crack epidemic

34 results back to index

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

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

The country’s emaciated public schools and its crumbling infrastructure, key parts of the vicious circle driving the drug economy, warranted even less discussion. These issues need to be addressed, which is why a politician’s take on drug policy is perhaps a better gauge of his or her political convictions than any other. I started to map out the idea for a book about cocaine in 2006. The crack epidemic had inspired a lot of books about the American drugs trade in the 1990s. There was also a smaller, specialist literature that looked at the anti-drugs policies that the U.S. was pushing on Caribbean and Latin American countries. But no book that I could think of looked at all facets of the story: at the illegal production, distribution and consumption of cocaine around the world, their origins, drivers and consequences.

…

Production is controlled by the actors in Colombia’s civil war to a greater degree than ever before. Distribution in the United States is controlled by Mexican cartels. The European market for cocaine has expanded over the past 10 years and West Africa has become a major staging post en route to Europe. Unlike the United States, European countries haven’t had to deal with a crack epidemic and this has affected Europeans’ attitudes to the drug, which are positively lackadaisical when compared to those of most Americans. The world-wide ban on hard drugs like cocaine has been orchestrated by Americans to fight very American drug problems. This has antagonised countries with quite different experiences of hard drugs.

…

There has been no better popular exposé of the failure of drugs policy in the United States than the HBO television series The Wire. Set entirely in Baltimore, Maryland, the series was devised by a former journalist with the Baltimore Sun and a former narcotics detective with the city’s police department. Its storylines are grounded in the writers’ shared experience of the crack epidemic that swept through the East Coast cities of the United States in the 1980s. Kurt Schmoke, who has a cameo role in the series, was mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999. When I met him in November 2007, he told me that he shared the writers’ frustration at the state of local and national policy-making on the issue of drugs.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

And, sure, many experimented with drugs and drank. But as a population, they were moving in the right direction. Those headed for the brightest futures were studying for college entrance exams and padding their résumés with all sorts of extracurricular activities. In other words, the response to the crack epidemic, in most of the country, was to blame the victims. This meant taking only minimal measures to help afflicted communities confront this terrifying public health crisis. Instead, legislators imposed draconian punishments and attempted to distance themselves from the problem. Hundreds of thousands, including enormous numbers of young Black males, were sent to prison for crack-related offenses, many facing obscenely long sentences.

…

Yet there was another issue, mostly unspoken: The people who made laws were familiar with cocaine. They knew it from college dorms and parties; a good number of them had snorted a few lines. Crack, in their eyes, was a “ghetto” drug. They associated it with other people. At the height of the crack epidemic, this distinction was encoded into racist federal law. The so-called 100-to-1 rule, passed in 1986, stipulated a sentence of no less than five years for carrying five hundred grams of cocaine, or a bit more than a pound. But those carrying a mere five grams of crack, just a few pebbles, faced the same minimum.

…

In this sense, stigma results in shame, because it signals who is valued and who is not in the eyes of society. When institutions and governments assign themselves stigmatizing roles, they create systems of assigned merit. In other words, if you are told by all the world that you are not worthy, you often end up feeling that way. The result: The crack epidemic unleashed a frenzy of punching-down shame. What was the alternative? Consider Blossom trying to sleep under the Florida bridge. If she were your sister or your daughter, what would you suggest? The first step, no doubt, would be to help her beat her addiction. Rehab would work best if she had a safe place to live, ideally surrounded by a supportive community, perhaps including her children.

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

He cites the Drew story—“a man who had benefited medicine for all races died because of anti-black attitude”—and concludes that “[e]ven if a major investigation into the allegations is done, it is unlikely to quell the certainty among many African Americans that the government played a role in bringing the crack epidemic to black communities.” Nonetheless, the Post quelled the best it could, going after the portions of Webb’s story that most explicitly suggested a racist conspiracy against American citizens. In the process, it authored a myth of its own: that everything in “Dark Alliance” was wrong. The October 4 package’s lead piece, “CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Contra-Tied Plot,” was written by Pincus and national-desk staffer Roberto Suro, who rejected “the idea that Blandón and Ross alone could have launched the crack epidemic.” Webb hadn’t reported exactly that, but he did note that cocaine “was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bring it into South Central in the 1980s at bargain basement prices.”

…

The coke industry pulled itself out of this apparent death spiral through an innovation that helped it reach thousands of new consumers: crack. Cheap and packing a quick punch, crack was the perfect $5, five-minute escape. It began to spread throughout the nation, especially in poor African American communities. Since the eighties, skeptics have cast doubt on the severity of the crack epidemic. In 1984, when coke use peaked in the United States, around 18 percent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had used cocaine, but the numbers for crack were much more modest. Monitoring the Future first began to break out crack as a category in 1986, when it found that 4.1 percent of high-school seniors had used it in the previous year.

