003.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

At a rather basic level, people are less likely to rise in protest against an unjust and repressive system if the risks of rising are not counterbalanced by the pressures of acute material distress: consumerism is always a technique for rulers in repressive regimes to seek a modicum of popular quiescence. ('Bread and circuses' policies are as old as Roman civilisation.) This was the case in the peacetime years of the Third Reich: mindful of the need to sustain his personal popularity or 'charisma', on which the political system of the Third Reich was so dependent, Hitler had constantly to balance considerations of consumer satisfaction with the economic imperatives entailed by preparations for war.

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Under Honecker in particular, serious efforts were put into improvements in housing, social policy, the standard of living, the availability of consumer goods, while at the same time there were cultural clamp-downs and reversals of early promises of intellectual liberalization. It should not be suggested that such policies were of a purely cynical, 'bread and circuses' nature: there were very real and genuine attempts to improve the conditions of life of East German citizens, reinforcing the obvious political considerations. What is at issue here, however, is not so much the motives behind such policies, or the causes of the relative (in East European terms) success of the East German economy, as the consequences of East German economic performance.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

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

And so we call on Patti, now that she knows the truth, to cancel this event.” Smith responded to the outcry, writing on her website, “I am an independent person, not owned or directed by anyone. My allegiance is to the Hotel itself, and I have done nothing to tarnish it.” But many residents believed the concert was merely bread and circuses, a way to get them on board with the developer’s plans. On Hamilton’s Facebook page, concerned readers—myself included—planned a die-in protest. On the night of the concert, protesters would drop “dead” on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, hold up lighters, and recite the lyrics to Smith’s song “People Have the Power.”

…

Creativity agendas can deceptively feel lefty, like old Jane Jacobs with her diversity and vibrancy and mixed use. As Peck points out, they “have an apple-pie quality,” generating support while disarming opposition. It’s hard to critique this stuff. Who doesn’t like public art, free Wi-Fi, and other nice things? Bread and circuses are an effective way to control opinion. When I criticized the High Line, I was attacked as a heretic. And don’t dare complain about bike lanes. Look, I enjoy riding in the bike lanes, but I’m not going to deny that they’re a tool of hyper-gentrification, attracting a certain class of people (to which I belong) and giving a boost to property values, facts that Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner knew well.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, edge city, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Honoré de Balzac, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

By "poor" Aristotle meant laborers, landowning peasants, arti­ sans, and so on—essentially, the middle class and below. 96 / THE COMING ANARCHY Is it not conceivable that corporations will, like the rulers of both Sparta and Athens, project power to the advantage of the well-off while satisfying the twenty-first-century servile popu­ lace with the equivalent of bread and circuses? In other words, the category of politics we live with may depend more on power relationships and the demeanor of our society than on whether we continue to hold elections. Just as Cambodia was never re­ ally democratic, despite what the State Department and the U.N. told us, in the future we may not be democratic, despite what the government and media increasingly dominated by corporations tell us.

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

There is no need to ban books if people are not reading them. If the people are entertained, they will also be docile. In the movie Gladiator, Senator Gracchus, played by Derek Jacobi, understands that patrician defenders of the Roman Republic, such as him, are weak competitors to Emperor Commodus’s bread and circuses. ‘The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it’s the sand of the Colosseum,’ he says. ‘He’ll bring them death – and they will love him for it.’ Vladimir Putin is a better student of Huxley than Orwell. When he was a KGB agent based in Dresden in the 1980s, most of its population could pick up television from the West on their transmitters.

The Other Israel: voices of refusal and dissent by Tom Śegev, Roane Carey, Jonathan Shainin

bread and circuses, conceptual framework, facts on the ground, Internet Archive, open borders, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

sc: Do you exclude the possibility of an IsraeH victory, despite the power differential? aa: We have had our "victory." In 1967, we occupied all the Palestinian lands. Once "terrorism is vanquished," what shall we do? This is absurd. The Palestinians want self-rule. Whoever wants to "vanquish" them, then offer them bread and circuses, understands nothing. The Israeli army is stronger than ever, our secret services are excellent; then why is the problem not resolved? Reoccupying the Palestinian Authority lands and killing Arafat, what would that change? Those who want victory want an unending war. SC: Yet, since September 11, many think that Israel can change the regional situation in its favor.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man’ (Numbers 31:17–18). God even gives advice on rape himself: ‘if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife’ (Deuteronomy 21:11). Source: Eisner 2003.4 Today many object to the cruelty of animals in circuses, but in Roman days, the circus in ‘bread and circuses’ meant the killing of perhaps several million people for entertainment in arenas such as the Colosseum. Gladiators fought to the death and naked women were tied to stakes and raped or torn apart by animals. Violence was not reserved for those on the bottom rungs of Roman society: thirty-four of the forty-nine Roman Emperors who ruled before the empire was divided were murdered.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Develop and deploy the skills to hunt and gather for yourself and your tribe, but with today’s technologies. And tell them to stop wasting their time watching a bunch of freakishly tall folks run around in Chuck Taylors and start doing something useful. Beer and professional sports are today’s bread and circuses that Caesar used to sedate the masses. Right now, we have no time for trivia.” “You done?” “Hell no.” “You sound angry. Don’t get mad, get even. Punch the brownies. Isn’t that what you taught me?” I asked. Shelby once smashed an entire counter of brownies at a deli when the boho behind the counter insisted that all sandwiches had to have alfalfa sprouts.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

If the government were willing to subsidize lobster to be cheaper than hamburger, I’d continuously dine on lobster. More to the point, I’d express a strong personal preference for lobster. The longer this subsidy went on, the more entitled my expectations for lobster would become. Middle-class housing subsidies and transportation spending are the bread and circuses of modern America. Americans express a preference for single-family homes on large lots along cul-de-sacs because that’s the lifestyle we subsidize. We’ve been willing to bankrupt our cities, and draw down the wealth prior generations built, in order to provide that subsidy. It can’t go on indefinitely.