…

The Congressional Black Caucus, led by Los Angeles Democrat Maxine Waters, demanded an investigation. (Waters even traveled to Nicaragua to conduct her own.) The head of the CIA traveled to South Central Los Angeles to meet with hundreds of residents packed into a huge community meeting, where he denied angry accusations that his agency had purposely caused the crack epidemic. Kurtz “initially got into this because black radio hosts and others were seizing on the Gary Webb series and making claims that went far beyond what he had actually reported,” he told me. “And the person who agreed with me on that was Gary Webb. . . . He considered me always to be fair to him.”

Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, housing justice, Saturday Night Live, social distancing

You know, they were allowed to have motorcycle boots back there, and they were wearing motorcycle jackets. In ’84, ’85, there were stabbings and slashings [in the teen jail]. And when I came back in ’88, it was like a war zone. When the Bloods and the Latin Kings became really big, that’s when the stabbings and slashings went wild, and the crack epidemic was simultaneous to that. The violence was out of control. We were averaging fifty, sixty slashings a month. It became routine. A guy gets slashed, we would do a search, we would transfer the guy out. Depending on the victim’s case, we would make them a PC [protective custody] and the guy would go to the Bing.

…

Terrence Skinner fought many battles on the job, and avoided some land mines, in his rise to deputy warden. He now helps care for his grandchildren. SIDNEY SCHWARTZBAUM, retired deputy warden, union president, 1979 to 2016: In the ’80s, the population started to explode. I think crime was on the rise. There were a lot of drugs. I was a captain already when the crack epidemic started. In 1988, Rikers was a lot worse as far as stabbings and slashings. We would have people getting beat up. We’d have a stabbing once in a while from like 1979 to ’85 when I was there as an officer. But by 1988, it was fifty. I was there for like eight months as a tour commander. There were fifty slashings a month over there.

…

Over the course of the ’90s and the aughts, lots of people were working to change the system and to promote alternatives to incarceration, post-adjudication and pre-adjudication, that were driving the numbers down. VALERIE YOUNGBLOOD, public defender, 1982 to 1996: I was there really from 1982 to 1996, for the heart and guts of the crack epidemic in New York City anyway. The numbers of cases were staggering. It was common at any given time to have thirty to thirty-five indicted felonies plus like fifty, sixty misdemeanor cases. It was overwhelming. People were getting pleaded out before there was any discovery. There were many, many more trials than there are now.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The New York Times, April 19, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/nyregion/coronavirus-nj-andover-nursing-home-deaths.html. Turak, Natasha. “UAE to Suspend All China Flights except for Beijing as Coronavirus Toll Mounts.” CNBC, February 3, 2020. www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/coronavirus-uae-to-suspend-all-china-flights-except-for-beijing.html. Turner, Deonna S. “Crack Epidemic.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed December 29, 2020. www.britannica.com/topic/crack-epidemic. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. London: Penguin, 2008. Tuthill, Kathleen. “John Snow and the Broad Street Pump: On the Trail of an Epidemic.” UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology.

…

The alleged safety of OxyContin was proved to be a lie in less than five years. Users started crushing time-release tablets to get the full dose of oxycodone at once. As the number of pills increased, so did the number of fatalities. The death rate from drug overdoses in the US rose from below 5 per 100,000 in 1990, despite the crack epidemic, to over 15 per 100,000 in 2015. This new drug wave was entirely legal. Thus, the urban drug market was somewhat less important—though it did smooth the flow from those with prescriptions to those without. Instead, the first wave of opioid deaths occurred in more depressed parts of rural America.

…

High crime rates caused people to flee cities, which resulted in a lower tax base, which led to an increased fiscal burden on remaining residents and a further round of urban flight. The long sentences imposed for drug crimes generally, and particularly for crack cocaine, helped spur the massive increase in incarceration that tore apart urban neighborhoods. We will return to these issues in chapter 9. Fortunately, the opioid overdose epidemic is not as violent as the crack epidemic and has not led to the same burst in mass imprisonment. Reducing Deceit through Better Incentives There are many culprits in the opioid epidemic. The federal government not only permitted the prescribing of OxyContin after 1995 but actually subsidized its use through public health insurance programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, that did not restrict utilization.

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

The results reported earlier in table 4.9 provide the information on how the right-to-carry laws affected the crime rates across states. 10 Are the results valid only when Maine and Florida are included? I will try to summarize the argument here. Ian Ayres and John Donohue are concerned about the inclusion of Maine and Florida for several reasons: (1) the results discussed by Black and Nagin, (2) the issue of whether the crack epidemic might have just happened to cause the relative crime rates to rise in non-right-to-carry states in the late 1980s, and (3) objections to whether Cramer and Kopel were correct in classifying Maine as a right-to-carry state. To satisfy their concerns, Ayres and Donohue use several different approaches, such as dropping both Maine and Florida out of the sample.