The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

In time, some if not all of these programs would be adopted by other Silicon Valley firms, as they forever imitated HP in the hope of capturing some of its singular success. But few companies are courageous enough to step beyond the window dressing to the heart of the HP Way: a complete trust in and respect for every employee. Without that, the par courses and swimming pools and softball teams were just bread and circuses, an employee-relations tool that would be taken away as easily as it was given—as employees discovered to their dismay every time Silicon Valley fell into a recession. What made Hewlett and Packard great managers was their appreciation of the fact that the quality of an employee’s work was a direct function of the company’s trust.

…

Another morale builder came in 1980, when AMD declared an “American Dream Christmas in May” and gave away by raffle $1,000 a month for the next 20 years to a company employee. The winner was a 21-year-old Filipino woman holding one of the lowest positions in the firm, who had worked for AMD for just 14 months. On a Saturday morning, Sanders, flanked by camera crews, delivered the prize to the woman. This was pure bread and circuses, of course. Sanders knew it and the employees knew it and they reveled in it together. This wasn’t National, where the atmosphere was “business is business,” or Intel, with its intimations of immortality, but Jerry Sanders saying, “Look, I got into this business to make a lot of money and to have a hell of a good time, and there’s no reason that you shouldn’t, too.”

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Nozick died in 2002, so he won’t have to find out for himself – maybe he would be relieved. Other critics see the Oculus founders’ view of the future as possible but frightening. Ethan Zuckerman is director of the MIT Centre for Civic Media, and thinks that “the idea that we can make gross economic inequalities less relevant by giving [poor people] virtual bread and circuses is diabolical and delusional.” Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist and writer who founded VR pioneer VPL Research, and is generally credited with popularising the term virtual reality. He lambasts as “evil” the vision that the rich will become immortal, while “everyone else will get a simulated reality. … I’d prefer to see a world where everyone is a first-class citizen and we don’t have people living in the Matrix.”

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

anti-work, antiwork, bread and circuses, British Empire, Etonian, place-making, Upton Sinclair

It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class – a sort of ‘bread and circuses’ business – to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process – the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives. 1 For instance, a recent census of the Lancashire cotton mills revealed the fact that over 40,000 full-time employees receive less than thirty shillings a week each.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Revenue had to be kept up through taxation and through the delicate business of bringing in commerce for their city by relief from taxes along with other enticements and emoluments. In the Roman world, city managers had to address the perpetual and pressing need to bring grain into the city of Rome, where it would be handed out freely (along with the entertainment, hence the phrase “bread and circuses”). The result was a combination of carrot-and-stick approaches that involved other professionals, from tax collectors in the provinces who had to siphon off enough local production to Rome, to the ship owners on whose vessels the grain cargo was brought, to the insurance agents who guaranteed against losses incurred in shipwrecks.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The economic calamity continues—especially in the US. For these voters, the policies adopted in the US and UK since 2016 are the economic equivalent of treating brain cancer with aspirin. Many populist voters also feel their communities are still under fire culturally. All that the Trumps and Brexiteers have provided is more “bread and circuses” to sooth the soul and primp the pride. These populist voters will still be yearning for big changes in 2020. And they will, I believe, soon have a lot of company. The urban, educated people who voted against populism will have a whole new attitude when globalization and automation get up close and personal.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

A handful of oligarchs, funded in large part by lucrative oil revenues, controlled most of the governments and militaries of North Africa and the Middle East. The United States and Europe helped to negotiate and maintain an uneasy truce between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in part because of the need to continually extract precious oil to fuel the global economy. To stay in power, the oligarchs reigned using bread and circuses mixed with terror, torture, and censorship. Over time the oligarchs aged and, over the last decade or two, found themselves as octogenarians struggling to control populations ballooning with young, frequently unemployed people. Reform movements across North Africa and the Middle East gained strength, from trade unions to student groups to militant political groups.

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg

bread and circuses, British Empire, computer age, disinformation, double helix, HyperCard, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, means of production, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Saturday Night Live, Socratic dialogue

Web browsers are independent of concerted efforts to develop coherent bodies of knowledge, thus a search provides at least initially a disordered array of information sites where reliable information and accurate representations of foundation documents are undistinguished, and perhaps indistinguishable, from rumors and gossip. They depend on a notional ‘‘cream rises’’ process that is undermined by a counter ‘‘bread and circuses’’ notion. The boundaries are unprotected and unmarked. The problem of reliability is crucial to the effective implementation of a democratized world of scholarship and its documentary source materials. 1 xml (Extended Markup Language), tei (Text Encoding Initiative), dtd (Document Type Definition).

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

The desire to lop off a few heads as the French did not that long ago doubtless still lurks in us, barely held in check by civilization. The rich will know they have no divine right of kings keeping the angry mob well behaved. So the rich and the powerful have two choices: bribery or force. In the past, they have either bought off the poor with bread and circuses or violently suppressed them. What would you do? Remember, this is all against the backdrop of trillions upon trillions of dollars of new wealth? Do you risk it all trying to suppress the 99.9 percent? Or do the rich accept an expansion of the welfare state? I don’t see how the rational rich would choose the “suppress” option.

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

“I gotta hand it to you, Mehmetcik: that new pitch is great! The World Bank and the IMF would totally love you for that. I bet you could do with a drink now.” But Ozbey was not to be derailed. He leaned forward intently, steepling his fingers like a talk-show pundit. “Victory centers on consumer goods and pop promotion. ‘Bread and circuses,’ in other words. If that is the battlefield, then I know that we can win. Can Kurdish separatists offer us platform shoes? Of course they can’t! Can mullahs make a pretty girl a star? They’d rather stone her to death! But the ‘military-entertainment complex’! Oh, yes!” Ozbey banged the laminated bar.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Hedonistic happiness through play and ‘pleasure’ eventually induces addiction and intolerance of anything other than pleasure, a point brought out by behavioural biologist Paul Martin in his book Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure (2009). Satisfaction is contentment with life in general and with one’s relationships. However, making a fetish of happiness is not a prescription for civilised society. The precariat must beware of the modern equivalent of a bread-and-circuses existence being offered by the state through pseudo-science and nudging. The therapy state While they set out to make people happy, libertarian paternalism and the utilitarianism underlying it have unleashed a cult of therapy, mirroring what happened in the period of mass insecurity at the end of the nineteenth century 142 THE PRECARIAT (Standing, 2009: 235–8).

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults: Opportunities for the Health Care System. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2020. “Loneliness and Social Isolation Linked to Serious Health Conditions.” CDC. April 21, 2021. cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-older-adults.html. Stone, Lyman. “Bread and Circuses: The Replacement of American Community Life.” American Enterprise Institute. April 29, 2021. Lichtenstein, Jesse. “Digital Diplomacy.” New York Times Magazine. July 16, 2010. Stecklow, Steve. “Why Facebook Is Losing the War on Hate Speech in Myanmar.” Reuters. August 15, 2018. Frenken, Sheera, and Davey Alba.

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

But you could reach them by foot or bicycle, and there was usually a U- or an S-Bahn station relatively close by. What these clubs promised was the possibility of another life, one that celebrated the moment, the now. They were driven above all by the desire to escape from the real, everyday world of capitalism and to create a parallel world according to one’s own rules. Instead of “bread and circuses,” these places offered drugs, dancing, and games of love—and, if necessary, protest as well. The old ritual of Feierabend, or quitting time—workers going out dancing on Friday or Saturday nights, letting off steam, and falling into bed—no longer made sense to ravers. Wresting away just one or two nights from the daily routine wasn’t enough for them—they also wanted the subsequent morning and long days; even half the week, if possible.

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

It means something different when it exists in a medium we switch on to see “what’s on TV” rather than to find a given single work; when the goal is more often to watch television than to watch a particular drama and then turn it off. From its beginnings in the early 1950s, TV has been blamed for encouraging overindividualism, for hastening consumer suckerdom, for spurring passivity and couch-potatoness, and for making up the sensational bread-and-circuses of mass-culture tyranny. That pretty much covers it. And yet when opponents tried to divide the wretched things flickering inside the idiot box into categories, they made excuses for quite unnecessary forms that they felt they recognized (highbrow TV dramas) while deriding unique and far more important items that didn’t suit their vision of dramatic art (game shows, local news, now reality shows).

The politics of London: governing an ungovernable city by Tony Travers

active transport: walking or cycling, bread and circuses, congestion charging, Crossrail, first-past-the-post, full employment, job satisfaction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, urban sprawl, vertical integration

References 213 Fuchs, Ester (1992) Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Gibbon, I. G. and R. W. Bell (1939) History of the London County Council, 1889–1939 (London: Macmillan & Co). Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press). Glancey, J. (2001) London: Bread and Circuses (London: Verso). Gordon, Ian (1999) ‘London and the South East’, in M. Breheny (ed) The People: Where Will They Work? (London: Town and Country Planning Association). Government Office for the South-East of England (2001) Regional Planning Guidance for the South East (RPG9) (London: HMSO). Greater London Authority (2000) Congestion Charging London Assembly Scrutiny Report (London: GLA).

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Occupations and social status came to be determined by heredity. The middle ranks of citizens, whom Gibbon called “the most respectable part of the community,” were burdened by debt. A growing portion of the citizenry, unable to feed themselves or find honest work, subsisted on state-sponsored “bread and circuses”: in the late Roman Empire, 300,000 Romans held bread tickets.42 The backbone of the res publica had become something of a proletarian mob. In the feudal era, most people labored in fields they did not own, and most were illiterate. The idea of self-government for the masses would have seemed absurd, even sacrilegious, and was barely even considered.43 A comeback of democracy depended principally on a property-owning middle class and on respect for commercial enterprise, which was widely viewed as ignoble in the Middle Ages.

Felaheen by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Boeing 747, bread and circuses, haute cuisine, polynesian navigation, sensible shoes

On the street below, workmen were busy stringing green-and-red bunting from one lamppost to another and adjusting crowd barriers under the bored gaze of traffic policemen. One of the many street parties would be held there. Enthusiasm fuelled by Ashraf Pasha's announcement that all the food would be free. Bread and circuses . Eduardo was still trying to work out exactly when His Excellency meant. "You own this?" "I rent it from the city," Isabeau said. "My brother also used to live here." "You have a bedroom?" "Obviously." "Show me," Eduardo said. The sex was perfunctory, almost matter-of-fact. And Eduardo thanked her when it was done.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

The buildings would still end up demolished, but they’d be killed in front of huge street crowds, who would watch the effort and heartily approve it as an act of mass entertainment. The huge street crowds certainly weren’t hard to find; they were composed of the refugees and the destitute, packed like sardines in their bunks and cots across a huge expanse of Southern California. Having briefly been a refugee herself, Radmila knew their lives: Angeleno bread and circuses. Crackers, soup, foam mattresses, and immersive illusions. The city grid of Los Angeles doubled as a giant game board for immersive game players: one would see these game adventurers, mostly young, angry, and unemployed, on foot, on bicycles, clambering walls, jumping fences, bent on their desperate virtual errands.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

But new media have emerged, too, whose content arose for, or on, the Internet. These include blogging, Wikipedia, and YouTube, along with new forms of shared communication, such as Facebook, Google Groups, and Twitter. Will these new forms replace the ready-made contents? It’s unclear. Amid the bread-and-circuses element of the Internet, there is a need for good-quality materials and a means to sort the wheat from the chaff. Garbage in, garbage out, as computer programmers say. It is our choice, some will argue, yet I find myself looking with sheer disbelief, or ironic amusement, at what people have chosen to put up on the Net.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Harvard cultural historian Lizabeth Cohen has pointed out that mass-market consumption offers the façade of social equality without forcing society to go through the hard work of redistributing wealth. Low prices lead consumers to think they can get what they want without necessarily giving them what they want—or need. The ancient Roman phrase for this is panem et circenses, bread and circuses, the art of plying citizens with pleasures to distract them from pain. Today, low prices are the circus. In the postwar boom years of 1947 to 1973, real median family income doubled, as did the value of what the typical worker produced. Fully one-third of Americans belonged to labor unions that secured jobs, benefits, and wages, and those who didn’t benefited as well because nonunion employers strove to keep workers happy to dissuade them from organizing.