…

One of the two states whose laws went into effect after 2000 also showed a drop, while the other, Missouri, showed no change. This pattern casts doubt on the claim that the crack cocaine epidemic during the late 1980s and early 1990s is driving the results, because these results show drops in crime rates whether the right-to-carry laws went into effect before, during, or after the crack epidemic. Figure 10.2 shows the pattern for murder rates by the decade that the right-to-carry law went into effect. It graphs out what was shown in table 10.5a. Clearly, the murder rates start falling after the law, though 276 | CHAPTER TEN Table 10.6 The impact of right-to-carry laws on victimization costs (millions of 2007 dollars) Murder Alaska Arizona Arkansas Colorado Florida Georgia Idaho Kentucky Louisiana Maine Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nevada New Mexico North Carolina Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania South Carolina Tennessee Texas Utah Virginia West Virginia Wyoming Total Average per state Per capita Excluding Florida: Total Average per state Per capita Rape Robbery Aggravated assault Property crime –$36.91 –$67.35 –$795.17 –$110.29 –$19.85 –$182.53 –$28.61 $127.33 –$137.97 –$1.26 –$258.63 $38.05 –$42.19 $104.84 –$264.70 –$6,652.83 –$1,490.79 $3.50 –$18.56 –$547.55 –$31.41 –$289.53 –$127.05 –$122.11 –$1,795.62 –$118.89 –$2.61 –$3.15 –$107.19 $11.93 –$3,368.81 –$208.35 $3.78 $28.72 –$128.08 –$6.57 –$149.53 $40.88 –$53.45 $4.06 –$6.90 $153.92 –$42.26 $123.29 $0.00 $212.79 –$2,834.34 –$0.63 $6.84 $10.73 –$70.19 –$1.13 –$153.37 $0.00 –$12.96 –$4.33 –$158.07 $70.39 –$126.29 $270.82 –$707.18 –$168.72 –$492.25 $195.55 –$282.37 –$3,263.15 –$37.02 –$421.56 –$122.35 $2.39 –$15,419.92 –$571.11 –$111.38 $0.24 –$48.00 –$11.31 –$90.48 –$37.24 –$202.90 –$30.24 –$2.71 –$71.77 –$209.50 –$882.25 $27.97 $33.52 –$21.28 –$5.69 –$4,030.40 –$155.02 –$29.11 –$131.82 –$67.03 $89.37 $43.31 –$50.29 –$1,566.65 $14.15 $43.51 –$5.37 –$0.07 –$5,392.38 –$215.70 –$38.95 $16.46 –$235.82 –$8.33 –$200.92 $8.73 –$100.52 –$189.06 $147.51 –$332.01 $332.65 –$135.67 $29.44 $19.91 $0.00 $3.23 –$433.91 –$14.96 –$3.13 $14.10 –$48.57 $8.13 –$106.80 –$2.81 –$316.14 $38.63 $61.49 –$42.53 –$132.71 –$1,619.63 –$3.00 $40.54 –$8.16 $0.17 –$5,374.38 –$185.32 –$38.82 –$8,767.10 –$337.20 –$63.33 –$2,234.78 –$89.39 –$16.14 –$2,023.58 –$84.32 –$14.62 –$474.78 –$16.96 –$3.43 –$2,540.04 –$90.72 –$18.35 –$82.40 –$68.16 $33.72 –$0.01 –$0.08 –$67.20 $140.17 Note: Except for the per capita estimates, all dollar amounts are in millions of dollars.

…

When the counties adopting the law experienced a drop in violent crime, neighboring counties directly on the other side of the border without right-to-carry laws experienced an increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue argue that different parts of the country may have experienced differential impacts from the crack epidemic. Yet, if there are two urban counties next to each other, how can the crack cocaine hypothesis explain why one urban county faces a crime increase from drugs, when the neighboring urban county is experiencing a drop? Such isolation would be particularly surprising as criminals can easily move between these counties. . . .

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", crack epidemic, desegregation, Multics, Ronald Reagan, Steven Levy, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois

So he may have felt he couldn’t afford to have his authority challenged in their presence, even by a senior citizen whose legs probably couldn’t buy him one lap around a high-school track. Still, J.T.’s explanation seemed so alien to me that I felt I was watching a scene from The Godfather. By now it was nearly a year since I’d started hanging out with J.T.’s gang. It was 1990, which was roughly the peak of the crack epidemic in Chicago and other big U.S. cities. Black and Latino gangs including the Kings, the Cobras, the Disciples, the Vice Lords, the MCs (Mickey Cobras), and even the Stones, which had been temporarily dismantled a few years earlier, were capitalizing on a huge demand for crack and making a lot of money.