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

The banker makes of you a tool.”1 The line, which is from an 1892 populist song, neatly sums up Frank’s view, shared by many liberals and Democrats, that the success of the modern conservative movement was the result of Republican success in manipulating working-class Americans into voting against their material self-interest. Kansas is, in this way, an ancient narrative about the deployment of bread and circuses by the ruling class, wrapped in hip, bristling prose. The gag that runs throughout the book has Frank constantly turning to the readers as though to say, Can you believe how deranged my people are? Like environmentalists who see their fellow humans as essentially opportunistic and reactive, Frank tends to view the average conservative Kansan as someone whose ability to reason dispassionately has been occluded by the passions.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

But this says more about modern attitudes about what makes for a good life than anything else. Is it really so surprising that some might trade boring, low-status, poorly paid jobs with a life of entertainment? If automation eventually reduces the number of jobs available in the economy, perhaps games might become subsidised as a form of social control, cutting-edge bread and circuses to keep people happy. Researchers are already investigating how to distract hackers from causing damage to real servers by creating gamified, narrative-based “honeypot” servers containing faked but enticing data; why not extend the principle to other areas?7 The reason we instinctively shrink from a Matrix-like future where humans are kept in a blissful virtual reality (or metaverse) is that it concedes there isn’t anything better we can offer people.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Democracy Index 2015: Democracy in an Age of Anxiety. London: The Economist. Retrieved from www.eiu.com/democracy2015. 6. World Trade Organization (2015). “Members and Observers.” Retrieved from www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/org6_e.htm. 7. The Economist (2015, August 8). “Bread and Circuses.” The Economist. Retrieved from www.economist.com. 8. Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday (2000). The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London: Routledge, p. 1; Brotton, Jerry (2012). A History of the World in Twelve Maps. London: Allen Lane. 9. Brant, Sebastian (1458–1521) (1498).

The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Subsequent estimates later put the total cost at nearer £15 billion. All was forgiven when the games were declared a success, with the prime minister, David Cameron, promising they had been worth £13 billion in exports, an absurd figure. But there was no question a pride surged over London that summer, as Nero’s bargain held, of ‘bread and circuses’ for public contentment. London 2012 saw a curious inversion of London’s traditional modesty. Housing crisis – or not A sense of suspended hysteria followed the 2012 Olympics, including much controversy over their ‘legacy’. Tourism did not rise, sports activity fell and a huge site at Stratford stood aching for reuse.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Roman corporations were created to solve a problem. The Roman Republic had expanded too far, too quickly. It was good at conquering, but it now had to become good at administering. But with no government bureaucracy to speak of, this was hard to imagine happening. Who was going to provide the Roman people with bread and circuses? Who was going to build the bridges and roads? Who was going to equip the armies? Who was going to collect the taxes? The societates publicanorum solved the problem. Rather than have the republic invent an administrative state out of thin air, Rome used the money, manpower, and expertise already in the hands of private capitalists to perform the state’s key functions.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

The first issue is potentially resolved by a guaranteed basic income—an answer that begs the question of how we, as societies, distribute and redistribute our wealth and how we govern ourselves. The second issue is even more complicated. It’s certainly not Marx’s simplistic notion of fishing in the afternoon and philosophizing over dinner. Humans, not machines, must think hard here about education, leisure, and the kinds of work that machines cannot do well or perhaps at all. Bread and circuses may placate a population, but in that case machines that think may create a society we don’t really want—be it dystopian or harmlessly vacuous. Machines depend on design architecture; so do societies. And that is the responsibility of humans, not machines. There’s also the question of what values machines possess and what masters (or mistresses) they serve.

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

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

He enrolled at the Harvard Law School instead—then quit to quickly raise the means to win the hand of the daughter of a wealthy Akron, Ohio, businessman. His brother had a candy business outside Boston. So candy it would be. Welch specialized in sales. The frustrated writer’s first book, in 1941, The Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a profession more important than law or medicine. “Instead of the bread and circuses handed out to idle mobs by politicians,” salesmen drove progress itself by inducing Americans to want more things and then to strive to better themselves in order to earn enough to buy them. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant for the candy industry hardened Welch’s conservatism; lobbying as chair of the Washington Committee of the National Confectioners Association (he was named Candy Industry Man of the Year in 1947) petrified it.

…

he would howl after outlining the perfidies of Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes. “Or have you already forgotten about them?” He went on existential rambles. “I can’t help but wondering, sometimes, if you’ve asked yourselves why my campaign is the way it is.” Think of the Romans, he said. “They traded their votes for ‘bread and circuses.’ They traded away their Senate for an emperor.” It was the only way he himself could understand this great national salivation over an opponent he now despised. He now viewed his job as just smacking people back to their senses. Just think about it for a moment. Do you want my opponent to “let us continue”?

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

Very typical Labour manifesto – very appealing to those who are not used to making their own way in the world. Somebody else will provide. So they got into office on this idea of a National Health Service, universal pensions, universal benefits, full employment.’ ‘Free stuff?’ I say. ‘Sweeties!’ he nods. ‘Bread and circuses! The problem was, we couldn’t afford it and so we had to go to the United States to say, “Please can we have the money to pay for the welfare state and the health service?” They said to us, “If you want help, then you’re going to have to bring the empire to an end.” Which, of course, the Labour Party wanted to do anyway.’

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

It was a remarkable performance, but in the end Blair was attempting to justify the unjustifiable, the building at enormous expense of a theme park run by the Government. What on earth made him believe that it was in any way equipped to deliver such a thing, any more than the Government could deliver football champions, or chart-topping musicians? This was a not very exciting, indeed an entirely bloodless version of bread and circuses, and in the light of the condescending, ill-conceived, and vastly over-budget nature of the majority of the Dome’s content, for anybody who actually went, Blair’s words are impossible to read now without cringing. To walk to the new world of the Dome from familiar, scruffy, nineteenth-century London you must first negotiate the grimy Victorian streets of Greenwich.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Without attention, information means very little. The insight that attention, not information, is the prize in the struggle for power is not new. Almost two thousand years ago, the Roman satirical poet Juvenal wrote about how people’s demands for representation could be diluted by “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses), that is, by providing distracting entertainment while also making sure that they were fed.12 In the twenty-first century, the same dynamics hold, but this time, the circus is online. Very few countries have the kind of vast censorship apparatus that can carefully censor much of the information coming from outside the country and respond in real time by taking down potentially effective posts.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

In the old days of explicit empires, China would have been called a “vassal state” and the stuff it sends us would have been called “tribute.”3 Yet China too will do everything it can to sustain the present Story of Money, for essentially the same reason we do: its elites benefit from it. It is just as in Ancient Rome. The elites of the imperial capital and the provinces prosper at the expense of the misery of the people, which increases over time. To mollify them and keep them docile and stupid, the masses are provided with bread and circuses: cheap food, cheap thrills, celebrity news, and the Super Bowl. Whether we declare it to end, or whether it ends of its own accord, the story of money will bring down a lot with it. That is why the United States won’t simply default on its debt. If it did, then the story under which the Middle East ships us its oil, Japan its electronics, India its textiles, and China its plastic would come to an end.

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

bread and circuses, call centre, East Village, fear of failure, impulse control, land reform, Lao Tzu, Socratic dialogue, the medium is the message

'Your second question was going to be "Oh my goodness, perhaps we should discuss why the religion of the Die attracts some people." 'Oh yes? . `May I give my answer now?, 'Oh yes do. Go ahead.' Father Wolfe's prosecuting-attorney voice snaps out from the same screen from which looks Dr. Rhinehart. `The devil has always attracted men through gaudy disguises ah, through bread and circuses ahh and through promises he cannot fulfil unh. I believe-' `Wouldn't it be interesting if he never came out of it?' interrupts Rabbi Fishman's voice. `I beg your pardon, I was speaking.'[Father Wolfe.] `Oh he'll come out of it says Dr. Dart. `The permanent catatonic looks more tense but less alert.

Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

These critics believe that information technologies have already changed what used to pass for reality into a slicked-up electronic simulation. Twenty years before the United States elected a Hollywood actor as president, the first hyper-realists pointed out how politics had become a movie, a spectacle that raised the old Roman tactic of bread and circuses to the level of mass hypnotism. We live in a hyper- reality that was carefully constructed to mimic the real world and extract money from the pockets of consumers: the forests around the Matterhorn might be dying, but the Disneyland version continues to rake in the dollars. The television programs, movie stars, and theme parks work together to create global industry devoted to maintaining a web of illusion that grows more lifelike as more people buy into it and as technologies grow more powerful.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg

bread and circuses, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, feminist movement, fixed income, global village, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Journalism, New Urbanism, place-making, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, wage slave, young professional

Perhaps it is because America is the world champion in both the achievement and exportation of modernization that its people overlook one of modernization’s major consequences. It is the transformation of traditionally free forms of public entertainment into that which is cost prohibitive—at least on a routine basis—for the majority of people. The bread and circuses that placated a Roman citizenry of old included, at least, free circuses. The American middle mass is mollified in much the same way, but entrance to our arenas is far from free. That salaries running to six and even seven figures are paid to Neanderthals named Bubba testifies both to the need for collective forms of diversion in the society and to the greedy profit-taking made possible when the society is otherwise unable to satisfy such needs.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The independence of the small farmer and his need to combine brain and muscle to produce food were considered to offer vital traits for self-governance, from pragmatism to individualism. Unfortunately, the once agrarian legions gradually either became mercenary or were manned by those without a stake in Roman society. To keep ruling, the elite relied on sending public largess to the army and to the poor, the stereotypical “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses) of the poet Juvenal, who caricatured the urban and often idle masses kept afloat by the combinations of state-subsidized food and free entertainment. Yet, even after the collapse of the classical world in the latter fifth century AD and the transitory disappearance of a vestigial middle class, the idea of Western broad-based citizenship never quite died.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Hence, $2500 was a generous annual stipend. Indeed, the Romans used coinage-money to a far greater extent than any of their predecessors in history. Thousands of soldiers throughout the empire had to be paid, and some Roman generals even minted their own gold coins to distribute to their troops. Furthermore, bread and circuses did not come for free, but promoting domestic tranquility among the Roman politii was essential if emperors hoped to remain in power. The doles were distributed in cash on occasion, but even the more frequent payments in kind, the alimenta, or bread rations, were largely imported from outside Italy and had to be paid for with coinage.

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

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

The consumer of the cornucopia of spectator commodities available from a hardworking, overproducing entertainment industry must work even harder than the producers to take it all in. Can any consumer keep up with the movies, television programs, internet offerings, video games, music downloads, and athletic competitions that constitute the modern marketplace’s new bread and circuses? It makes for disciplined work for an individual to stay abreast with any one of these sectors. Yet unless she does, the market economy falters. No wonder leisure, squeezed between the extended hours of work, often feels like a full-time job. If as Dan Cook has declared, childhood makes capitalism hum, the kids better get to work. 4 Privatizing Citizens: The Making of Civic Schizophrenia Libertarianism is a political philosophy for Peter Pans, an outlook on the world premised on never growing up.

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

Sea states will continue to build and operate navies to protect their vital national interests, and as part of the US-led Western liberal collective. Economic sanctions remain a powerful tool, and the threat they pose explains why Russia and China still talk of war and conquest as part of the ‘bread and circuses’ of totalitarian politics. While sea states do not choose war, because it is bad for business, they may find that, like their seapower precursors, they do not have the option. The right of innocent passage through continentalised maritime space must be upheld, jointly and collectively – lest the oceans that Mahan described as ‘the great common’ are lost.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

airport security, bioinformatics, bread and circuses, Burning Man, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, DeepMind, Donner party, full employment, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, iterative process, Kim Stanley Robinson, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging the streets and hogging the show, talking endlessly about their nonexistent city on a hill while ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of all that hypocrisy can’t be washed away even by the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No—bastion of the world government, locked vault of the World Bank, fortress headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses—no one can like that. So naturally when the great flood washed over the city, wreaking havoc and leaving the capital spluttering in the livid heat of a wet and bedraggled May, the stated reactions were varied, but the underlying subtext often went something like this: HA HA HA. For there were many people around the world who felt that justice had somehow been served.