…

Politicians, academics, and law-enforcement officials all offered policy solutions, to little avail. The liberal-minded deployed their traditional strategies—getting young people back into school and finding them entry-level jobs—but few gang members were willing to trade in their status and the prospect of big money for menial work. Conservatives attacked the crack epidemic by supporting mass arrests and hefty prison sentences. This certainly took some dealers off the streets, but there was always a surplus of willing and eager replacements. The national mood had grown increasingly desperate—and punitive. Prosecutors won the right to treat gangs as organized criminal groups, which produced longer prison sentences.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Wilson attributes the problems faced by the inner-city black community to “the large scale and harmful changes in the labor market, and its resulting spatial concentration as well as the isolation of such areas from the more affluent parts of the black community.”6 Writing about the parallel today, the economist Raghuram Rajan notes that talented and well-educated young people have headed to the growing, successful, high-tech towns and cities.7 African American inner-city communities faced a crisis of crack cocaine in the 1980s. The crack epidemic shows both contrasts and parallels with the current opioid epidemic. Crack was cheap and offered an immediate high that was highly addictive. Crime rates increased, as those addicted looked for money for their next fix. As crack dealers fought for a place on a street corner, homicide rates among young black men spiked.

…

With globalization, changing technology, rising healthcare costs of employees, and the shift from manufacturing to services, firms shed less educated labor, first blacks and then less educated whites. In both epidemics, drugs that could ease psychological or physical pain were available at an (arguably) affordable price to populations that were hungry for the escape that they seemed to offer. During the crack epidemic, the inner city offered few legitimate avenues of progress. In the opioid crisis, it is less educated whites, many of whom do not see a promising economic future, or a promising future in any aspect of their lives, who are falling prey to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We should also not exaggerate the similarities, especially when we are comparing blacks and whites today.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

Wilson, the noted social scientist and a co-creator of the “broken windows” theory of policing, retreated to abstract moralizing and tautology. “Drug use is wrong because it is immoral,” he claimed, “and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.” Others went further. “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer declaimed: “A bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” In this way, “the crime-stained blackness of the Negro” lived on to haunt white America.

…

Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer—if it can be called that—because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels that, for blacks, society simply accepts as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose—the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers who, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s master class.

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

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

Starting in the early 1960s, an astonishing spike in crime, in which blacks made up a disproportionate share of both perpetrators and victims, took on aspects of a national emergency. The emergency would pass through various stages: the looting episodes in Memphis that preceded the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and a new wave of deadly riots that followed it, the Attica Prison Revolt of 1971, the New York blackout of 1977, the crack epidemic of 1986, the Los Angeles “Rodney King” riots of 1992, O. J. Simpson’s acquittal in his 1995 murder trial. After that, crime rates fell in general, but the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal statistics never went away. By 2011, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term in office, blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, still accounted for 39 percent of the arrests for violent crime.

…

It give birth to an entire new world-spanning genre: “gangsta” rap, which would echo through the banlieues of Paris and the dusty villages of West Africa; turn Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls into symbols of the inner city’s violence but also its romance, wisdom, and swagger; and vie with rock ’n’ roll for a while before rap (more generally understood) supplanted rock as the music of American youth of all races. The crack epidemic was at least as serious a problem as the 1970s heroin spike, with a death-by-overdose rate reaching almost 2 per 100,000. By the time of the 2016 election, which it did much to decide, the opioid epidemic that had begun with OxyContin was killing not 1.5 or 2 but 20 Americans per 100,000. In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania it was killing almost 40 per 100,000, and in West Virginia it was killing 50.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

In Boston, a West Coast development firm is building a twenty-story residential tower in Fort Point, the former industrial district that was the setting for much of the Martin Scorsese movie The Departed. This is, of course, a stark contrast to the destruction and decay that once plagued our cities, which in the ’60s saw street riots, in the ’70s suffered from white flight, and in the ’80s and ’90s experienced an influx of crime, prostitution, and a crack epidemic that ravaged urban areas across our nation. It’s hard to imagine now, but in New York, it wasn’t all that long ago that Times Square was dangerous, prostitutes trolled the Meatpacking District, and Central Park’s Belvedere Castle was boarded up and covered with graffiti. In 1975, the New York Daily News ran the now-famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to Gerald Ford’s reluctance to bail the city out from bankruptcy and encapsulating a sentiment that our cities weren’t worth saving.

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

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

“The drug problem has become so widespread that the FBI must assume a larger role in attacking the problem,” declared FBI director William Webster in 1981. The DEA grew very rapidly in the 1980s, relocating from a modest downtown Washington building into a sprawling northern Virginia complex. Strident warnings about the drug trade, particularly the melodramatic 1980s media jeremiads about the “crack epidemic,” further fueled the law-and-order movement. Multiple new laws, including the Anti-Drug Abuse acts of 1986 and 1988, imposed draconian minimum sentence requirements on those convicted of trafficking in illicit substances or even merely possessing relatively small amounts of them. But it was the 1988 presidential election that cemented law and order as American orthodoxy.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

By 2000, one out of three black men was spending time in jail. The rise of mass imprisonment put great pressure on many black families, and led to social as well as economic problems.11 Nixon proclaimed the War on Drugs just as the Great Migration ended. Reagan and state governments expanded the war in the 1980s as the crack epidemic grew. Blacks were (and are) far more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites. At the same time, industry began to decline in the American Midwest, in what is now called the Rust Bowl, and the jobs that blacks came north to find began to disappear. They found conditions in the North better than in the South, but not as good as they had hoped.