Rome by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, bread and circuses, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, double helix, G4S, gentrification, Index librorum prohibitorum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, urban planning

A glorified mix of legend, history and moral instruction, it tells how Aeneas escapes from Troy and after years of mythical mishaps ends up landing in Italy where his descendants Romulus and Remus eventually found Rome. Little is known of Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, better known as Juvenal, but his 16 satires have survived as classics of the genre. Writing in the 1st century AD, he combined an acute mind with a cutting pen, famously scorning the masses as being interested in nothing but ‘bread and circuses’. Ancient Histories The two major historians of the period were Livy (59 BC−AD 17) and Tacitus (c 56−116). Although both wrote in the early days of empire they displayed very different styles. Livy, whose history of the Roman Republic was probably used as a school textbook, cheerfully mixed myth with fact to produce an entertaining and popular tome.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The same YouGov survey discovered that appearing on a reality television programme was a popular career option among teenagers.17 Another poll found 26 per cent of sixteen–nineteen-year-olds believe they will easily secure a career in sports, entertainment or the media. This is hardly surprising. The saturation coverage the media devotes to the likes of The X Factor, The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den raises a false illusion of a meritocracy that does not exist in quotidian lived reality. It is a British version of bread and circuses for the hoi polloi in ancient Rome. The people are served up a populist exemplar of merit to divert them from the wider social truth that so little exists. And if they can be convinced that they might be catapulted to success, they are less likely to criticise the high rewards of those already at the top.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Again the innovation was turned down because of the threat of creative destruction, not so much because of its economic impact, but because of fear of political creative destruction. Vespasian was concerned that unless he kept the people happy and under control it would be politically destabilizing. The Roman plebeians had to be kept busy and pliant, so it was good to have jobs to give them, such as moving columns about. This complemented the bread and circuses, which were also dispensed for free to keep the population content. It is perhaps telling that both of these examples came soon after the collapse of the Republic. The Roman emperors had far more power to block change than the Roman rulers during the Republic. Another important reason for the lack of technological innovation was the prevalence of slavery.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

As the performers danced and played, delinquent youths mocked and mimed them with rude gestures and verbal insults (one can imagine their modern descendants chucking beer cans). The pantomime became the first comic play when authors added plot and dialogue.116 The need to keep the citizens happy with bread and circuses even led to the formation of the world’s first international music union. This was by mutual arrangement. After the defeat of Macedonia in 167 bc, Greek musicians poured into Rome, and were recruited to play in the triumphal games organised by General Anicius Gallus to celebrate their own conquest.117 The musicians then unionised into a guild of ‘Dionysiac artists’ (Dionysiaci artifices), vastly improving the organisation of public festivals.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

The neoliberals concede that it may appear that the existing market system sometimes fails; but the answer to these hiccups is to impose more markets, since nothing else can ever begin to cope with the complexity of evolution. The prescription for market failures is always more markets; however, that prescription can only reliably and successfully be imposed by a strong state. Moreover, since democratic electorates are always clamoring for bread and circuses, which threatens to thwart the telos of economic improvement from their perspective, a strong state must vigilantly strive to keep them in line; ideally, a state controlled by neoliberal politicians. This sometimes appears confusing to outsiders, who cannot understand how neoliberals can so blithely demonize the state and simultaneously concede its necessity.

Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

At the other end of the oasis, the women around the tomb of Pasha Hindi in Bashendi have been selling local jewelry to visitors for several years, and on my most recent visit their wares included some locally made clothes and a neat handmade wooden lock that you can see not only in the Ethnographic Museum in Mut, but in use around the orchards and pens of the oasis. 5 Kharga Kharga has been a place of exile and banishment for at least 2,000 years. Roman satirist Juvenal (the man who came up with the phrase bread and circuses) is said to have been sent here at the ripe old age of 80 to end his life, and a number of other big names suffered the same fate. One of these, Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople— who gave his name to the kind of doctrinal innovation that gets you sent out into the desert—left behind bone-chilling accounts of 5th-century raids and plunder by Nile Valley tribes. 13_259290-ch10.qxp 7/22/08 12:40 AM Page 286 Kharga 5 6 Nasser Square Area of inset map below i Fountain by Tourist Mahmoud Mabrouk Information Sh ar Office ia Bu rS ai d ATTRACTIONS Al Bagawat 2 Deir al Kashef 1 Kharga Museum of Antiquities 7 Temple of an-Nadura 4 Temple of Hibis 3 ACCOMMODATIONS Hamadallah 8 Kharga Oasis Hotel 6 Pioneers Hotel 5 7 W National Bank of Egypt RN T TE ES SER DE E G Y P T Re d 0 Nile Cairo Sea Kharga 200 mi Gamal Abdel Nasser Mosque EgyptAir Office 8 Nada St.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

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

Blood and Soil: Walter Darré and Hitler’s Green Party . Kensal, Bourne End, 1985. -----. Ecology in the 20th Century: A History . Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1989. Brandt, Willy , et al. North-South: A Program for Survival . MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980. Brantlinger, Patrick . Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1983. Bridgewater, Patrick . Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of Georg Heym . Libris, London, 1991. Broderick, Francis . “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Phylon 19 (1958), 367-71.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Even within the Persian Empire, Persians did not have to pay tribute to the Great King, but the inhabitants of conquered provinces did.51 The same was true in Rome, where for a very long time, Roman citizens not only paid no taxes but had a right to a share of the tribute levied on others, in the form of the dole—the “bread” part of the famous “bread and circuses.”52 In other words, Benjamin Franklin was wrong when he said that in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes. This obviously makes the idea that the debt to one is just a variation on the other much harder to maintain. None of this, however, deals a mortal blow to the state theory of money.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

For the great majority of the empire’s inhabitants, the circle of production and consumption was a very small one: you ate what you grew. In this world, where wealth was created through agriculture, cities seemed to exist almost as parasites; the surplus of the countryside was creamed off by urban elites who in turn sustained the urban poor with bread and circuses. If cities were parasites, Rome was the arch-parasite, squatting vast and useless on its seven hills, with its roots sunk into the flesh of the decaying empire. So long as its nutrient channels continued to flow – water from the hills; grain from Africa; slaves from the north; oil from Spain – life in the capital could continue more or less as it had always done, albeit without the gloss of regular imperial patronage.

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Biological life, in turn, is always a metabolism that nourishes itself through the ingestion of things, whether it labors or is at rest, whether it consumes or amuses itself. The things offered by the entertainment industry are not values to be used and exchanged; rather, they are objects of consumption as apt to be depleted as any other such object. Panem et circenses (bread and circuses)—these two do indeed go together: both are necessary for the life process, for its sustenance and its recovery; both are also swallowed up in this process, that is to say, they both have to be produced and performed time and again if this process is not to come to an eventual halt. This is all well and good, as long as the entertainment industry produces its own objects of consumption, and one could reproach this industry no more than one could reproach a bakery for creating products of such limited durability that they have to be depleted in the instant of their creation lest they spoil.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

The majority of nation states appear to be against global monopolies but, with the exception of China, they are no match for behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft. These tech companies seem increasingly able to determine the public’s taste. The ultimate consequence of this is the reduction of the citizen, and therefore also of the working citizen, to a mere consumer of ready-made fare. The ultimate ‘Bread and Circuses’ society – Yuval Harari’s ‘Age of Shopping’ or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).13 Having surveyed the whole history of work, then, what can this survey tell us about what to expect of its future? While no single scenario can be clearly argued to hold (or not), we can react to a number of established, even celebrated, projections in relation to the future of work: the ‘end of capitalism’, increased inequality, the role of the ‘free’ market in distributing work and pay, and the consequences of robotization.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Banzon would investigate complaints about the troops or other information provided by average Filipinos utilizing a cheap ten-centavo telegram. Magsaysay often told his troops, “I want every enlisted man of the Philippine army in uniform to serve as a public relations man for the Army and for our government.”20 Such efforts to woo the population have a long pedigree, stretching back to the “bread and circuses” that the Roman Empire provided to keep its subjects compliant. But an emphasis on the softer side of warfare was a relatively recent development in modern Western military doctrine, which had been relentlessly focused on conventional warfare since the days of Marlborough and Napoleon. Tactics designed to win what another contemporary counterinsurgency commander, General Gerald Templer in Malaya, called “hearts and minds” were still seen as novel in Lansdale’s day, and it was his success in the Philippines, along with Templer’s success in Malaya, that would help convince many regular soldiers of their importance.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

So great was the change that one Japanese architectural journal likened the transformation of the Iraqi capital to that of Paris in the late nineteenth century under the direction of Baron Haussmann.40 Naturally, this provided those in power with valuable political capital: regimes across the Persian Gulf could make grandiose statements that linked the new affluence with their personal power. It was no coincidence, therefore, that as the streams of cash flowing into the heart of the world turned into a torrent, the ruling classes became increasingly demagogic in their outlook. The funds at their disposal were so great that, although they could be used to provide bread and circuses in the traditional method of autocratic control, there was simply too much to lose by giving others a share of the power. There was a marked slowdown in the development of pluralistic democracy and instead a tightening of control by small groups of individuals – whether related by blood to the ruler and the ruling family as in the Arabian peninsula and in Iran, or espousing common political causes as in Iraq and Syria.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

III The grain trade was not simply a source of profit for Rome’s merchants. In 5 BC Augustus Caesar distributed grain to 320,000 male citizens; he proudly recorded this fact in a great public inscription commemorating his victories and achievements, for holding the favour of the Romans was as important as winning victories at sea and on land.27 The era of ‘bread and circuses’ was beginning, and cultivating the Roman People was an art many emperors well understood (baked bread was not in fact distributed until the third century AD, when Emperor Aurelian substituted bread for grain).28 By the end of the first century BC Rome controlled several of the most important sources of grain in the Mediterranean, those in Sicily, Sardinia and Africa that Pompey had been so careful to protect.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Only weeks before the General Assembly opened in New York, the world had been given two demonstrations of the reality of multipolarity. On the one hand, China’s staggering Olympic display put to shame anything ever seen in the West, notably the dismal Atlanta games of 1996, which had been interrupted, it is worth recalling, by a pipe bombing perpetrated by an alt-right fanatic.10 If bread and circuses are the foundation of popular legitimacy, the Chinese regime, bolstered by its booming economy, was putting on quite the show. Meanwhile, as the fireworks flared in Beijing, the Russia military had meted out to Georgia, a tiny aspirant to NATO membership, a severe punishment beating.11 Sarkozy came to New York fresh from cease-fire talks on Europe’s eastern border.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

If the Church of England (which had given its blessing to the Anglo-Boer War) was the Tory party at prayer, then the Liberal-inclined Nonconformists of the chapels promoted laissez-faire capitalist values (as Matthew Introduction xix Arnold had concluded in his Culture and Anarchy of 1868, and as the economic historians Max Weber and R. H. Tawney would argue). Tressell saw the Church, just as he saw newspapers, pubs, and much popular culture as, in one discourse, bread and circuses and, in another, a class and state apparatus, moulding the ideology of work- ing people towards a self-destructive passivity and acceptance of their situation in the face of their own exploitation and expropri- ation. In particular, Noonan had an acute ear for the conservative ideology of the songs of the Victorian and Edwardian music hall that run so profusely through his book (see the Explanatory Notes, below).

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Like Rome itself, the provincial cities developed into major urban centres, characterized by imposing public works—paved streets, aqueducts, baths, theatres, temples, monuments—and by the growth of merchant, artisan, and proletarian classes. The city mob—constantly pacified, in Juvenal’s words, ‘through bread and circuses’, panem et circenses, became a vital social factor. In the countryside, the villas of local dignitaries stood out above the toiling mass of slaves who worked the great latifundia. An intermediate and, in the nature of things, enterprising group of lib-ertini or ‘freed slaves’ grew in importance, as the import of fresh slave populations tailed off with the end of the Republic’s conquests, [SPARTACUS] Despite the extreme contrasts of Roman society—between the vast power and wealth of the patricians and the lot of their slaves, between the opulence of many city-dwellers and the backwardness of the desert tribes and barbarian settlers on the periphery—it is a tribute to the flexible paternalism of the Roman social tradition that the outbreaks of class conflict were relatively few and far between.