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

Newspaper columnists from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Miami Herald agreed. John Tierney of the Times lamented that, thanks to meth, politicans had “lost sight of their duties.” Glenn Garvin of the Herald called the Oregonian’s coverage “nonsensical.” Craig Reinarman, whose criticism of the Reagan administration’s response to the crack epidemic was put forth in the book Crack in America, worried that the exorbitant meth coverage by papers like the Oregonian had further directed money to law enforcement and prison, and “away from the underlying sources of people’s troubles,” as he told Willamette Week. No one was more critical of the nation’s meth coverage than Jack Shafer of Slate.com, whose weekly columns tried to disprove every study on which the concept of a meth epidemic had stood.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

Knickerbocker Avenue, so recently a thriving commercial thoroughfare, degenerated into an open-air drug-dealing mall known as “the Well” and tightly controlled by the ruthless and widely despised crime boss Carmine Galante, who was finally gunned down while having lunch on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker in 1979. Nothing much improved in the 1980s. The crack epidemic led to a still higher surge of violent crime, with seventy-seven murders in the neighborhood in 1990 alone. Bushwick differed from the South Bronx only in its failure to achieve national notoriety, and in its relative obscurity even to the residents of the other boroughs of New York City. Hardly anyone set foot in Bushwick who didn’t have to.

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

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

It’s not that there aren’t bursts of violence associated with the opioid trade, or addicts willing to commit murder for a fix. But, generally, Americans have ended up dying in record numbers from opioids without the kind of crime wave or murder spike, without the turbulence and chaos, that accompanied the crack epidemic. As the essayist Andrew Sullivan wrote for New York magazine in 2018, “The drugs now conquering America are downers: they are not the means to engage in life more vividly but to seek a respite from its ordeals.” And unlike pot, opioids are antisocial drugs, offering bliss that’s best experienced in solitude.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

Melvin and Ali said this so-called development bisected communities, ruined businesses, and destroyed the close-knit community that had thrived for years. There was no question that these neighborhoods had been slated for destruction because they were the least politically powerful. Later came the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Melvin and Ali got out a photo history of the Black Panthers and paged through it with me. Here was Lil’ Bobby Hutton, killed by the police though he was unarmed. Here was a Black Panther rally, everyone sporting a gun. Violence begetting more violence. Riding back to my farm in GhostTown, I took Shattuck instead of Martin Luther King, which led to a newly developed corner of North Oakland called Temescal.

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

Golf takes place at basically all-white country clubs (except for the staff, who are “conveniently” 95 percent people of color) and consists of a lot of middle-aged white dudes walking in pleated khakis for long stretches of time while a person of color carries all their shit and an umbrella to shade them from the summer heat. Y’all, I ain’t got time in 2018 to see a bunch of rich white dudes try to low-key bring back the cute parts of colonialism the way fashion is like, “Hahahaha! Everyone forget about the crack epidemic of the eighties and just focus on us putting shoulder pads back in women’s blazers so you all look like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.” No. Fucking. Thanks. Golf.* So to recap, I like most sports except golf and, while we’re at it, NASCAR (but I think it’s obvious by now why I wouldn’t be into that one either).

Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler by Ethan Brown

barriers to entry, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, forensic accounting, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mandatory minimum

“Back in the eighties, ’Preme was the legend,” Irv proclaims, thumping his desk with his fist loudly for effect, “but guess what? I’m the fucking legend now.” Irv’s bravado is often reminiscent of both Scarface and Sunset Boulevard but there is a great deal of truth to it. During the eighties the crack epidemic brought mountains of cash to drug dealers big and small, thus making hustlers iconic. Though a few eighties-era MCs possessed a street pedigree—rapper Rakim famously rhymed, “I used to be a stick-up kid/So I think of all the devious things I did”— hip-hop and hustling inhabited separate social spheres.

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

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

Instead researchers point out that crime began falling in most major US cities from the early 1990s and fell more sharply in places like San Diego, which didn’t crackdown on small offences. The conclusion from a number of studies is that the fall in crime in New York, and in other cities, was down to the reduction of the crack epidemic.37 During the same period researchers found that complaints against police misconduct, for surveillance policies such as stop-and-search and dispersal, rose by 37 per cent, lowering trust between the police and community.38 In the UK, according to figures from the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a record number of allegations against police were made for 2007/8, more than since records began in 1985, with a rise of nearly 25 per cent relating to the use of stop-and-search.39 Although few questions have been asked here, in the US even the pioneers of Broken Windows no longer agree with each other.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

The Chicago school system, rather than disputing Levitt’s findings, invited him into the schools for retesting. As a result, the cheaters were fired. Then there is his forthcoming “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990’s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not.” The entire drop in crime, Levitt says, was due to more police officers, more prisoners, the waning crack epidemic and Roe v. Wade. One factor that probably didn’t make a difference, he argues, was the innovative policing strategy trumpeted in New York by Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton. “I think,” Levitt says, “I’m pretty much alone in saying that.” He comes from a Minneapolis family of high, if unusual, achievers.

Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death From the ER by Pamela Grim

clean water, crack epidemic, it's over 9,000, time dilation

This meant that, in addition to the usual domestic type of violence you have in any ER, we saw terrible things: machete slashings, butcher-knife dismemberings, Uzi slayings, cop-versus-bad-guy shootouts, four- or five-year-old kids riddled with bullets and clearly too dead to even think about trying to resuscitate. Bosnia had nothing on this swath of ghetto except maybe a few more land mines and a few less Uzis. That summer we saw the first wave of the crack epidemic coming through, watched the early stages of destruction of a generation from our unique vantage point. Sometimes we saw crack addicts with acute symptoms: a myocardial infarction in an otherwise healthy thirty-four-year-old man; exacerbation of psychotic symptoms in a schizophrenic. Mostly, though, we saw the crack-heads when they were at the end of the line—badly addicted, broke, strung out.

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

In its other dimension, of course, gangster crime was a consequence and representation of the economic abandonment of the bulk of black America, everybody who had not yet reached the institutional uplift of higher education or the stability of middle- and upper-class wealth. Its drug was crack. Scholars have shown in the decades since the so-called crack epidemic that the instant addiction, violent madness, and “crack babies” attributed to the drug at the time were overblown or fake. Crack wasn’t very different chemically from the cocaine from which it was made. Crack’s significance was its business model. This was a capitalist innovation, though one at the level of cottage industry.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, crack epidemic, disinformation, Ferguson, Missouri, financial thriller, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, Snapchat

They had thought they could prevent crime with police patrols, but now the Kansas City PD had tested that assumption empirically, and patrols turned out to be a charade. And if patrols didn’t work, what did? Lee Brown, chief of the New York City Police Department, gave a famous interview in the middle of the crack epidemic in which he all but threw up his hands. “This country’s social problems are well beyond the ability of the police to deal with on their own,” Brown said. He had read George Kelling’s Kansas City report. It was hopeless. No matter how many police officers a city had, Brown said, “You could never have enough to use traditional policing techniques to deter crime.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership. The crack story exemplified this. TV stations glamorized the “wars” on the streets, got great ratings, yet rarely got to the heart of what the crack epidemic was: a way for cocaine cartels to expand the consumer base beyond the saturated market of upper-class buyers of powder coke. Crack was just the cartel version of a corporate marketing ploy to rope in poorer consumers. Poor crackheads scared the public so much, authorities wishing to fight them got almost anything they asked for.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

(Gary used to joke with people that “I shut the city down when I was born!”) On top of the riots and power outages, New York was also being haunted that summer by a serial killer nicknamed the Son of Sam. Gary didn’t last long in the housing projects. In the 1980s his family moved farther east, to Canarsie, after colorful crack vials from New York’s rising crack epidemic had started to line the gutters around Stillwell Avenue, where they lived. Now, thirty years later, Gary sat amid the faded green and white cubicles at 290 Broadway, checking his e-mail (reading each one three times) and finishing up reports from previous investigations that involved people who had tried to hide money from the U.S. government in far-off countries.

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

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

Some of the worst have manifested during the opioid epidemic, which has been spreading rapidly through the US since the early 2000s. The opioid epidemic is the worst overdose epidemic in US history. Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, exceeding the death rate during the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Mortality due to crack was two per hundred thousand. Mortality due to opioids is ten per hundred thousand and has reached forty per hundred thousand in West Virginia. The opioid epidemic has a demand side and a supply side. The demand side has been attributed to social and economic conditions in the US and thus cannot be blamed on deficiencies in the health-care system.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The dark ghetto’s inescapable overlay of race and poverty was ground in by the illegal drug trade—this was when Frank Lucas says he earned a million dollars a day selling dope on 116th Street—and by the government’s increasing unwillingness to rebuild. “It’s a bitter harvest after ten years,” said the archdeacon of New York’s Episcopal diocese. “But looking back on them, we have no reason to expect anything else. The will for change, real change, never was there.”18 Life grew ever more violent in the 1980s because of the crack epidemic, when more buildings were abandoned and boarded up. During these years the New York City government became Harlem’s biggest property owner by seizing buildings in rem when landlords didn’t pay their taxes. Small landlords decided it was more rational to walk away than to make needed improvements, for no one wanted to buy these buildings and tenants couldn’t pay higher rents.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Whereas neoliberalism is typically understood through the lens of laissez-faire state economics, David Harvey argues it is a comprehensive political project to weaken the power of labor and expand institutional networks of capital accumulation.11 Impoverishment and unemployment generated through neoliberalism in the 1980s was masked by the explosion of the prison industrial complex, itself bolstered by a race-baiting media spectacle about an alleged crack epidemic. This justified a radical transformation of the criminal justice system geared toward drug prosecutions. Furthermore, a “culture of poverty” narrative profiling Black families was accompanied by a broken windows model of policing that linked poor Black communities to disorder. Police officers justified broken windows policing by arguing that enforcing laws against low-level, poverty-related, and property-related offenses, such as street vending or graffiti, prevented serious violent crime.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Even cockroaches were disappearing from our cities b e c a u s e of widespread u s e of the roach poison C o m b a t . So what on earth was she talking about? When the moral history of the 1990s is written, it might be titled Desperately Seeking Satan. With peace and harmony ascendant , Americans s e e m e d to be searching for substitute villains. We tried drug dealers (but then the crack epidemic waned) and child abductors (who are usually one of the parents). T h e cultural right vilified homosexuals; the left vilified racists and ho-mophobes. As I thought about these various villains, including the older villains of communism and Satan himself, I realized that most of them share three properties: They are invisible (you can't identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team.

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Not so with dealer Kareem Shaw, who was happy to pull back the curtain on the FUBI ring when the task force arrested him four months after Jesse’s death. Best of all, he led Metcalf to a key piece of information: a face. “You saw the video, right?” he asked Metcalf. What video? An eighty-minute production, Hell Up in East Harlem was a gritty, street-level documentary about a Harlem block plagued by gang violence during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ’90s. It was all available on YouTube and so, around minute thirty, was the source of the tsunami of misery that descended on Woodstock a decade after the film was made. Seated on a bench for the camera, Mack wore a red hoodie. He bemoaned the fact that death and prison seemed too often to be the only avenues out of the loop of poverty and drugs.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number of people in prison for drugs hardly changed. Then, in 1984, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes started to rise sharply due to violence associated with the crack epidemic. More than a decade later, in 1997, total inmates in New York prisons for drug offenses peaked and began their long decline, mostly because of a reduction in violence. It was only in 2004 and again in 2009 that the state legislature reduced penalties, and the declining rate of incarceration for drug crimes didn’t change after those two years.22 And those who put many of the stricter drug laws into place did so because they were under pressure to protect African American communities suffering from violence associated with gang warfare over open-air crack markets.23 Notes Pfaff, “when prosecutors weren’t too concerned about drug crimes, they simply ignored the Rockefeller Drug laws, whether during the rising-crime 1970s or the falling-crime 1990s and 2000s.”24 Rising incarceration rates reflected rising rates of violent crime.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat.5 But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.6 The family was no longer a reliable source of support for poor people.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

But through history, illicit drug scourges have always involved a tiny minority of Americans. Baltimore, with a robust heroin market dating back decades, is considered the country’s heroin capital—with the DEA and the city’s health department estimating that roughly 10 percent of the city’s residents are addicted. The crack epidemic, at its height, involved fewer than half a million users a year nationwide, according to SAMHSA estimates. But, as with crack cocaine, the numbers of new opiate addicts by the 2000s were enough to throw hospitals, emergency rooms, jails, courts, rehab centers, and families into turmoil, especially in areas where abuse was new.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

But although during his eight years in office there were dramatic falls in crime (in fact, crime was already falling under the previous mayor), there is no evidence that this was due to ‘zero tolerance’ policing. Indeed, crime fell in cities throughout the United States in the early 1990s. In San Diego, where there was no broken windows policy, it actually fell more rapidly. Many studies have since concluded that the fall in crime was due largely to a reduction in the crack epidemic that was sweeping America. James Q. Wilson has himself admitted, ‘I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime.’53 The ‘zero tolerance’ approach has proved influential around the world, not least in the United Kingdom where, in order to combat the fear of crime in urban areas, British cities have pioneered a revolution in surveillance technologies.

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

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

Economist Steven Levitt looked at the reduction of crime across the U.S. in the 1990s and concluded: “Most of the supposed explanations…actually played little direct role in the crime decline, including the strong economy of the 1990s, changing demographics, better policing strategies, gun control laws, concealed weapons laws and increased use of the death penalty. Four factors, however, can account for virtually all of the observed decline in crime: increases in the number of police, the rising prison population, the waning crack epidemic and the legalization of abortion.” (15) A recent study of 75,000 households served by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Puget Sound Energy found that customers who received peer comparison charts reduced their energy usage by an average of 1.2% to 2.1%, a change that was sustained over time.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

For many years, the program was widely credited for the stunning decline in New York’s crime rate in the 1990s, though many other theories have been put forth to explain it (for instance, the reduction in the number of at-risk teens following the legalization of abortion decades earlier, and the end of the crack epidemic). Regardless of its efficacy, in recent years criticisms of CompStat’s impacts on policing have mounted.34 It turned out that, in their quest to maintain steady reductions in the reported rate of crime, police officers allegedly routinely reclassified crimes as less serious offenses and even discouraged citizens from reporting them in the first place.35 CompStat shows that when data drives decisions, decisions about how to record the data will be distorted.