…

‘Political life’, he wrote, ‘was stamped and swayed not by the parties and programmes of a modern parliamentary character, not by the ostensible opposition of Senate and People … but by the struggle for power, wealth, and glory.’16 Particularly important in an age of civil war was a politician’s ability to control the army and to satisfy the soldiers with lands, money, and respect. Fighting, it would seem, was only a secondary preoccupation for successful generals. LUDI THE people who have conquered the world’, wrote Juvenal, ‘now have only two interests—bread and circuses.’ ‘The art of conversation is dead!’ exclaimed Seneca. ‘Can no one today talk of anything else than charioteers?’ The Ludi or ‘Games’ had become a central feature of Roman life. Originally staged on four set weeks during the year in April, July, September, and November, they grew to the point where the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum were in almost permanent session.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Ah yes, if only it was that easy, if only there was no need for the Palestinian midnight security courts and the twenty-fiveyear prison sentences and the after-dark arrests that were now part of life in Gaza for those who disagreed with Arafat. Then the president of Palestine opened the races while his men handed out baskets of sweet wafers to the hundreds of sheikhs and family leaders who sat beneath the awning. The people ate, the horses raced. Yes, the old man gave his people bread and circuses to mark his birthday. For Arafat was running a little dictatorship down in Gaza, with the total approval of Israel and the United States. Under the pretext of stamping out “terrorism” on Israel’s behalf, he now had more than ten competing Palestinian intelligence services under his command, a grand total exceeded only by Arab leaders in Baghdad and Damascus.

…

Soft music plays as white-jacketed waiters serve the UN’s finest, the sanctions boys and the arms inspectors and the men and women who try desperately to undo the suffering caused by the gentlemen in the glass building on the East River 5,990 miles away. But despite the white-liveried waiters, whatever you do, don’t mention the Titanic. Iraqi state television has shown James Cameron’s film three times (he can forget about the royalties) as a balm for hardship, the Baghdad equivalent of bread and circuses. But unlike the Titanic, the Babeesh has no third class diners. This is a restaurant for those who measure money by the kilo rather than the Iraqi dinar note. Now that the dinar is worth 0.0006 of a dollar (thanks to the employers of the Babeesh’s clientele), my own meal for three needed a stack of 488 one hundred dinar notes, a wad of cash a foot thick.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

When comparisons were made between voting numbers on reality television and those in elections, the lesson generally drawn was of the declining state of democracy in the country. Sometimes an accusation was levelled that there was a causal connection between the two phenomena, that a combination of cheap, imported electronic goods and the material consumed via those goods constituted a latter-day bread and circuses. It was equally possible, however, to see the growing interactivity of the media as the first, inchoate stirrings of a new model of politics. ‘It may be that the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end,’ reflected Peter Mandelson in a 1998 speech, observing that the political elites that had dominated democracy for so long – including those in the intellectual, trade union and local council spheres – came from ‘an age that has passed away’.

Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

active measures, air freight, airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, clean water, computer age, Exxon Valdez, false flag, flag carrier, Live Aid, old-boy network, operational security, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent control, rolodex, superconnector, systems thinking, urban sprawl

He'd gotten this job because he was fluent in three languages, French, Spanish, and English, and thus could be helpful to the majority of the visitors - "guests" - to this new Spanish city, all of whom needed to urinate from time to time, and most of whom, evidently, lacked the wit to notice the hundreds of signs (graphic rather than lettered) that told them where to go when the need became overwhelming. Esteban, Andre saw, was in his usual place, selling his helium filled balloons. Bread and circuses, they both Ought. The vast sums expended to build this place-and for what purpose? To give the children of the poor and working classes a brief few hours of laughter before they returned to their dreary homes? To seduce their parents into spending their money for mere amusement? Really, the purpose of the place was to enrich further the Arab investors who'd been persuaded to spend so much of their oil money here, building this fantasy city.

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

Of course, nobody expected that his midnight magic would replenish the grocery shelves overnight, and many feared that this was all too late to halt the disintegration of the Soviet Union into warring sovereignties.[83] Still, for the first time in many months, Gorbachev seemed to have regained a foothold on the slippery terrain of Soviet domestic politics. The Izvestiya commentator Stanislav Kondrashev remarked that the apparent pointlessness of democracy was making the idea of a ‘strong hand’ attractive to the public, citing the old adage of the Roman emperors, ‘bread and circuses’. But, said Kondrashev, ‘when bread rations are rapidly declining, people are prepared to sacrifice parliamentary circuses’.[84] Old-guard communists welcomed what seemed to them the strengthening of the state and a blueprint for slower, controlled reform. Conversely, Gorbachev hoped that liberals would regard his actions as a sign that he was still maintaining the momentum for reform, while seeking compromises across the political spectrum.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

In the modern city, that sense of space underwent a transformation as remarkable as the physical changes brought about by water pipes and glass windows. Entertainment was crucial to that change. In addition to goods and people, cities were channelling emotion. To be sure, cities remained spaces of work, and they had offered bread and circuses since ancient times. All the same, the period roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s witnessed a dramatic proliferation of commercial spaces dedicated to fun – the music hall, the cinema the amusement park, the football stadium and the velodrome. Their holidays and spending money may look miserly to today’s reader, but most working people of the period were enjoying more disposable income and holiday time than ever before.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Gladiators fought each other to the death; our thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures may have come from the signals flashed by the crowd to a victorious gladiator telling him whether to administer the coup de grâce to his opponent. About half a million people died these agonizing deaths to provide Roman citizens with their bread and circuses. The grandeur that was Rome casts our violent entertainment in a different light (to say nothing of our “extreme sports” and “sudden-death overtime”). 27 The most famous means of Roman death, of course, was crucifixion, the source of the word excruciating. Anyone who has ever looked up at the front of a church must have given at least a moment’s thought to the unspeakable agony of being nailed to a cross.