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

Americans must understand that the real reason for this make-believe war was to demolish the inner-cities and put minorities in prison for long stretches, while simultaneously diminishing their ability to ever get a decent job once they get out. It looks like they “won” the war. The New Crack The current opioid epidemic in the Appalachian region of the United States is predominantly a white issue, but the use of drugs in poor areas of the country was established as the norm because of the crack epidemic decades earlier. Is the opioid crisis an accident, or could it be the new crack cocaine push to target the poor white communities? It should be obvious by now that nothing like this happens accidentally, and that the intentional push of these drugs, in association with rampant over-prescribing by medical professionals, is by design.

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

* * * Stockton also fell victim to Wall Street’s skill for selling a vision, even if that vision was certain to prove unsustainable and disastrous in time. Starting during the recession of the 1970s, Stockton fell into disrepair. The downtown all but emptied out, and the city was overcome by the crack epidemic of the ’80s, along with its attendant crime. Gang activity surged, and Stockton was recast as a city of drugs and violence. By 1997, when Gary Podesto became mayor—he would serve two terms—the economy was looking up, even while most of the community still lived in some degree of squalor. Podesto wanted a legacy project, and he thought that rebuilding the decrepit downtown area could be just the thing.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

It is a singular tale—and it takes place clear across the country from Silicon Valley. * * * In December 1997, a white van delivered a teenager named Chris Wilson to the Patuxent Institution, a maximum-security correctional facility in Jessup, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. Chris had grown up in Washington, DC, as the crack epidemic ripped through his community. Scores of young African American men fell victim to the mayhem all around them. By the age of seven, Chris had started sleeping on his bedroom floor instead of on his bed, to protect himself from stray bullets. By age ten, he had been to more funerals than birthday parties.

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

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

After the good times of the 1980s, the economy stumbled in the early 1990s, making it more difficult for young people to find jobs and hardening their already considerable cynicism. Violent crime, which had been rising since the 1970s, reached extreme levels in the early 1990s (see Figure 4.16). Carjackings, rapes, murders, shootings—all had increased exponentially. With the crack epidemic surging and gun violence rising, many were afraid to walk down the street in urban areas at night for fear of getting mugged. The surge in violent crime in the 1980s and 1990s was extreme—and it has not been equaled since. Horrified Silents and Boomers blamed Gen X’ers, the youth of the time; Silent generation columnist William Raspberry (b. 1935) called them “a generation of animals,” while others described them as “superpredators.”

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

California lawmakers went on a prison-building spree as Democratic and Republican politicians tried to outflank each other by taking ever-harsher stances on drugs and crime.92 Drug War critics, prison abolitionists, and police accountability activists were drowned out by the chorus of voices demanding punitive solutions. By the time Jerry Brown ran for Oakland mayor in 1998, the contradictions of the nineties had reached a breaking point. It was a decade that brought America the crack epidemic and superpredators but was also bookended by LAPD’s vicious videotaped beating of Rodney King and the NYPD’s firing squad execution of Amadou Diallo, two incidents that elevated concerns about systemic racism and brutality in law enforcement. Oakland’s Riders scandal was a corollary to King, Diallo, the 1994 Mollen Commission that examined systemic drug corruption in the NYPD, Ramparts, and countless other shootings, beatings, and human rights violations at the hands of police.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

HANK SHOCKLEE: If Public Enemy was going to do a video, we wanted something outside the norm. My thing is, I hate literal translations. The video should always tell you what the lyric doesn’t. LIONEL MARTIN, director: I didn’t even know who Public Enemy was. HANK SHOCKLEE: The song was about drug addiction, especially crack. The crack epidemic was destroying the black community. Everybody I know, including myself, had close family members who were on crack or trying to recover from it. The fact that the song was disjointed gave us the impetus to create skits within the video. I didn’t want to make light of crack, but a video needs to have entertainment value.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

crack is wack Keith Haring fans should make the pilgrimage to the subtly named Crack is Wack Playground (E 127th St and Second Ave), where the pop artist painted the now-famous Crack Is Wack mural in 1986 on both sides of the handball court walls. Featuring Haring’s signature cartoonish style and bright colours, the mural made a serious anti-drug statement at the height of the Harlem crack epidemic. Note that it will be impossible to view the mural (as it’s enclosed by a protective shelter) during reconstruction of Harlem River Drive (to be completed by the end of 2019). Caribbean Cultural Center 120 E 125th St, between Park and Lexington aves • Tues, Wed & Fri 11am–3pm, Thurs 11am–8pm • $5 • 212 307 7420, cccadi.org • Subway #4, #5, #6 to 125th St The Caribbean Cultural Center opened in this former firehouse in 2016, offering a series of revolving art exhibitions (focused on the African diaspora in the Americas), and a rich programme of events and performances.

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

The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.149 To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex.